Like most underfunded American schools, Walter H. Dyett High School on Chicago’s South Side has a hallway that smells slightly of old paper and floor polish. The building, which bears the name of a renowned jazz educator, no longer has a band class. Nor is there a chorus. When they are offered, Advanced Placement courses are presented on a laptop screen. Seventeen-year-old Diamond McCullough is more aware of the irony than the legislators who planned her schooling. The majority of the students at her school are Black. The curriculum opens up like a foreign land twenty blocks away.
This is the current state of segregation. not water fountain signs. On the steps of the courthouse, not National Guard members. Just a zoning ordinance, a district boundary, a real estate listing, and an unattended school board meeting. The nation has quietly returned to a place it once vowed to leave, some 70 years after Brown v. Board. Black students are attending majority-minority schools at rates not seen since 1968, and more than half of Latino students in New York, California, and Texas are enrolled in schools that are 90% or more minority. These statistics were meticulously compiled by researchers at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project.
Speaking with those who research this gives the impression that the narrative is no longer about overt cruelty. It has to do with machinery. The gears include housing trends, court decisions from the 1990s that overturned desegregation orders, and the silent migration of educated parents to districts with favorable reputations. Neighborhood schools, as idealistic as they may sound, have a sorting effect, according to Gary Orfield, co-director of the Brown at 60 report. White and Asian families attend middle-class schools. Everyone else attends high-poverty schools. A villain is not necessary for the system to work.
Housing discrimination is the hardest nut, according to Sherrilyn Ifill, head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Because it is diffuse, it is more difficult. A realtor here, a landlord there, a homeowners association elsewhere. The majority of the child’s fate has already been determined by geography by the time she enters kindergarten. Property values follow a history that most Americans would prefer not to delve too deeply into, and school quality follows property values.
It is worthwhile to consider the implications of this in a classroom. fewer teachers with experience. There are more teachers assigned to areas other than their areas of expertise. A library that has not been updated since the previous administration. The loss isn’t just academic, as Dennis Parker, who oversees the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program, notes. It’s the relationships, the networks, and the everyday tension of interacting with people from diverse backgrounds, all of which subtly accumulate over the course of a lifetime. Segregation and poverty become intertwined to the point where they are difficult to distinguish, even when speaking.
Strangely, the South has fared better, in part because many of its districts absorb the city and its surrounding suburbs in a single administrative gulp. The maps in the North and Midwest resemble jigsaw pieces, with each one drawn just tightly enough to exclude some neighborhoods and include others. For decades, wealthy parents have been using their moving vans to cast ballots, according to Kansas education professor John Rury. It’s difficult to blame one family. Perhaps it’s easier to see how the pattern adds up.
Eighteen-year-old Aquila Griffin transferred from Dyett because she needed to complete world studies and biology in order to graduate. At a rally in Washington, she stated unequivocally that when policies restrict their options, teachers are only able to do so much. It’s difficult to ignore the quiet weariness of a generation in that sentence. The lawsuits were successful. The speeches were delivered. And at some point, the nation came to the conclusion that what it truly desired was the appearance of progress, with the receipts conveniently lost.
