Network Schools – Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for

Today’s NYTimes reports that the Sausalito Marin City School District’s decision to open a charter school two decades ago resulted in separate but equal schools, violating the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Dana Goldstein and Anemoma Harticollis open their article about the State’s edict to desegregate schools with this:

A California school district outside of San Francisco agreed to desegregate its schools on Friday, after a two-year state investigation found that the district had “knowingly and intentionally maintained and exacerbated” racial segregation and even established an intentionally segregated school.

The intentionally segregated school with an imbalance of white students in the district, a charter school created 20 years ago by parents “…who said they were frustrated by poor test scores in the district“, IS more integrated than most schools across the country. It’s student body is 41 percent white, 11 percent African-American, 25 percent Latino and 10 percent Asian. The other school in the district, though, has an enrollment that is 7 percent white, 3 percent Asian, 49 percent African-American and 30 percent Latino. But where the district fell far short of the mark was in the way it funded and staffed the two schools:

It reneged on a promise to create a gifted program and cut music, art, physical education and counseling services, according to court papers (in the district-run school, Bayside-M.L.K). By 2015, the Bayside-M.L.K. principal, assistant principal and about half of the teaching staff had left, the court papers say.

The district-run school did not have a qualified math teacher, while the charter school did. The district school had only a part-time counselor, while the charter school had a full-time one.

And the district was harsher in disciplining black and Hispanic students compared with white students than any other public school district in the state, the attorney general said.

It is imponderable what the State’s findings would have been had the DISTRICT school been as well resourced as the CHARTER school… but if Brown v. Board of Education’s conclusions were applied even a separate and equal school would be illegal.

The real takeaway from the article, and the most distressing to read, is that for all intents and purposes the Federal government is no longer doing anything to address desegregation, which means it will now fall to STATES to address the issue of inequality. As Ms. Goldstein and Harticollis note, this is a reversal of roles:

State attorneys general typically defend school systems against desegregation claims, not pursue them. In the decades after the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the vast majority of desegregation agreements resulted from federal, not state, action — but in recent years, federal courts have done little to integrate schools.

In the long run this will mean that children of color in states with aggressive (i.e. liberal) AGs will eventually be offered the same opportunities as their white counterparts. But… it also means that children of color in most states will remain in second tier underfunded schools while their white counterparts attend well funded districts. In short, Brown v. Board of Education is no longer the law of the entire nation.