Abstract
One of the most troubling contradictions of the past two decades is that as our society becomes increasingly diverse both racially and ethnically, public schools are becoming more homogenous along those same lines.1 Even as the most conservative communities across the nation removed many of the formal means of desegregation such as court orders and student transfer policies that were designed to create an integrated public school system, new forms of division were created. This new phase of segregation has a strong class component. Today, when African American and Latino students are segregated into schools in which the majority of students are nonwhite, they are very likely to find themselves in institutions where poverty is concentrated. African Americans still earn only 62 percent of the salaries and wages of their white counterparts. This means that despite all the effort of the civil rights movement and Black Power generations, the American social class system is still a racial hierarchy. Furthermore, the higher the social class, the more the whites predominate.2 In contrast, the lower class is bulging with poor black and brown workers. Often, this is the case with majority white schools, which tend to enroll high proportions of students from middle- and upper-class neighborhoods. The school that students attend affects their life chances because concentrated poverty is linked to lower educational achievement, crime, and low employment rates. Student academic achievement is related to many variables including the availability of advanced courses, the ability of the school to attract and retain teachers with credentials in the subject they are teaching, and the degree to which the school is segregated internally, that is, with disproportionate numbers of African American children in lower educational tracks.
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Notes
“Fifty-Two Years after Supreme Court Outlawed Legal School Segregation Inequities in School Funding Persist,” Omaha Star, May 25, 2006, 17. Brett Gadsden, “‘He Said He Wouldn’t Help Me Get a Jim Crow Bus’: The Shifting Terms of the Challenge to Segregated Public Education, 1950–1954,” Journal of African American History 90:1-2 (Winter-Spring 2005): 24.
Lorinda Bullock, “Economic Gap Widens between Blacks and Whites,” (2006). http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=b462dde8f3ffdad9fbd22f 0c1a77bf4 (accessed June 16, 2007). See also Douglas Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
V. P. Franklin, “Introduction: Brown v. Board of Education: Fifty Years of Educational Change in the United States,” Journal of African American History 90:1-2 (Winter-Spring 2005): 1–3.
Ibid. Sonya Ramsey, “We Will be Ready Whenever They Are: African American Teachers Responses to the Brown Decision and Public School Integration in Nashville, Tennessee, 1954–1966,” Journal of African American History 90:1-2 (Winter-Spring 2005): 39.
Clarence J. Munford, Race and Reparations: A Black Perspective for the Twenty-First Century (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1996), 327.
Michael A. Fletcher, “At the Corner of Progress and Peril,” June 2, 2006, A01, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp_dyn/content/article/206/06/01/AR2006060102184_pf...6/5/2006; see also Jawanza Kunjufu, Keeping Black Boys Out of Special Education (Chicago, IL: African American Images, 2005).
Floyd. D. Weatherspoon, “Racial Justice and Equity for African-American Males in the American Educational System: A Dream Forever Deferred” North Carolina Law Journal 26 (2006): 1–41.
Mary C. Doyle, “From Desegregation to Resegregation: Public Schools in Norfolk, Virginia 1954–2002,” Journal of African American History 90:1-2 (Winter-Spring, 2005): 64.
Joan Indiana Rigdon, “The Spirit of Brown?” Washington Lawyer 21:7 (March 2007): 20.
Ibid. Constance Curry, The Intolerable Burden, Film, directed by Chea Prince (Brooklyn: First Run/Icarus Films, 2003).
David J. Connor and Beth A. Ferri, “Integration and Inclusion—A Troubling Nexus: Race, Disability, and Special Education,” Journal of African American History 90:1-2 (Winter-Spring, 2005): 107.
Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro, Daryl Michael Scott, ed. (Washington, DC: Association for Study of African American Life and History, 1933, 2005), xiii, 54.
Joel Spring, Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality: A Brief History of the Education of Dominated Cultures in the United States, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), 111–115.
Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (New York: Plume, 2000), 198.
Gloria Ladson-Billings, The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994), 5–16.
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Field and Function of the Negro College,” The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques, 1906–1960, ed. Herbert Apthaker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973), 101.
Gains, “Why I support Senator Chambers”; Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West, The Future of the Race (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 111.
Martin Carnoy, Cuba’s Academic Advantage: Why Students in Cuba Do Better in School (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 10–18.
Menucha Birenbaum, Curtis Tatsuoka, and Tao Xin, “Large-Scale Diagnostic Assessment: Comparison, of Eighth Graders’ Mathematics Performance in the United States, Singapore, and Israel,” 12:2 Assessment in Education Principles Policy and Practice (2005): 167–181
Ina Mullis, Michael O. Martin, Albert E. Beaton, Eugenio J. Gonzalez, Dana L. Kelly, and Teresa A. Smith, Mathematics Achievement in the Primary SchoolYears: IEA’s Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) (Chestnut Hill, MA: TIMSS International Study Center, Boston College, 1997), 7–18, http://www.timss.bc.edu
Ina Mullis, M. O. Martin, E. J. Gonzales, K. D. Gregory, R. A. Garden, K. M. O’Connor, S. J. Chrostowski, and T. A. Smith, TIMSS 1999 International Mathematics Report: Findings from IEA’s Repeat of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study at the Eighth Grade (Chestnut Hill, MA: Boston College, 2000)
Laura O’Dwyer, “Examining the Variability of Mathematics Performance and Its Correlation Using Data” 11:2, TIMSS’95 and TIMSS’99. Educational Research and Evaluation (2005): 155–177.
Margaret Spellings, A Test of Leadership; Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education. A Report of the Commission appointed by Secretary of Education, (2006), http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/reports/0809-draft.pdf10 (accessed March 3, 2007). Greg Wiggan, “Globalization, National Development, and Education in the New Millennium: Where Do We Go from Here?” Comparative and International Education Society Newsletter, September 2007, http://cies.us/newsletter/sept%2007/Globalization_Wiggan.htm; see Also Greg Wiggan, “Race, School Achievement and Educational Inequality: Towards a Student-Based Inquiry Perspective,” 77:3 Review of Educational Research (2007): 310–333.
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© 2009 Zachery Williams
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Johnson, T.A., Ford, P., Wiggan, G., Quick, D.B. (2009). African American Administration of Predominately Black Schools: Segregation or Emancipation in Omaha, NE. In: Williams, Z. (eds) Africana Cultures and Policy Studies. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230622098_7
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