Kate Taylor, reporter for The New York Times, recently published a story rife with insights in the intersectionalities of prejudice, fear, and segregationist idealisms associated with contemporary American values regarding public schools. As someone deep into the messages in Robert Putnam's Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, I found the story fascinating.
Here's its crux: When overcrowding as P.S. 8 in Brooklyn, New York, became a concern, city officials suggested moving students from that school to nearby P.S. 307, which has more than enough space to accommodate the overflow. However, when rezoning to enact this plan was pitched, stakeholders took issue. Some simply do not want the levels of racial and socioeconomic intermingling the move would facilitate in one of America's most segregated school systems.
Read the article by clicking *here*. Marvel that some of the people quoted live in the North in 2015 and not Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1965. Note how test scores are a focus regarding defining quality schools and "quality" students.
Putnam says in Our Kids that growing housing and community segregation between the well-off and the poor presents challenges to empathy, since so few rich kids actually see kids not as well off as they do. In this story, there is a concerted effort to keep well-off children away from poorer children, to keep black and brown kids away from Anglos and people of East Asian decent. There's even palpable concern about busing as a means of achieving a racially and economically diverse student body -- with space to move and mingle!
The adults in this situation are perpetuating the mentalities that keep the American populus from addressing growing social mobility gaps and opportunity gaps. Taylor's story exemplifies the "I got mine" attitude and growing sense of insularity and "unknowability of the self from the other" that even some liberal-minded social justice groups' members use to defend exclusionary spaces.
May the members of this community see all the young people at both these schools -- attending now and attending in the near future -- as their kids, every one of them.
AND eager for your help. Have a story of power, manipulation, self-interest or injustice which needs attention? Let me know and we'll let the world discover "what's that smell."
"If you're a profession of sheep, then you'll be run by wolves." -- David C. Berliner
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: Everything else is public relations." -- George Orwell
"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral." -- Paulo Freire
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