“School Choice”: Watchword for Racial and Class Segregation
Free Market Racism:
Segregated Schools, Gentrified Neighborhoods
Segregated Schools, Gentrified Neighborhoods
For Teacher-Student-Parent-Worker Control of Schools!
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| New York City's Democratic mayor Bill de Blasio (left ) yuks it up with real estate mogul William Rudin, at Real Estate Board of NY gala, 22 January 2016. |
New York schools are the most segregated of any state in the country.[1] Sixty-four years since Brown v. Board of Ed ruled that having separate public schools for black and white children is unconstitutional, the vast majority of NYC’s black and Latino students attend intensely segregated schools. But it’s not just the schools – only one in four New Yorkers live in racially integrated neighborhoods, while wealth disparities in NYC are some of the sharpest in the country.[2] In 2014, the median yearly per capita income for the city’s bottom 50 percent was a little over $12,000, while the top 0.1 percent made upwards $5.2 million each, accounting for 24 percent of NYC’s total income.[3] Meanwhile, gentrification is pushing poor black and Latino residents out of their neighborhoods and into precarious housing situations, as landlords take advantage of white, middle-management yuppies moving into historically black and Latino neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant (Brooklyn) and East Harlem to drastically raise rents.
try, bar none.
For “Tale of Two Cities” Bill De Blasio, the liberal Democrat who was first elected in 2013 promising to fight inequality in education, housing and income, and who was re-elected last year on a “more of the same” platform, not much can be done about school segregation because “we cannot change the basic reality of housing in New York City.” Even his vow to make the elite specialized high schools better reflect the city has gone by the boards. Admission to these schools is determined solely by an entrance exam that does not measure what is taught in middle school. While African American and Latino students make up two-thirds of the NYC school population, they only account for 10% of the specialized high schools, and only ten (10) black students made it into Stuyvesant High School this year. The mayor hides behind a 1971 state law (which only affects three of the eight elite schools) barring changes to the admissions rules. The reality is that he doesn’t want to tarnish the crown jewels of NYC’s education system, whose alumni are wealthy donors and fiercely defensive of specialized high school elitism.
De Blasio’s position reflects his role as a bourgeois politician administering the world center of finance capital. He serves the interests of the ruling class, and in NYC that means Wall Street and the Real Estate Board of New York. The real estate speculators and finance capitalists have the final say-so on what goes on in this city, and they profit immensely from New York’s racial segregation. (Mega-mogul Donald Trump and his father were notorious for “redlining” their housing complexes to keep out black people, and son-in-law Jared Kushner is an actual slumlord.) Without the backing of the real estate industry, De Blasio would never have gotten elected, and his “affordable” housing policies have made them richer, subsidizing new residential construction to the tune of $83 billion. The so-called affordable units in these subsidized buildings are often not in the budget range of lower-income working people, and with preference for neighborhood residents, the result is that segregated housing patterns don’t change. But property values go up, and with them, so do taxes on the present minority homeowners, in some cases forcing them out of the neighborhood.
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Map from UCLA Civil Rights Project study, New York State's
Extreme School Segregation (2014). The Majority of charter school have 0 to 1% white students, which the study compares to the "blacks only" |
South African apartheid regime.
Meanwhile, income inequality between white and non-white households is increasing and the accumulated wealth of African Americans and Latinos is falling sharply. By one analysis, from 1983 to 2013, the wealth of median Black and Latino households fell by 75%, while for whites it rose by 14%.[4] This was exacerbated by the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-09, when many new black homeowners lost their homes. In fact, if you subtract the value of the family car, the median net worth of a black family is practically non-existent, a mere $4.000, while for a white family it is 34 times greater, $140,000.[5] And a whole slew of studies show that the “achievement gap between rich and poor is widening,” dramatically so. Today the average difference in reading test scores between children from high-income families and low-income families is almost twice as big as the gap between black and white children, regardless of income.[6] Thus in the poorest ghetto neighborhoods public schools’ racial segregation and class segregation are compounded.
Teachers know what this means for schools. In New York State, 62 percent of levied local property taxes go to funding schools, meaning that wealthy suburban, Long Island and Hudson River Valley communities have far more money to spend on schools. Plus the state’s distribution of school aid has systematically shortchanged New York City by billions of dollars a year.[7] NYC schools still receive several thousand dollars less per pupil than neighboring suburban school districts. Within the city there are huge differences between schools in coveted districts and attendance zones in the wealthiest ZIP codes compared to those in impoverished districts like East New York. Families living in Carnegie Hill townhouses on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, in posh Upper West Side apartments and Cobble Hill Brooklyn brownstones can raise literally a million dollars a year per school through Parent Teacher Associations, and alumni associations at selective schools like Brooklyn Tech raise over $2 million annually, to fill budget gaps, stock libraries, air condition classrooms, buy Mac computers, etc., further widening disparities.[8]
To make matters worse, the “school choice” regime enthroned by former billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg and his lackey schools chancellor Joel Klein exacerbates school segregation. A recent report from the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School (The Paradox of Choice: How School Choice Divides New York City Elementary Schools [May 2018]) found that this practice keeps zoned schools in rich white areas as-is, while encouraging white parents in gentrified neighborhoods and middle-class African American families in poor areas not to send their children to their overwhelmingly black and Latino zoned schools, instead going to charter schools or richer areas. According to the report, “free lunch-eligible families were 80 percent less likely to opt out of their zoned schools and English language learners were 73 percent less likely to opt out of their zoned schools.” That means the majority of poor, working-class and immigrant families are sending their children to resource-starved zoned schools, where books are in short supply and classrooms run-down, and where they are being pushed out by well-funded charters.
De Blasio points to the numbers, saying NYC spends the most money of any U.S. city on its students and bragging that graduation rates and test scores are rising. But teachers who have to deal with ballooning class sizes and traumatized students whose lives are fraught with adversity know that these numbers mean precious little. They know how excruciatingly difficult it is for the almost 100,000 homeless students – fully 9% of all students, up by one-half in the past six years – to study and learn. In areas of the South Bronx, one in five students is homeless and up to a third of those transfer schools during the school year.[9] Yet in a city that’s home to some of the world’s most predatory finance capitalists, there is no shortage of resources. The problem is the capitalist society which benefits the leeches on Wall Street at the expense of the working masses who make NYC run.
School Choice and Racist Reaction
From the outset, “school choice” has been a racist reaction to Brown v. Board of Education. Barely a year after the landmark 1954 ruling, right-wing economist Milton Friedman – whose free-market policies were later put into practice with brutal effect under the murderous dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile – came up with the idea for school vouchers. To Friedman, it was bad enough the government was paying for education. Now that schools had to be desegregated, it was even worse that government “imposed” integration on white families. He proposed that money the government would normally spend on education be allocated to families as vouchers they could spend on their school of choice. This meant that integration could be avoided, and profit could be made from schools competing to attract white families. The first implementation of school vouchers was in 1956, in Virginia, under the Stanley Plan that set up all-white “segregation academies.”
Resistance to school integration took a more sinister and violent turn in the mid-’70s. In 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education) that school segregation could be remedied by busing students from predominantly black neighborhoods to schools in white neighborhoods, and vice versa. When federal courts ordered busing programs in Boston, Massachusetts and Louisville, Kentucky, this led to a racist backlash, with angry white mobs attacking buses filled with black children. At one point a prominent leader of the Ku Klux Klan spoke before a large crowd of whites in the predominantly Irish working-class neighborhood of South Boston (“Southie”). Despite the court order, the fear of violence by marauding racists patrolling the neighborhood was so great that only 10 percent of black students who enrolled in South Boston High attended in 1974. Various bourgeois politicians, Democrat and Republican, black and white, seized on the racist frenzy to call for “community control” of schools – i.e., for re-segregation and busting the teachers union.
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| Segregationist mob jeers school buses transporting black children to South Boston in October 1974. Maoists embraced the anti-busing racists. Other leftists joined Black Democrats in calling for federal troops to Boston. The Trotskyists called for integrated workers defense guards to defend busing. |
At that time, founders of Class Struggle Education Workers were members of the then-Trotskyist Spartacist League (SL), which stood on the program of revolutionary integrationism. We called to defeat the anti-busing terror campaign, noting that busing to integrate the schools, while wholly inadequate, embodied the basic democratic principle of free and equal public education. In contrast, the precursor of the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party capitulated to the Southie racists and opposed “forced busing,” saying it “divided poor and working people.” Other opportunist leftists supported calls by black Democrats for federal troops. We called instead for labor/black defense of busing.
Beginning in the late 1980s, court decisions and government policy have undone many of the school integration programs. By 2007, the Supreme Court ruled (in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1), in a split decision, that even voluntary programs cannot order school integration where racial segregation is de facto rather than by law (de jure). Then, under Republican George W. Bush’s 2001 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law and continuing under Democrat Barack Obama’s 2009 Race to the Top (RTTP) initiative and the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), school choice was enshrined as a goal. Schools labeled as failing were slated for closure, while semi-privatized “charter schools” were aggressively promoted with federal funds and billions from Wall Street investment houses. On top of this, where in the 1960s and ’70s white families “fled” to the suburbs, now the white flight has been reversed with gentrification, as more affluent young white professionals from the suburbs move into African American and Latino inner-city neighborhoods.
The combination and interaction of school choice, charterization and gentrification is having a devastating effect on public schools and housing on oppressed communities across the country. It amounts to educational redlining. Washington and New Orleans have ceased to be majority black cities and their public school systems have been heavily or almost totally replaced by charters. In NYC, Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant are becoming gentrified, and are prime locations for charters aided by Wall Street vultures such as Eva Moskowitz’ Success Academies and Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone. The result is to siphon off children from middle-class black families into charter schools, leaving the zoned schools with the poorest and almost exclusively (99% or more) non-white students. In many cases, well-funded charters move into the same buildings as the poverty-stricken public schools, so that the latter are targeted to fail. Meanwhile, a perverse effect of school choice is that gentrifying white parents take advantage of the preference given to students from areas of “failing schools” to enroll their children in elite schools.[10]
In New York City in the new millenium, residential segregation is as pronounced as ever, and public schools are more segregated than at any time since 1968, both by race and class.[11] The recent Paradox of Choice New School report shows that white families are least likely to exercise school choice (29 percent), because by and large they live in majority white areas with high quality zoned schools. But “more than half” of families in gentrified neighborhoods opt out of their zoned schools. This means, the report said, that school choice “provides families of means with exclusive access to the schools they like, while choice allows them to flee the ones they don’t.”[12] Conversely, black families are most likely to exercise school choice (60 percent), often opting for charters. And when poor and working-class families do try and exercise choice, they are effectively turned away:
“The Center identified a pattern of ‘gate keeping’ behavior on the part of the schools, such as school officials who told parents a school was ‘not for them,’ that the school application required a photo, and that they could not sit by their kids at breakfast drop-off for fear of the parent eating the free food…. They were informed the children would be asked where they slept at night and might receive impromptu visits from social workers to verify this home address. They even had a principle who said ‘this is not a free lunch school’ on a tour.”
Battle Over School Integration in New York City
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Internationalist Group and Class Struggle Education Workers
protested co-location of Wall Street-backed Success Academy
charter school in PS 123 building in Harlem, September 2009.
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As revolutionary Marxists we fight for free, equal, high quality, secular public education for
all. Despite the screening of applicants for high school (as well as middle schools, grade schools and even kindergarten) by exams and interviews, along with the undermining of public education through charter schools and capitalist opposition to educational equality in general, even so working-class students are determined to get an education. The rationale for school closures and reduced funding relies on low standardized test scores and four-year graduation rates. In 2017, under two-thirds of African American students in New York graduated high school on time. However, over three-quarters graduated in six years. Graduation rates for Hispanic students are lower, mainly because many are English Language Learners (ELLs), only 40% of whom graduated in four years and 50% in six years. (A key way charter schools raise graduation rates and test scores is by excluding ELLs and special education students.)[14] This is a key issue for public education in New York City where 40% of the population is foreign-born, over half speak languages other than English at home and 53% of students are from immigrant families.
A key factor behind the attack on public education is raw racism, as it has been ever since the white backlash to Brown v. Board of Education over six decades ago. But not just from Southern white Republicans. From the first battle over charter schools in 2009, Class Struggle Education Workers denounced the “educational colonialism” of the invasion of black Harlem by charter schools, labeling the installation of Success Academy II in the building of PS 123 “educational apartheid.” We noted how the United Federation of Teachers dodged the fight against charters. The CSEW called to “mobilize the full power of the UFT” together with the students, parents and working people of Harlem “in the effort to stop the encroachment of charter schools.” In subsequent years, the CSEW also repeatedly denounced the racism behind Mayor Bloomberg’s closure of almost 200 schools, overwhelmingly in black neighborhoods or with heavily African American and Latino students. But while opposing some of the school closings, the UFT leadership didn’t point to their racist character, nor did the reformist opposition in the union.
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At April 2014 protest against charter schools called by
parents groups, CSEW denounced capitalist
assault on public education.
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Currently a heated battle has erupted on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where the District 3 Education Council voted to offer a quarter of the seats in the district’s middle schools to students from other attendance zones in the district (i.e., Harlem) who had lower scores on state reading and math exams. An NY1 video went viral “showing mostly white parents complaining that their children wouldn’t receive coveted middle school spots after excelling on state tests” (Chalkbeat, 25 April). The furor increased when the new schools chancellor Richard Carranza retweeted the video with the (accurate) headline, “Wealthy white Manhattan parents angrily rant against plan to bring more black kids to their schools.” Carranza has subsequently questioned why school children are being screened at all. He will soon find that he has stirred up a hornets’ nest of liberal racism that de Blasio wouldn’t touch, as this along with Brooklyn’s Park Slope is the core of his white support. Among the defenders of Upper West Side school exclusivity is one Cynthia Nixon, the Sex in the City star who is running for the Democratic nomination for governor.
De Blasio won office promising to stop the expansion of charter schools, but he soon capitulated to the privatizing pro-charter forces in the Democratic Party itself, from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (the former Wal-Mart board member) down to state governor Andrew Cuomo and the Wall Street hedge fund operators behind Democrats for Education Reform. But for all the millions of dollars spent on propaganda blaming the “achievement gap” on “bad teachers” and teachers unions, after one failed teacher-bashing “reform” after another, the education deformers reject “one tool that has been shown to work: school desegregation,” wrote David Kirp in the New York Times (4 March 2012). Kirp, a senior fellow at the Learning Policy Institute, noted that numerous studies showed:
“The experience of an integrated education made all the difference in the lives of black children – and in the lives of their children as well. These economists’ studies consistently conclude that African-American students who attended integrated schools fared better academically than those left behind in segregated schools. They were more likely to graduate from high school and attend and graduate from college; and, the longer they spent attending integrated schools, the better they did. What’s more, the fear that white children would suffer, voiced by opponents of integration, proved groundless. Between 1970 and 1990, the black-white gap in educational attainment shrank — not because white youngsters did worse but because black youngsters did better.”
Right-wing and liberal education “reformers” are constantly talking of a generalized crisis of the schools, in order to justify their agenda of privatizing and corporatizing public education. This “crisis” is manufactured: if you consider only public schools with less than 10% of students eligible for subsidized meals – a simple measure of low income – on the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) test scores, U.S. schools would be No. 1 in the world in science and technology education, No. 1 in reading and No. 5 in math. The fundamental problem facing urban schools is entrenched poverty, which is far greater in the United States than in any other advanced industrial country. But that is well-nigh impossible to overcome under decaying capitalism, when everything from schools and hospitals to public transportation is becoming prohibitively costly while falling apart. The challenges of urban education have been studied to death. The solutions to school segregation, achievement gaps and the rest are relatively simple. The impediment is the rotting capitalist system and the noxious politics that go with it.
Marxists – and indeed anyone who has thought seriously about the obstacles to achieving high-quality, critical education for the mass of poor, oppressed and working people – might seem caught in an apparent contradiction. It’s obvious that the education system is rigged. We know that in capitalist society, schooling sorts by race and class and gender to fulfill unequal social and economic roles. We know the working class gets little quality education by design and economic circumstance. Forty years ago, economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (Schooling in Capitalist America [1976]) confirmed that education is a key component in an elaborate process of the social reproduction of labor power and the translation of labor to profits. Schooling not only mirrors the economic and social order, but also reinforces patterns of class domination and racial oppression. Yet we nevertheless loudly and rightly demand and organize for access to that rigged system as a democratic right.
The school system supplies the workers and tries to legitimate the inequalities of the class structure, but in the process it must produce workers with cognitive and technical skills required for suitable job performance. For our class, work is the only game in town – the other option being extreme material poverty. Access to the tools of capitalist culture is a requirement for economic survival. Denying access to education has long been a strategy to constrain the working class from fighting in its own interests. Crucially, some of the knowledge, culture and technical skills acquired in school can become weapons in the hands of our future class leaders. Class Struggle Education Workers demands free quality lifetime public education under teacher-student-worker-parent control as part of the wider class struggle for the reorganization of society on an egalitarian socialist basis that can only come about through revolution. The need for such struggle is particularly acute in this period of sustained capitalist attack on public education. n
[1] John Kucsera with Gary Orfield, New York State’s Extreme School Segregation: Inequality, Inaction and a Damaged Future (UCLA, The Civil Rights Project, March 2014). Also “New York Schools Have Worst Segregation in the U.S.,” in Class Struggle Education Workers Newsletter No. 4, Summer-Fall 2014.
[2] Ingrid Ellen, Maxwell Austensen and J. Yager, “Housing: The Paradox of Inclusion and Segregation in the Nation’s Melting Pot,” in B. Bowser and C. Davedutt, eds., Racial Inequality in New York City: Looking Backward and Forward (SUNY Press, forthcoming).
[3] “How Has the Distribution of Income in New York City Changed Since 2006?” New York City Independent Budget Office, April 2017.
[4] Institute for Policy Studies and Prosperity Now, The Road to Zero Wealth: How the Racial Wealth Divide Is Hollowing Out America’s Middle Class (September 2017).
[5] Antonio Moore and Matt Bruenig, “Without the Family Car Black Wealth Barely Exists,” People’s Policy Project, 30 September 2017.
[6] Sabrina Tavernise, “Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Say,” New York Times, 10 February 2012.
[7] Judges ruling on the 1994 suit by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity calculated the shortfall at between $4.7 and $5.6 billion a year, but the state still refuses to pay up.
[8] “Way Beyond Bake Sales: The $1 Million PTA,” New York Times, 3 June 2012; “PTA Inc.: Wealthy parents are picking up the tab at some New York City schools,” Daily News, 16 March 2015.
[9] Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness, On the Map: The Atlas of Student Homelessness in New York City 2017 (August 2017).
[10] See “School Choice May Be Accelerating Gentrification,” The Atlantic, 19 March 2019; and “How Gentrification Is Leaving Public Schools Behind,” U.S. News & World Report, 20 February 2015.
[11] Gary Orfield, Erica Frankenberg et al., Brown at 60: Great Progress, a Long Retreat and an Uncertain Future (Civil Rights Project, 15 May 2014). See also Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (Three Rivers, 2005).
[12] For example, at P.S. 287 on the northern edge of Downtown Brooklyn, 28% of the children zoned to the school are white, but no white students attend (see “Why Are New York’s Schools Segregated? It’s Not as Simple as Housing,” New York Times, 2 May 2018).
[13] New School Center for New York City Affairs, Urban Matters, 22 June 2016.
[14] For a lame attempt at justifying this exclusionary policy (but documenting its extent), see Marcus Winters, Why the Gap? English Language Learners and New York City Schools (Civic Report No. 93, October 2014),
Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the fight for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed. See the CSEW program here.