Equating School Quality with Whiteness Perpetuates White Supremacy
By Michaela Ward
It is important to frame school desegregation as an issue of resource allocation, to ensure that it is not misunderstood to imply that schools primarily for students of color are inferior. Rather, racial equity in schools means equitable resources for students of color and white students.
Desegregation may be one way to achieve this goal.
For school desegregation to be used effectively as an advocacy tool, though, advocates must acknowledge that desegregation is a means of achieving equity within a public education system that disproportionately favors (i.e. funds) white students. It is not that schools serving white students are inherently better. It is not that Black students need access to whiteness to have high-quality educations. Rather, in our current public education system rife with entrenched and institutionalized racism, funding and its resultant resources are tied to white students. Given that resources are a large part of what makes an education high-quality, we know that providing Black students with access to funding via school desegregation is one way to promote racial equity in education. However, such desegregation does not necessarily dismantle a racist funding system, and may in fact leave untouched a system that would not support students of color in schools explicitly for students of color.
Not naming desegregation as an issue of resource allocation risks perpetuating the falsehood that school quality is tied to whiteness. School quality is often tied to resources. For a clear example of a state which disproportionately and formally privileges white students, we need look no further than our own. As detailed in a recent report by the interfaith activism group POWER, in Pennsylvania “on average, the whitest [school] districts get thousands of dollars more than their fair share for each student, while the least white districts get thousands less for each student than their fair share, according to the [recently enacted Pennsylvania state school funding] formula.”
Funding is important not only as a signal of who our elected officials value, but also as a precursor for academic and lifelong successes–which I use here as two measures of school quality. There is a growing body of evidence for these common-sense impacts of funding. A longitudinal study conducted by C. Kirabo Jackson, Rucker Johnson, and Claudia Perseco of UCLA found that:
“increases in per-pupil spending, induced by court-mandated school finance reforms, led to significant increases in the likelihood of high school graduation and educational attainment for poor children… While there was no effect for children from non-poor families, for poor children a 20 percent increase in per-pupil spending each year for all 12 years of public school was associated with:
A 23 percentage-point increase in high school completion rates,
Nearly a full additional year of completed education,
25 percent higher adult earnings,
52 percent higher annual family income, and
A 20 percentage-point reduction in the annual incidence of poverty in adulthood.
These statistics make abundantly clear that our public education system is underfunding and thus underserving students of color.
While desegregation is touted as the clear fix, separatist arguments for Black-centered schools emphasize that quality education does not depend on white students. They suggest that, for students of color, education quality may in fact be amplified by the absence of white students. For example in We Are an African People, historian Russell Rickford describes how disappointing desegregation attempts in the late 1960s sparked interest in Black-centered “movement schools.” In these new schools “faith in the transformative power of education endured, as did the conviction that structures created ‘outside the official order’ could serve as vessels of critical thought and consciousness” (99). While Rickford describes schools which were independent (rather than public), and which were by no means perfect, they are still strikingly relevant examples of education that strove to be high-quality specifically for Black youth. These movement schools provided “a more affirming formulation [than integrated schools], one that heralded the positive cultural and political characteristics of ‘black education’” (28). These schools had nourishing, culturally positive, and action-oriented elements of their pedagogy: all hallmarks of school quality which are often talked up but rarely actualized.
Ultimately I am arguing that desegregation is a partial solution to achieving racial equity in education, and that naming its incompleteness is critical lest advocates unconsciously bind whiteness to school quality. Our current funding system is racist. Changing that – i.e. making resources equitably available to students of color – ought not to depend on Black students being in schools with white students. Black-centered schools (or racially integrated schools that explicitly support students of color) ought to be able to thrive without the need for white students to bring in resources.
With this thesis in mind, I also suggest that dismantling the racism that’s bound up in such underfunding of students of color is a long-term goal. In the meantime, naming this long-term goal can happen alongside pushing to make resource allocation equitable through desegregation. And, as many who push for desegregation note, there are benefits to racial integration beyond equity in funding. For example, the U.S. Department of Education and Department of Justice issued guidance in 2011 which stated: “Racially diverse schools provide incalculable educational and civic benefits by promoting cross-racial understanding, breaking down racial and other stereotypes, and eliminating bias and prejudice.” Desegregation is a worthy goal when the often-veiled logic behind it is brought to the forefront of advocates’ work, and used to call attention to the short- and long-term work of building a racially equitable system of public education.
In closing: desegregation is an issue of resource allocation. It is not an issue of access to whiteness. Schools primarily for students of color are in no way inferior to those for white students, and it is important to name desegregation as an issue of resource allocation to keep this fact from being hidden.
References
Darling-Hammond, L. (1998). Unequal opportunity: Race and education. Brookings Institution. Retrieved from https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-and-education/
Jackson, C. K., Johnson, R., & Persico, C. (2005). How money makes a difference: The effects of school finance reforms on outcomes for low income students. National Bureau of Economic Research, (May 2014). Retrieved from https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/how-money-makes-difference-effects-school-finance-reforms-outcomes-low-income-students.pdf
U.S. Department of Justice & U.S. Department of Education. (2015, November 5). Guidance on the voluntary use of race to achieve diversity and avoid racial isolation in elementary and secondary schools. Retrieved March 31, 2018, from https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/guidance-ese-201111.html
Mosenkis, D. (2016). Systemic racial bias in latest Pennsylvania school funding. Retrieved from https://powerinterfaith.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/PA-Racial-School-Funding-Bias-July-2016-1-1.pdf
Rickford, R. (2016). We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.