Why Won’t Metro Richmond Integrate Its Schools?

By Don Cowles

Fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, Metropolitan Richmond schools, like our neighborhoods, remain segregated by race and socioeconomic class.

In Chesterfield, Hanover, Henrico, and Richmond, there are 150,000 students at more than 200 schools (K-12), with an annual operating budget over $1.25 billion. Over the past half-century the number of students has increased 130 percent and the number of schools more than 40 percent.

Yet, in our four metropolitan school districts, most low-income students are isolated in a third of our schools, where they are a majority of the student body, according to Virginia Department of Education data.

In the counties, white students are typically exposed to student bodies that are less than 10 percent students of color, according to the Harvard Civil Rights Project. In the city, students of color are exposed to student bodies that are less than 10 percent white.

WHY HAVE WE not integrated our schools? Do we think it is not important?

Over the past 50 years evidence of the benefits of school integration has multiplied.

First, “student body diversity promotes learning outcomes, and better prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce and society, and better prepares them as professionals.” This is Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s summary of findings submitted by academic, business, and military leaders in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003. School integration is fundamental to a “world-class” education system.

Second, integration of students from lower-income families into schools with a majority of higher-income families improves overall academic achievement without adversely affecting performance of higher-income students, according to Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the Century Foundation who has written on the subject. This is attributable to the school community sharing high aspirations and access to resources.

Third, our schools are “laboratories” of democracy, in which people of diverse beliefs and backgrounds learn how to live together effectively — the very purpose for which public education was established under the Virginia Constitution.

So, school integration is important. It is also urgent to the students missing the benefits.

WHY HAVE WE not integrated our schools? Do we not know how to do it?

Other regions are doing it and experiencing the benefits. Some are redrawing attendance zones. Others are implementing special student transfer policies, creating more magnet schools, expanding school choice options, instituting inter-district transfer programs, and dispersing public housing into mixed-income neighborhoods.

The Raleigh/Wake County Public School System in North Carolina is a national leader in economic school integration, according to a front-page New York Times article. It limits the proportion of low- income students in any school to no more than 40 percent, deploying a combination of strategies from redrawing school assignment zones to magnet schools to, yes, busing. In the end, the school system estimates that only 2.5 percent of its students are assigned to schools to achieve economic balance.

Bill McNeal, Raleigh/Wake County school superintendent, lays it on the line, “Here is what you should hold me accountable for: At the end of the bus ride, are we providing a quality education for your child?”

(McNeal will share the Raleigh/Wake County story at Hope in the Cities’ Metropolitan Richmond Day tomorrow.)

Currently, Raleigh/Wake County claims that all but 15 percent of its schools meet the 40-percent guideline (some are only a few percentage points away), 91 percent of students perform at or above grade level, and all 139 schools are operating successfully.

SO, THERE are practical ways to integrate schools across racial, income, and other differences. Why is Metropolitan Richmond not integrating its schools? Do we lack the will to do it?

Certainly, building inclusive school communities is challenging work. It is personal work. It can’t be assigned to governments and school administrators. It is the work of each student, parent, and educator — forming new relationships with people who may be quite different.

Also, the process may necessitate healing of historical wounds. Trust may have been broken, recently or long ago. Difficult apologies may be in order. However, hope can be restored in new relationships. We may need to reaffirm our shared values, such as respect, responsibility, honesty, and accountability. Accepting a few fundamental principles might free us to celebrate our diversity.

The American Dream embodies a marvelous paradox, that out of many different people one community can form — E Pluribus Unum.

What difference would it make if we created inclusive school communities — if we treated every child as our own child?