Segregation, the Black-White Achievement Gap, and the Romneys

by Richard Rothstein

Working Economics - The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) blog
August 22, 2012

http://www.epi.org/blog/segregation-black-white-achievement-gap-romneys/

We cannot remedy the large racial achievement gaps in American
education if we continue to close our eyes to the continued
racial segregation of schools, owing primarily to the
continued segregation of our neighborhoods. We pretend that
this segregation is nobody's fault in particular (we call it
"de facto" segregation), and that therefore there is nothing
we can or should do about it. Instead, we think that somehow
we can devise reform programs that will create separate but
equal education. One after another of these programs has
failed - more teacher accountability and charter schools being
only the latest - but we persist.

The presidential campaign can be a reminder, though, of the
opportunities we've missed and continue to miss. Forty years
ago, George Romney, Mitt's father, resigned as Secretary of
Housing and Urban Development after unsuccessfully attempting
to force homogenous white middle-class suburbs to integrate by
race. Secretary Romney withheld federal funds from suburbs
that did not accept scatter-site public and subsidized low and
moderate income housing and that did not repeal exclusionary
zoning laws that prohibited multi-unit dwellings or modest
single family homes - laws adopted with the barely disguised
purpose of ensuring that suburbs would remain white and middle
class.

Confronted at a press conference about his cabinet secretary's
actions, President Nixon undercut Romney, responding, "I
believe that forced integration of the suburbs is not in the
national interest." This has since been unstated national
policy and as a result, low-income African Americans remain
concentrated in distressed urban neighborhoods and their
children remain in what we mistakenly think are "failing
schools." Nationwide, African Americans remain residentially
as isolated from whites as they were in 1950, and more
isolated than in 1940.

In the September/October issue of The American Prospect, Mark
Santow and I review George Romney's crusade, and contrast his
views with those of his son, this year's Republican
presidential candidate. Like most policymakers today from both
political parties, Mitt Romney accepts the permanence of
racial segregation. Instead, to address the problems of low-
income urban youth, he has made a wildly impractical proposal
to permit children from low-income families to transfer to
public schools far from home in those lily-white suburbs that
his father had confronted.

George Romney understood that there is little chance we can
substantially narrow the achievement gap without breaking up
heavy concentrations of low-income minority children in urban
schools, giving these children opportunities to attend
majority middle-class schools outside their "truly
disadvantaged" neighborhoods. But urban children cannot have a
practical opportunity to attend such middle-class schools
unless their parents have the opportunity to live nearby.

The failure of George Romney's efforts has resulted today in
African-American children from low-income urban families still
frequently suffering from health problems that lead to school
absences; from frequent or sustained parental unemployment
that provokes family crises; from rent or mortgage defaults
causing household moves that entail changes of teachers and
schools, with a resulting loss of instructional continuity;
and from living in communities with high levels of crime and
disorder, where schools spend more time on discipline and less
on instruction and where stress interferes with academic
achievement.

With school segregation continuing to increase, these children
are often isolated from the positive peer influences of
middle-class children who were regularly read to when young,
whose homes are filled with books, whose adult environments
include many college-educated professional role models, whose
parents have greater educational experience and the motivation
such experience brings and who have the time, confidence, and
ability to monitor schools for academic standards.

Although his integration efforts were suppressed by President
Nixon, George Romney was not an isolated figure. Although his
passion was unusual, his views on racial integration were
shared by many national leaders, Republican and Democrat
alike. It is hard for many of us today, unfamiliar with how
far this nation has regressed in matters of racial inequality,
to imagine that, for example, Vice President Spiro Agnew
lectured the National Alliance of Businessmen that he flatly
rejected the assumption that "because the primary problems of
race and poverty are found in the ghettos of urban America,
the solutions to these problems must also be found there...
Resources needed to solve the urban poverty problem - land,
money, and jobs - exist in substantial supply in suburban
areas, but are not being sufficiently utilized in solving
inner-city problems." Nixon's domestic policy coordinator,
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, contemptuously called it "gilding the
ghetto" to try to ameliorate inequality simply by pouring
money into urban programs: "efforts to improve the conditions
of life in the present caste-created slums must never take
precedence over efforts to enable the slum population to
disperse throughout the metropolitan areas involved." A
commission headed by former Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner, formed
after riots in over 100 cities in 1967, called for a crash
program for the federal government to construct or subsidize
six million units of low and moderate income housing, intended
primarily for black urban families, in middle-class white
suburbs. George Romney adopted this goal as HUD Secretary, but
he could never begin to fulfill it.

Today, Democrats and Republicans alike unashamedly promote
efforts to "gild the ghetto" with charter schools that are
more segregated than regular public schools, and with
compensatory education programs that have little chance of
truly compensating. But the black-white academic achievement
gap is unlikely to narrow much further without revisiting the
imperative of residential integration in our metropolitan
areas. Integration alone won't close the gap, but without
integration, other programs will continue to be frustrated.

Read the full report on which the Santow-Rothstein American
Prospect article is based, with sources for those interested
in pursuing these issues.
http://www.epi.org/publication/educational-inequality-racial-segregation-significance/

[Richard Rothstein is a research associate of the Economic
Policy Institute and senior fellow of the Chief Justice Earl
Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of
California (Berkeley) School of Law. He is the author of
Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right (Teachers
College Press and EPI, 2008) and Class and Schools: Using
Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-
White Achievement Gap (Teachers College Press 2004). He is
also the author of The Way We Were? Myths and Realities of
America's Student Achievement (1998). Other recent books
include The Charter School Dust-Up: Examining the Evidence on
Enrollment and Achievement (co-authored in 2005); and All Else
Equal: Are Public and Private Schools Different? (co-authored
in 2003). Contact Richard Rothstein at [log in to unmask] ]

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