DOE vs. DOJ on School Integration

This morning’s Washington Post features a superb front page story on policies in a small Mississippi school district to segregate students – and the efforts of the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice to stop it.  But as I note in a guest blogpost for Washington Post columnist Valerie Strauss’s “The Answer Sheet,” the DOJ’s action to fight de jure segregation stands in stark contrast to Obama’s Education Department’s failure to address the much larger issue of de facto (residential based) school segregation by race and class.

The Post’s page one story, by reporter Stephanie McCrummen, outlines the way in which the school system in Walthall County, Mississippi allowed large number of white students to transfer from predominantly black Tylertown High School to the predominantly white Salem Attendance Center.  The school system’s practice was wrong – and DOJ was right to sue – but what’s striking from the article is that even after the transfers, “both Tylertown and Salem remain more integrated than many schools across the country.  Tylertown is 76 percent black and 22 percent white; Salem is 33 percent black and 66 percent white.”

What is the Department of Education doing about the far more substantial de facto segregation by race and class in America’s metropolitan areas?  Virtually nothing – which represents an enormous missed opportunity.  The separation of rich and poor in American schools is the very fountainhead of school inequality.  It undermines the role of public education in promoting both social cohesion (bringing kids of different backgrounds together) and social mobility (allowing kids of all backgrounds to achieve academically.)

As McCrummen’s story notes, DOE intends to do some good things on the margins — stepping up enforcement of civil rights laws when minority students are disproportionately disciplined or put into special education classes, for example.  But today, enforcement is the least powerful tool in the Education Department’s arsenal.  Far more potent are public policy efforts, backed by budget lines, to deconcentrate school poverty through positive incentives rather than through court order.  The Department of Education’s Race to the Top fund has shown the power of federal dollars to leverage public policy change to promote merit pay for teachers and charter schools (which, research finds, are more segregated than public schools).  Yet no priority has been given to school integration under Race to the Top; and funding for magnet schools, which voluntarily bring together students from different walks of life, has been flatlined. 

For more on how the Obama Administration could step up its fight against separate and unequal schooling, see here.