School equity and white parents
Next month, Bay Area kids are going back to profoundly segregated schools, maybe even the most segregated in our region’s history. Even after George Floyd and the summer of protest, after COVID and our great interdependent awakening, after Juneteenth became a national holiday, things are only growing more divided.
How can this be? How can we be a nation reckoning with its own racial history and contemporary inequity like never before — and be standing still, if not moving backward, when it comes to achieving educational equity?
The answer largely lies with white parents. Even more specifically, white progressive parents.
Last year, researchers used public opinion data to identify the 12 most conservative and least conservative cities in America and then looked at their racial breakdowns for school achievement. In places like Portland, Ore., home of progressive mecca Powell’s Books, in places like New York, where the Occupy movement was born, and, yes, in places like my own town of Oakland, where you can find a summer camp that will teach your kid to chant, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, the gender binary has got to go!” there is a significantly bigger gap between what Black and brown kids achieve and what their white peers do.
Progressive cities, on average, have achievement gaps in math and reading that are 15 and 13 percentage points higher, respectively, than conservative cities do.
In Oakland, 63% of white kids are proficient in math, while 17% of Latinx kids and just 12% of Black kids are. When it comes to reading, things don’t look much better: 71% of white kids in Oakland can read at grade level, while 24% of Latinx kids and 19% of Black kids can.
If you’re a Black student in America, you’d be better off learning in Tulsa, Okla., Tallahassee, Fla., or — and this one really gave me whiplash — my own conservative hometown of Colorado Springs than in Oakland — birthplace of the Black Panthers.
There are a variety of reasons that schools are likely to be even more segregated this year. Many Black families have found that homeschooling actually worked better for them and they’re, understandably, not going back to a system that continually lets them down. But it is white and/or privileged families that will likely have the biggest impact on enrollment. Parents who could afford to pull their kids out of public schools (especially in the Bay Area, where distance learning dragged on) and enrolled them in private schools with infectious disease consultants oncall and outdoor tents. Some privileged families who created pandemic pods, complete with a private teacher and full control over when and what and how their kids learn, are vowing to stick with the most bespoke of educational experiences.
Many of these families who have opted for private options care about equity. But in the absence of an actual community with which to put their care into action, racial healing has become an intellectual or even performative journey. It feels shallow and unrewarding — a fearsome posture rather than a liberatory expansion.
Too many have settled for “curated diversity” when we know that true integration is necessary.
As a white parent myself, I felt unsatisfied with channeling my instincts for racial justice into being sure my kid’s bookshelf had lots of characters of color. So in 2017, we chose to send our white daughter to a predominantly Black school — rated a dreaded 1 out of 10 on GreatSchools.org — in our gentrified neighborhood in Oakland. It is a school that the whisper network of white and/or privileged parents say to avoid at all costs.
It was the best choice we ever could have made.
Our kid has benefited in a million small ways, both social and intellectual. You can feel the impact of not being around white kids all day in her stride and her smile. She can easily make friends with kids from Yemen or at the shelter down the block. Of her own volition, she tried to figure out why Fancy Nancy calls it the Big Dipper, while Harriet Tubman called the constellation the Drinking Gourd.
At only 7 years old, she befriends and reasons differently than most of her white friends in the neighborhood.
Chances are, the school that the white whisper network says is “chaotic” and “rough” is actually a loving, interesting place where a white child will have no trouble making friends.
It’s really the grownups who will likely have the biggest learning curve in navigating the school environment. My husband and I have struggled at times with how to show up in our relationships with our daughter’s teachers, other parents in the school and a very broken district. When and how much should we speak up in meetings?
But white progressives like me have to stop talking antiracism to death. We need to do something uncomfortable, maybe even scary, instead and see what happens.
Join a multiracial community and your confusion will change; instead of wondering how you look to other, mostly white people online, you’ll be wondering about how your actions impact people of color whom you know and care about. You won’t wonder if you’re on the right side of history because you’ll realize that that’s the wrong question.
There is no right side of history. There’s only the generational imperative that we bend the arc more than our parents did, and set our kids up to be unsatisfied with how far we got. Bending is an action. It’s not a syllabus or a social media campaign.