The questions we’d rather avoid on school integration

Fairfield is going to have to rethink its school system. It’s long been racially unbalanced, as the state puts it, and changes must be made to put the system into compliance.

The problem is that even a perfectly balanced Fairfield school system, were such a thing possible, would be dramatically out of balance with the community just next door. The state doesn’t plan to do anything about that.

The issues in Fairfield concern one school, McKinley Elementary, which has been out of sync with the rest of the town for 15 years. The state labels schools as racially imbalanced when the proportion of minority students for any school is off from the town’s figure by 25 percentage points or more.

McKinley was more than 56 percent minority as of last school year, while the district was about 26 percent.

For reference, with Fairfield about three-quarters white students, the figure in the Bridgeport public schools is about 10 percent. The state is silent on that imbalance, pretending a town border is something other than an imaginary line on a map.

It’s a continuation of a long, mostly ugly history of racial imbalance in America’s schools. To the extent that people think about it at all, there are many who seem to believe the issue was settled with the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954. Separate but equal was from that point no longer allowed.

The reality on the ground was a lot more complicated. Many school districts simply ignored the ruling, waiting until they were forced, sometimes at gunpoint, to integrate. Some cities closed their schools altogether rather than let Black students attend. In nearly every case, white people who saw the approach of people of color, either to their neighborhoods or their schools, simply fled.

American suburbia is held up as an ideal to which people should aspire, but its historical development was about running away. White people needed a safe space, and they found it amid their desultory large-lot subdivisions, subsidized by the federal government.

The segregation remedies that did go forward ran into unending obstacles. The courts ruled that it wasn’t legal to block people from a school or neighborhood by virtue of their race, but there turned out to be many other avenues to enforce segregation that weren’t so explicit but had nearly the same impact.

We can see the results in Connecticut. American schools are as segregated now as they were decades ago, and the problem is especially severe in the Northeast. And in few places is the divide as stark as it is on the town line between Fairfield and Bridgeport.

Even within a community, there’s only so much that can be done, because parents of means will find a way out. For instance, Bassick High School, one of three public high schools in Bridgeport, annually has 50 to 60 white students among its population, accounting for less than 10 percent of the student body. That doesn’t mean there are no other white students in its catchment area.

Seven elementary schools feed into Bassick, one of which, Black Rock School, serves the wealthiest part of town. Black Rock has more than 100 white students each year, up to a quarter of the student population. As they age into high school, those students are going someplace else.

We could imagine something similar happening if the state ever decided to take integration seriously and, say, merge Fairfield and Bridgeport into one district, with maybe Easton thrown into the mix. A lot of students who previously attended suburban schools would be sent somewhere else, either by moving or switching to a private school.

That doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. The arguments in favor of integration are just as strong now as they were in 1954.

We also know the reason it doesn’t happen. Just as Darien wouldn’t take 16 kindergartners from Norwalk, Wilton parents protested in a “Hands Off Our Schools” rally in 2019, Danbury couldn’t get any of its neighbors to take part in Open Choice and Waterbury was turned down by its suburban counterparts when overcrowded with arrivals from Puerto Rico following a hurricane, the reaction from white Connecticut is always the same — rage. We talk a good game about our blue state values, but when it matters — when kids’ futures are on the line — our actions don’t match up.

The state could act anyway. A decade ago when a dispute arose between Bridgeport and Trumbull over a new magnet school, the General Assembly passed a bill that redrew town borders, and suddenly the school was on Bridgeport property. The state could do something similar any time it chooses.

In Fairfield, the town appears to have little choice but to act, but some parents are pushing back. That includes McKinley parents of white students, who say they like the school the way it is.

Sometimes, parents can find an integrated school isn’t something to be avoided.