The segrenomics of U.S. education

For children in Baltimore classrooms, 2018 opened with buildings where temperatures never topped 40 degrees. An incensed teacher wondered why persevering in abominable conditions is something “we only ask of black and brown children.”

A new book by Cornell professor Noliwe Rooks, “Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation and the End of Public Education,” traces the history of separate and unequal education in America.

White America’s reaction to the prospect of educating children of color has ranged from outright and often violent opposition to promoting weak substitutes for adequately funded, integrated schools — substitutes that fail to ensure educational equity. Throughout U.S. history, these maneuvers have presented opportunities for hoarding resources for the white and affluent and even profiting at the expense of children of color — a phenomenon Rooks calls “segrenomics.”

From the earliest days of tax-supported public education, states found ways to deny African-American communities equal educational opportunity. One method was to simply refuse to fund African-American schools.

In 1914, South Carolina spent on average $15 per pupil for white schools but fewer than $2 per pupil for black schools. Appalled at the conditions in which African-American children were forced to learn, that state’s superintendent of education remarked: “It is not a wonder that they do not learn more, but the real wonder is that they learn as much as they do.”

As Rooks chronicles, officials in the South outlawed integration, doubletaxed African-Americans, refused to build African-American schools and engaged in violence. Public money, even if raised by African-Americans, almost exclusively benefited white students.

Some white philanthropists resolved to help African-Americans — on their terms. They required poor African-American communities to front money for schools that the philanthropists would match. Determined African-American communities all over the South expended herculean efforts to raise the required money.

The philanthropists had a constricted vision of education for African-Americans. To them, it was a means to provide effective and subservient laborers to ensure the South’s economic health. As one organization put it, the goal was “to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life where they are.”

Rooks illustrates how officials and “reformers” have virtually ignored successful models for education, such as: adequate funding, integration, and community-initiated reforms.

As she demonstrates, inequality, hoarding and profiting off the backs of poor children of color continue today. Schools have resegregated. States persistently underfund schools serving predominately children of color. They offer false “solutions” that hurt more than help — like charter schools.

Charters, concentrated in poor communities of color, are no better than public schools, increase segregation and often result in or benefit from closing neighborhood schools.

As Rooks notes, charters are “cash cows” for many operators, whether in the form of tax incentives; public funding; or the billions of dollars stolen by charter employees and operators. Charter expansion is a credit negative for poor communities, weakening their ability to raise money for public works. Authorities exact little oversight over this theft of public dollars.

Many affluent white communities hoard educational resources. Wealthy districts invest in investigating and prosecuting non-resident parents of color who attempt to enroll their children there. Strict oversight of wealthy district boundaries starkly contrasts the lax regulation of charters in communities of color.

Segrenomics continues to benefit the privileged at the expense of communities of color.

The same narrow view of education for children of color continues in many charter schools. Professor Pedro Noguera once confronted John King, then a charter principal, later U.S. Education Secretary, over the harsh discipline in his school.

Noguera asked “Are you preparing these kids to be leaders or followers? Because leaders get to talk in the hall. They get to talk over lunch, they get to go to the bathroom, and people can trust them. They don’t need surveillance and police officers in the bathroom.” King’s response was that “this the model that our kids need.’”

Rooks draws hope from communities of color mobilizing to protect their schools. As scholar Sally Nuamah observed, schools were the first public institution to which African-Americans gained access. Public schools are community anchors and a path to the middle class, providing stable employment. They are also a forum for organizing and speaking out.

Rooks cites groups such as the Student Unions in Philadelphia and Newark, who staged walkouts and sit-ins to call attention to the lack of resources; and the Chicago community that conducted a hunger strike to protest school closures. Rooks predicts that these engaged and organized communities “may save us all.”