Dear White Parents

A leading writer on race challenged white liberals to put their kids where their ideals lay: by sending them to public schools with more black and brown children.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, one of the nation’s most provocative writers on race, issued that challenge in a lecture at Yale Law School’s auditorium.

A staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, Hannah-Jones challenged the crowd of professors, college students and public-school teachers to consider their own role in maintaining segregation.

She invoked the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that struck down the notion of ​“separate but equal” schools.

“Today, we think that Brown v. Board of Education was really about resources, that the court was ruling that segregated black schools were not receiving the same resources as white schools and therefore had to be unconstitutional,” Hannah-Jones said in the lecture Wednesday afternoon. ​“But the truth is that Brown v. Board doesn’t mention resources. It doesn’t mention test scores. It doesn’t mention achievement gaps.”

Instead, Hannah-Jones said, the justices declared, ​“Separate cannot be made equal.”

Despite that ruling, our classrooms today are often just as segregated as they were back then. Including in New Haven, where half the schools are almost entirely black and brown.

“Why is it OK to have this segregation today, when we can all agree that in Brown’s time, it was wrong?” asked Hannah-Jones, who’s bi-racial. ​“Well, I can tell you that a majority of white Americans living with Linda Brown didn’t think that was wrong [back then] either.”

Who’s The Next Ruby Bridges?

Starting to integrate schools took more than a decade after the court wrote its opinion in Brown v. Board. It took legal challenges to restructure society and individual choices to diversify schools.

As an example, Hannah-Jones pointed back to Ruby Bridges, the first black child to attend an all-white elementary school.

In 1960, Bridges desegregated William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. For weeks, federal marshals escorted the first-grader past a crowd of angry white parents, who held up a black doll in a baby’s casket to intimidate her. Many pulled their own kids out of school.

Even the teachers refused to include Bridges in their lessons. She ended up spending the school year alone in a classroom with Barbara Henry, the one teacher who didn’t mind what her skin color was.

“I think about Ruby because she’s 6 in this picture. My daughter’s 7,” Hannah-Jones said. ​“I ask myself: Would I have the courage to send my child through a white mob every day to go to this school? How could it have felt for this little girl to sit in a classroom by herself because she was so tainted?”

Desegregation peaked in 1988, Hannah-Jones said. That year, the national achievement gap on reading scores was half of what it was in 1971 — the smallest it ever was and has been since. Studies showed the effects of desegregation lasted for a generation, with the black children who went to diverse schools more likely to graduate from college, rise out of poverty, move to integrated neighborhoods and live longer, said Hannah-Jones, who herself rode a bus for two hours every day to go to a predominantly white high school in Iowa.

“Despite every single reform we have implemented — No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, charter schools and school choice, you name it — none of that has worked to close the racial achievement gap the way school desegregation has,” she said. ​“Today, we have gone backwards.”

What would it take to change that? She said Connecticut needs county-wide school districts, like those that allowed integration in the South, such as Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina and Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools in Tennessee.

“You move two miles down the road to an all-white community, and you never have to worry about integration,” she said. ​“You can have clean hands, because you can say it has nothing to do with race, it’s just the community that you live in.”

Failing that change in law, Hannah-Jones flipped Bridges’s historic example on its head. She challenged white, left-leaning parents to stop sending their children to exclusive schools, where racial minorities are kept out.

It’s a choice she made herself, sending her daughter to a segregated school in Brooklyn rather than the magnet schools, gifted-and-talented programs and private institutions that her friends (and even the experts studying segregation) picked for their own kids.

In essence Hannah-Jones was asking: Which white parents have the courage, like Bridges’s family, to integrate a school?

“Segregation is not accidental and it’s not incidental. It’s not simply a legacy of our past. It has to do with everything we believe right now: When you walk into a school and see a room full of black kids, what do you automatically assume? What are your fears? What stops you from enrolling your kid?” she asked. ​“We have to raise the question: Do we really believe in equality or not? Do we believe that those kids in those schools are deserving of less than our own children? The answer, of course, is we do.

“After I wrote the story about my daughter, one of the things that I heard was the question: ​‘How dare you sacrifice your child,’” she continued. But ​“whose children should be sacrificed today? Whose kids are worthy to be left behind, while we think about how we can advantage our children? The answer is that we want to sacrifice the same children that we always sacrifice in this country.”

In fact, Hannah-Jones concluded, ​“We’ve decided that separate but equal is OK. We sustain the system here in New Haven and all over the country,” she said. ​“You can’t leave here and ignore that you’re making a choice. Ride a few blocks over to a segregated black and Latino school, walk in there and see what it looks like. And ask yourself if you can make that choice. If you don’t, just admit it: You don’t actually believe in equality at all.”

Segregation In The Elm City

New Haven maintained separate schools for blacks and whites up until 1874, when the Board of Education closed the last all-black school on Goffe Street, noting that the country had changed after the Civil War. A century and a half later, half of New Haven’s public schools are profoundly segregated, according to the Independent’s analysis of last year’s attendance records maintained by the state.

In a city that’s one-third white, in a county that’s three-quarters white, more than 90 percent of the students at 17 schools are racial minorities.

In Fair Haven, three elementary schools are almost exclusively brown: Columbus Family Academy, a neighborhood school, is 94 percent Hispanic; John S. Martinez School, a magnet school open to the whole city, is 87 percent Hispanic; and Clinton Avenue School, another neighborhood school, is 75 percent Hispanic.

The same pattern repeats in Dixwell with black students: Wexler-Grant Community School, a neighborhood elementary, is 72 percent African-American.

And over on the north end of town, there’s so few whites at Hill Central, another neighborhood school, that the state won’t release the actual number of white students to ensure confidentiality for the handful.

White students crowd into four schools with limited admissions policies: Sound School, a vocational high school in City Point, is 58 percent white; Worthington Hooker School, a neighborhood school open only to East Rock residents, is 47 percent white and 29 percent Asian; Nathan Hale School, a neighborhood school for the East Shore, is 46 percent white; and Edgewood School, another neighborhood school, is 31 percent white.

Guess which three city schools came out on top in the state’s latest assessments? Worthington Hooker, Sound and Nathan Hale. Hooker was the only school in the district to score higher than the state average.

Racial demographics at New Haven’s charter schools are mixed, with some doing better and some far worse than traditional public schools.

Only nine white students go to Amistad Academy, out of 1,081 altogether. Elm City College Prep doesn’t have a single white student this year, out of 752 altogether, according to the state’s tally. (Updated: Amanda Pinto, a spokeswoman for Achievement First, said the state’s numbers are inaccurate, and they are working to correct it. According to an internal count, Elm City College Prep has 14 white students, including the two children of the co-CEO and president, Dacia Toll.)

But numbers are higher at Elm City Montessori, an elementary school in Fair Haven Heights, and at Common Ground, a high school in West Rock. At both, 24 percent of the students are white.

Across the city, most schools are a long way off from the Connecticut Supreme Court’s definition of racially integrated. As decided in Sheff v. O’Neill, to avoid racial isolation, only three-quarters of the kids in magnet schools should be black and brown.

New Haven wasn’t involved in that 1989 lawsuit, but afterwards, it used newly available state funds to launch its own inter-district magnet program, opening up select schools to suburban students. Unlike the compulsory busing that split Boston in the mid-1970s, the Elm City’s recent attempts at integration are voluntary.

“NHPS is proud of its commitment to integration and choice across the school district with a variety of school themes and offerings for students,” said Will Clark, the school’s chief operating officer. ​“Through the magnet program, New Haven has opened it doors to both our surrounding towns as well as all city neighborhoods.”

Still, only two of New Haven’s inter-district magnet schools meet the court’s cut-off.

One third of the students at Engineering Science University Magnet School (ESUMS), a combined middle and high school, are white. (Half of ESUMS’s students live outside the city.) And one quarter at Betsy Ross, a middle school, are white. Two more inter-district magnet elementary schools — Benjamin Jepson, at 24 percent, and Davis Street, at 22 percent — both come close to the cut-off.

Racial integration appeared loosely correlated with meeting state benchmarks. Among New Haven’s public schools, Jepson scored fourth-highest on state assessments this year, behind the three predominantly white schools. Hill Central and Wexler-Grant bottomed out the list.

There’s several reasons why the inter-district magnet school program hasn’t achieved a full desegregation. For one, the school system hasn’t been able to maximize participation from the suburbs in recent years — a gap they’re aiming to close next year to pick up an extra $1 million in state revenue.

Even if New Haven were to fill up every reserved seat, changing demographics mean the suburbs are more racially diverse now than during the height of ​“white flight” from 1950 to 1980, making it harder to bus in white students. The school system has hired Richard Kahlenberg, a consultant from The Century Foundation to study whether the district can strive for socioeconomic integration, even if it can’t achieve racial equity.

“It is important to look beyond diversity as being defined as race and ethnicity exclusively. Research tells us that students perform better in economically diverse school environments than those that have high concentrations of poverty,” said Sherri Davis-Googe, head of the district’s school choice program. ​“NHPS’s federally-supported magnet schools are in the initial stages of integrating its schools’ student population by socioeconomic status.”

Joey Rodriguez, the newest school board member, whose daughter goes to Jepson, said he’s planning to work with new Superintendent Carol Birks on the district’s disparities. ​“I have said this before and I will say it again, racial and educational equity must remain a priority,” he said. ​“I expect our schools to create equal outcomes for students while recognizing the diverse needs of our learners.”

Another board member, Tamiko Jackson-McArthur, added that, in New Haven, an equitable education is both ​“paramount and required.” ​“In places where this may fall short,” she said, ​“we must endeavor to remedy all aspects that have prevented this from happening.”