Learning in Public: Lessons for a Racially Divided America From My Daughter's School by Courtney E. Martin

Author:Courtney E. Martin [Martin, Courtney E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Discrimination, education, Philosophy; Theory & Social Aspects, Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780316428255
Google: cgwHEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Little, Brown
Published: 2021-08-03T00:23:19.542523+00:00

61

IT’S THE MIDDLE OF summer, and the district has released a plan for reducing the number of schools in Oakland. They call it the Blueprint for Quality Schools.

The official name isn’t fooling parents, who mostly seem to regard it with suspicion and no small amount of panic.

The district claims that this is an attempt to finally correct for the fiscal recklessness of the early aughts; the board approved a small-schools policy in 2000, and a decade (and half dozen superintendents) later, there were forty new schools. The thinking back then, not just in Oakland but throughout the nation, was that smaller schools serve kids, especially those who have been marginalized, more effectively. But it didn’t work. According to the Oakland Tribune, “The Oakland school district was transformed, at least on the surface. But many of its problems—low test scores, high dropout rates, staff turnover—remain.”2

Small schools weren’t the Holy Grail. And they are expensive, in a district that is already starving for resources. As the superintendent puts it: “The fact that Oakland has more schools per student than any other large California school district prevents us from using our scarce resources efficiently, and makes it more difficult to retain excellent teachers and maintain high-quality schools.”3

Reducing schools is like getting toothpaste back into the tube. And when White and/or privileged parents are involved, it gets particularly ugly.

In this case, Peralta and Kaiser—schools with great test scores, tight-knit parent communities, and low percentages of kids on free or reduced lunch—are each “being threatened” with the prospect of merging with Sankofa—where the test scores are dismal, there isn’t even a PTA, and the vast majority of kids qualify for free or reduced lunch.

Peralta is majority White, and Kaiser is more multiracial but still 35.8 percent White in a district that—overall—is only 10 percent White.

I didn’t tour Kaiser, but I heard a lot about it over time because a number of families who are in the Emerson catchment go there instead. I began to think of Kaiser as a sort of escape hatch for White progressive families in our neighborhood. There was enough racial diversity at Kaiser that White parents could reassure themselves that they weren’t driving up to the hills because they were trying to avoid Black kids. In fact, on the contrary, they emphatically loved the school’s racial diversity—“it looks like Oakland,” Kaiser parent after Kaiser parent told me proudly. Except that it didn’t live like Oakland; the year I looked at schools in Oakland for Maya, only a quarter of kids at Kaiser qualified for free or reduced lunch (in a district where three-quarters do).

So, in a sense, these White progressive families were able to maintain their anti-racist cred in their own minds by choosing a specific kind of diversity that felt safe, and that kept the test scores up and the poorest kids out (there is no viable public transportation up to the school). And choose they did. The vast majority—89 percent—of the kids who go to Kaiser don’t live in the surrounding neighborhood.

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