The Continuing Reality of Segregated Schools

Next month will mark a year since Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., a small St. Louis suburb. The death of the unarmed black teenager and the ensuing protests helped focus the nation’s eyes on the long-ignored specter of police brutality against black Americans, birthing a movement to assert that black lives matter.

Brown quickly became a national symbol of police violence against black youth, but after spending the last year reporting on thedevastating consequences of the resegregation of America’s schools, I realized he was also a symbol of something much more common.

Most black children will not be killed by the police. But millions of them will go to a school like Michael Brown’s: segregated, impoverished and failing. The nearly all-black, almost entirely poor Normandy school district from which Brown graduated just eight days before he was killed placed dead last on its accreditation assessment in the 2013-2014 school year: 520th out of 520 Missouri districts. The circumstances were so dire that the state stripped the district of its accreditation and eventually took over.

In the months following Brown’s death, I traveled to Normandy and wrote a piece called “School Segregation, the Continuing Tragedy of Ferguson” for ProPublica and The New York Times, published last December.

But I couldn’t stop reporting this story, as I had found something there that seemed straight out of a history book. A Missouri law had inadvertently created a new school integration program in one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in the country by allowing Normandy students to leave their unaccredited school district and transfer to white, high-achieving ones.

I teamed up with Chana Joffe-Walt, a producer for the radio program “This American Life,” to tell the story of Michael Brown’s school district through the students who remain there. It is a story of children locked away from opportunity, what happens when those children are given a chance to escape failing schools and what happens to those children left behind. It is a story of how powerful people decided to do something only when the problems of the worst district in the state were no longer contained. And above all, it is a story of the staggering educational inequality we are willing to accept.

Click Here to listen to the hour-long presentation, The Problem We All Live With

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