The question was posed in class last week: “Should the government punish public schools that fail to comply with its policies by taking funding away from them?” While the context here was de jure segregation, many of us associated the scenario with NCLB. NCLB notoriously linked students’ academic performance to high-stake standardized tests. Schools failing to meet the intricate, man-made, and rigid standards (AYP, Adequate Yearly Progress, benchmark as it was known) would face funding sanctions or penalties. I found those measures too counter-intuitive to comprehend. In order to help a child who had failed a test, why would the government take the necessary resources away with the hope to “incentivize” him or her to work harder?
I don’t deny the possibility that competition might boost academic performance. But wherever there are competitions, there will also be someone left behind. When a competition was initiated and subsequently materialized, who are going to care for the marginalized, the defeated, and the left behind? In the business world, nobody will. The winners flourish and the losers die out. Such is the potent mechanism of market economy. But wait a second. How about our kids? Are the mechanisms set by NCLB going to provide resources and create opportunities for the ones left-behind to catch up, or weed them out as the market economy punished the not-so-lucky businesses?
Circling back to the federal measures enforced to dismantle de jure segregation, a similar circumstance could be observed. Although the court decision on Brown v. Broad of Education provided legal framework in 1954 for public school desegregation, desegregation was not enforced on a massive bases till a decade later—not until the 1964 Civil Rights Act threatened to take away public school funding from segregated school districts. Against the backdrop of the passage of ESEA, which vastly increased federal funding for public schools, Southern schools found it increasingly difficult to defy the federal mandate. Rather than embracing desegregation measures wholeheartedly, however, some southern school districts, those whose boards were dominated by white supremacist, device ways to maintain status quo while evading the punishment. Take the Drew District in Sunflower County, Mississippi, for instance, the school board proposed a “freedom of choice” law. (Doesn’t this sound familiar? It reminded me of the ongoing choice movement that propelled the development of charter schools, vouchers, and cyber schools.) It allowed the parents to choose which schools to send their children. The lawmakers thought no black parents would dare to send their children to one of the traditionally white schools by choice, so the segregated school system could be upheld “voluntarily” and everyone would “be kept in place.”
Just as the white supremacist had calculated, the law discouraged black students from entering traditionally white schools except the sole instance when Mae Bertha Carter courageously enrolled her children into the traditionally white schools. While the maltreatment and psychological burden the children had to endure deserve the scrutinization of another blog post, meaningful desegregation was not carried out in Drew County until a decade later. The white supremacists’ manipulation of the law counted for the frustrating consequence, but it is safe to conclude that the federal policy (threatening to take away funding) failed to enforce changes it wanted to see effectively.
The percentage of black students attending public schools with white did rise in Drew County in the following decades. But what worth noticing is the re-segregation process came after the meaningful desegregation in the 1960s. “White flight” as it was characterized by locals occurred as private academies were established around the same era. White students began to enroll in private schools and black students gotten once again left behind, this time in “desegregated” public schools. It is such an irony that NCLB was proposed to hold public schools across the board accountable for students’ academic performance, while racial inequalities within public school system remained unaddressed. Schools once again were threatened to lose funding, but this time for failures among competitions against each other.
I don’t deny the possibility that competition might boost academic performance. But wherever there are competitions, there will also be someone left behind. When a competition was initiated and subsequently materialized, who are going to care for the marginalized, the defeated, and the left behind? In the business world, nobody will. The winners flourish and the losers die out. Such is the potent mechanism of market economy. But wait a second. How about our kids? Are the mechanisms set by NCLB going to provide resources and create opportunities for the ones left-behind to catch up, or weed them out as the market economy punished the not-so-lucky businesses?
Circling back to the federal measures enforced to dismantle de jure segregation, a similar circumstance could be observed. Although the court decision on Brown v. Broad of Education provided legal framework in 1954 for public school desegregation, desegregation was not enforced on a massive bases till a decade later—not until the 1964 Civil Rights Act threatened to take away public school funding from segregated school districts. Against the backdrop of the passage of ESEA, which vastly increased federal funding for public schools, Southern schools found it increasingly difficult to defy the federal mandate. Rather than embracing desegregation measures wholeheartedly, however, some southern school districts, those whose boards were dominated by white supremacist, device ways to maintain status quo while evading the punishment. Take the Drew District in Sunflower County, Mississippi, for instance, the school board proposed a “freedom of choice” law. (Doesn’t this sound familiar? It reminded me of the ongoing choice movement that propelled the development of charter schools, vouchers, and cyber schools.) It allowed the parents to choose which schools to send their children. The lawmakers thought no black parents would dare to send their children to one of the traditionally white schools by choice, so the segregated school system could be upheld “voluntarily” and everyone would “be kept in place.”
Just as the white supremacist had calculated, the law discouraged black students from entering traditionally white schools except the sole instance when Mae Bertha Carter courageously enrolled her children into the traditionally white schools. While the maltreatment and psychological burden the children had to endure deserve the scrutinization of another blog post, meaningful desegregation was not carried out in Drew County until a decade later. The white supremacists’ manipulation of the law counted for the frustrating consequence, but it is safe to conclude that the federal policy (threatening to take away funding) failed to enforce changes it wanted to see effectively.
The percentage of black students attending public schools with white did rise in Drew County in the following decades. But what worth noticing is the re-segregation process came after the meaningful desegregation in the 1960s. “White flight” as it was characterized by locals occurred as private academies were established around the same era. White students began to enroll in private schools and black students gotten once again left behind, this time in “desegregated” public schools. It is such an irony that NCLB was proposed to hold public schools across the board accountable for students’ academic performance, while racial inequalities within public school system remained unaddressed. Schools once again were threatened to lose funding, but this time for failures among competitions against each other.
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