The Seattle Times is into the third day of its series on the "resegregation" of the Seattle Public Schools. (See Sunday's, yesterday's, and today's articles.) The first quote in the first article makes the paper's angle clear:
"We like to think of ourselves as these enlightened, liberal folks," says School Board member Harium Martin-Morris. "But the fact is our schools aren't the way that people really think they are."
So what's the way Seattle's schools are? They are, by and large, racially imbalanced, with percentages of minority children that tend to be much higher or much lower than the district average. As goes Seattle, so go most of our schools--because people still tend to live in racially imbalanced communities. (Though Monday's story illustrates that housing patterns don't explain everything.) The Times obviously wants its readers to be outraged about this. Thus the use of the highly charged (and highly inaccurate) word, "resegregation."
But guess what? Many people in Seattle--particularly those running its schools--don't appear outraged. According to the paper, they are "resigned."
Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson hopes Seattle residents see the value of living and going to school with people from a wide mix of backgrounds. But she says she can't change where people live. And as much as she values racial diversity, she values high-quality schools more.A quality education, she says, "trumps diversity."
School Board Chairwoman Cheryl Chow puts it more bluntly: "It's not my job to desegregate the city," she said. "We serve the kids that come to our doors."
And what about school board member Martin-Morris, whose quote kicked off the series?
"This is probably heresy and I'll probably get in trouble for this," says School Board member Harium Martin-Morris. As long as a school's academic program is strong, he says, "I'm not so much worried about the ethnic makeup of a building."
That's right: "enlightened, liberal" Seattle is coming to see that a quality education "trumps diversity." This is good news. No, this is great news. This might be a turning point. After arguing about race for forty years, many of which saw an expansion of the achievement gap between white and black students, even the left-left coast is agreeing that student performance is more important than the racial make-up of a classroom.
While we'd all feel better if our schools reflected the racial diversity of our nation, minority students would surely feel better if they actually got a good education that prepared them for college and the world of work. That view appears to have gone mainstream--like a Mint Mocha Chip Frappuccino from Starbucks. Hooray!
