The Problem We All Live With
I’m ashamed to admit it, but my first thought upon reading his essay was, This is embarrassing. I wouldn’t have turned this in for my 9th grade English class, much less my college application essay. Poorly formulated sentences. Grammatical errors. For the piece of writing that is probably the most determinant of future income, it seemed unbelievable to see this quality from my classmate and peer.
My second thought was only slightly more redeeming. This is so unfair. Here I am. With the privilege of attending the best private school in Michigan with top-notch English education. With a college professor for a mother who happens to be a walking encyclopedia and serves part-time as my personal editor. And I’m being graded on the same curve as him? How is this even remotely fair?
The thought that (thankfully) never crossed my mind: will he be bad for my education? Does the presence of people without the same educational pedigree negatively impact the education I’m getting? To me, the answer was obvious. Of course not. He had no effect on my classroom education, as I still went to the same classes, studied the same material, and accumulated the same knowledge and skills.
Actually, that is not quite right, as my university education was not limited to the classroom. And outside the classroom was a totally different story. His impact on my character education couldn’t have been greater. I learned from him what it meant to stand up to peer pressure. I had lived my life with a deep fear of not fitting in. I loved learning, but I tried my best to hide it. I didn’t want anyone to know I studied or even wanted to study. I pretended to not care because I thought that’s what others respected. I learned from him that being cool wasn’t a checklist of things you had to do; it was an aura of how you did them. He wasn’t afraid to say no to a party, to prepare for a test on a drive with friends, to write a paper with the bustle of video games around him. He was comfortable in his own skin, and that made him fit in with anyone that you want to fit in with.
I learned from him what it meant to pursue a goal. When he struggled with learning Japanese while coping with the academic demands of an elite university, he didn’t quit. He found resources within the university to support him, he put in the applications to fund trips to Japan, and, most importantly, he put in the work. He didn’t let his early grades define or discourage him – he knew his goals were larger than any individual test or grade.
I could go on, but it’s probably easiest to just say – he is the person I learned the most from in college. Not from what he said, but from what he did and how he did it.
Thanks to a friend, I was re-listening to this podcast about “The Problem We All Live With.” It’s a really fantastic listen and captures the moment we’re in now. The main idea the podcast grapples with: the data shows that integration worked in education, yet we are mostly uncomfortable pursuing it.
Let’s start with the data:
“Actually, what the statistics show is that between 1971, which is where the nation really started doing massive desegregation, and 1988, which was the peak of integration in the United States…the data shows that at the start of real desegregation, the achievement gap between black and white students was about 40 points…In other words, on standardized reading tests in 1971, black 13 year olds tested 39 points worse than white kids. That dropped to just 18 points by 1988 at the height of desegregation. The improvement in math scores was close to that, though not quite as good. And these scores are not just the scores of the specific kids who got bused into white schools. That is the overall score for the entire country. That's all black children in America. Halved in just 17 years.”
Yet since 1988, we’ve gone back to a de facto segregated system through our housing policies and education funding and the achievement gap has moved backwards.
The issue:
When you listen to the podcast, you hear the fear of parents at a school district that unintentionally was forced to integrate in 2012. Their fear of the violence these ‘low-performing’ kids will bring. The bad habits. The effects it will have on their kids’ education.
It’s natural. If ‘high-performing’ kids are mixed in a classroom with ‘low-performing’ kids, of course they’ll meet somewhere in the middle, right? ‘Low-performing’ kids will improve, but that will come at the expense of ‘high-performing’ kids, right? In some ways, the system has to be somewhat of a zero-sum game, right?
That’s not what the data shows.
“Often, the argument against integration efforts is that white students will get a worse education as a result. Most research finds that’s not the case.
For instance, Johnson’s paper found that integration had no effect on white students’ high school graduation rate or adult earnings. Lifting school desegregation orders also didn’t increase the dropout rate of white students, according to separate research.
The Texas study found that attending a school with a higher share of black students didn’t affect the test scores of white students. And a study of a Metco — an integration program that sends Boston students to school in more affluent suburbs — found that it did not affect the achievement of white students in receiving districts.”[1]
No matter what the data shows, it’s hard to overcome that intuitive feeling. That feeling that you want your child to be around others ‘like them’. Positive influences, not negative ones. That feeling drove white people out of integrated districts and created de-facto segregation. That feeling is what we have to overcome if we are to truly reform our system.
What are these feelings overlooking? What’s the reason integration works?
“I think it's important to point out that it is not that something magical happens when black kids sit in a classroom next to white kids. It's not that suddenly a switch turns on and they get intelligence or wanting the desire to learn when they're with white kids. What integration does is it gets black kids in the same facilities as white kids, and therefore it gets them access to the same things that those kids get-- quality teachers and quality instruction.”
The truth is that our analogies fail us. When we think of integration, we think of bringing people together. And naturally, they are going to meet somewhere in the middle, maybe even halfway. But that’s the wrong frame of reference. When we think of integration, we ought to think of people offering a hand to others. When I offer a hand to someone who has fallen down, it’s not likely that I end up on the ground next to them. They have no desire to have me on the floor. They just want to be standing, too. We both have the same goal. What poor person wants you to be poor? What uneducated person wants you to be uneducated? All they want is to come up to your level, not to drag you down. This isn’t a zero-sum game.
In fact, if anything, my experience shows the value of diverse perspectives. How different life experiences teaches skills that can’t be measured on a test.
Where is my friend now? He’s a respected doctor that is a leader in his field. He’s also an amazing writer who has been published in leading scientific journals and many major news and media outlets.
So, as we evaluate options to tackle systemic racism, I hope we remember: his opportunities didn’t come at my expense. His opportunities came at my benefit.
[1] https://www.chalkbeat.org/2019/7/1/21121022/did-busing-for-school-desegregation-succeed-here-s-what-research-says