Jeremy B. Landa
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"The American Dream…encourages each person who lives in the United States to pursue success, and it creates the framework within which everyone can do it. It holds each person responsible for achieving his or her dreams, while generating shared values and behaviors needed to persuade Americans that they have a real chance to achieve them. It holds out a vision of both individual success and the collective good of all."
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The American Dream itself is a rather uncomplicated vision of our past, present, and future. However, it quickly unravels when we apply this dream to education. Consider this: we claim, on one hand, to have the desire to create equity and equality of opportunity for each person and their education, regardless of the zip code they are born into. On the other hand, the racial composition and socioeconomic status of different zip codes is one of the biggest predictors of educational success and failure. This tension is reflected in the decision of the United States Supreme Court, which had two interesting rulings that tie directly to the American Dream and socioeconomic opportunity. One ruling established separate schools for different races an unequal arrangement; the other ruling maintained separated central and suburban cities educational systems by not allowing buses from different places to cross city lines. These types of rulings, contradictory in nature, have allowed the agenda of some to override the collective good of all.
Directly related to equity of opportunity for all is this surprising fact: American schools today are more segregated than they were in 1970.
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Adding intrigue to that statement, they are trending towards levels of segregation that we have not seen since soon after the pivotal decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS(1954) 60 years ago.
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It may distress you to know that our lowest performing schools are often hyper-segregated schools of impoverished youth of color and our highest performing schools are often hyper-segregated schools of middle or upper class white youth.
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Even if these points do not alarm you, they will shock most students who have been implicitly and sometimes explicitly taught that we live in a society that is color-blind. It will certainly surprise my students at Cooperative Arts and Humanities Magnet High School in New Haven, CT (Coop to people in the know). Our school has 624 young adults enter the doors each day, with a racial diversity that is approximately 50% Black, 20% White, 25% Latino, 2% Asian and socioeconomic diversity that is 58% Free and Reduced Lunch versus 42% paying full lunch fees. Our school-wide demographics run counter to the narrative of what a majority of students experience in United States public high schools. Segregated and hyper-segregated racial and socioeconomic schools are not just part of the past; they are a present and growing piece of the educational system.
Therefore, my unit will explore the tension that exists between school budgets being inequitable and schools themselves being segregated racially and socioeconomically. Does it matter if schools are inequitably funded if they are in fact segregated? What if they are equitably funded, but still racially segregated? If they are racially segregated, but equitably funded, does this not smack of pangs of Plessy v. Ferguson's doctrine of "separate but equal"? American cities are heavily segregated places, racially and socioeconomically, and have been so for the last half century. The questions posed previously will allow students to explore the relationship between the law, race, socioeconomics, and school success and failure. It will also ask them to assess the educational landscape from a budgetary and demographics standpoint and design education policies that are steeped in history, law, race, and socioeconomics.
