I didn’t quite understand why the School District of Philadelphia has finally decided to settle the forty year old desegregation case. Then I saw this piece:

The agreement pledges the district will provide additional resources, better teachers and improved building maintenance to remedy years of neglect in the city’s lowest-performing schools.

Those schools are also what the court termed “racially isolated” schools, or schools at least 90 percent African-American and Latino, officials said.

Okay, no surprise here in the racially isolated schools: that number has probably been between 60 and 70% since the mid-1960s. And if you add in all the schools in the Northeast that are racially isolated as well, it’s an even higher number.

What I think Ackerman is trying to do is use this decision alongside Act 46 to break the union in the low-performing schools. She wants to get the right to disregard work rules (something the SRC seems in favor of) and this court decision and the 2001 legislation will provide partial political cover to do so…

That’s cynical. Wow.

I’ve been tracking former principals and administrators in the School District of Philadelphia, individuals who worked impossibly hard to carve out opportunities for children in the 1940s and 1950s. But it’s striking and sad how little is left of their work: google reveals little more than the school named for them. Even more tragic is the way their names emerge in articles about how messed up urban schools are, the same schools they worked to re-shape so very long ago.

Jonathan Kozol (among others) makes this point about MLK or Thurgood Marshall: look for the school named for them and it will invariably be in a tough neighborhood. But what about folks like principal/district superintendent Dr. Tanner Duckrey? A school may have been named for him but his steadfast work to carve out equal educational opportunity remains solely the domain of historians…

I do not see how you can ever point your fingers at a southern senator or a southern school district and tell them that they are discriminating against black children when you are unwilling to desegregated schools in your own cities. Let me say to my distinguished northern colleagues that the reason you are unwilling to do it is fear of political reprisal. The question is whether northern senators have the guts to face their liberal white constituents who have fled to the suburbs for the sole purpose of having their sons and daughters not go to school with blacks.

Abraham Ribicoff to Jacob Javits, 20 April 1971

Quote from
Clotfelter, Charles T. After Brown : The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 44.