Ground Hog Day and Penalties for Integration

Groundhog day, and his shadow is in full view!

Sunny and warm today, and I’ve just finished my last two days at Ridge Street School in Newark, kids I especially enjoy– mostly Latino kids, with an easy expression of affection toward adults (maybe cultural?) that reminds me of when I worked in New York at the very beginning of my career as a writer-in-the-schools.

How much is oddly the same– and how much different.

I wonder if those New York schools P.S. 75 and P.S. 84 are as well integrated as they used to be?
New Jersey School “report cards” came out today, and of course there are the usual statistical penalties for being an integrated school– Columbia High School has an 18% poverty rate, as opposed to 1% or 0% in good old Livingston and Millburn/Short Hills. Of course, in our neighbors to the east, the poverty rate is over half and rising: East Orange, Irvington, Newark, including the test-in Newark schools, which have skimmed the best students and do very well. The only places in Essex County with poverty rates (and racial mix) comparable to CHS are, of course, Montclair and West Orange.

South Orange and Maplewood also have, of course, lots of affluent people of color, but poverty still correlates generally with race. This makes for complexities and difficulties– assumptions by white people that if you’re of color you must be poor, which is a bad assumption – also needs for services which are harder to get if you’re a middle income school district. Financing schools through property taxes is essentially a regressive tax system, causing tax burdens that favor segregation– Abbott districts get state funding that middle class districts don’t get, and the lily-white suburbs in Western NJ have low taxes (lots of corporate headquarters, malls). People are thus systematically encouraged to move west, encouraging further segregation, because people of color who can afford the move, prefer not to go out there and feel isolated.

More to this story, of course.