Black parents face tough balancing act in choosing schools
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Despite decades of desegregation efforts, Black parents in the U.S. still face challenges in choosing where to send their kids. They often find their choices lack racial diversity or funding.
Why it matters: Schools with students and teachers from diverse backgrounds best prepare students for the diverse world, experts said, but schools have become increasingly more segregated since the '90s.
- Black parents frequently have few or no racially diverse schools to choose from, said Halley Potter, director of PK-12 education policy at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. And yet, "we see stronger outcomes for students when they're in racially and socioeconomically diverse schools," she said.
- Gaps in achievement, or academic performance, between Black and white students grows fastest in more segregated school districts, per a 2022 report from global education organization ASCD.
State of play: Predominantly white and wealthy schools concentrate privilege and resources, Potter said. But schools with majorities of Black and Latino students tend to have fewer resources, more teacher shortages and fewer Advanced Placement class options.
- Public school choice programs give Black parents the opportunity to send their kids to non-neighborhood schools, but that often puts the impetus on those families to travel further to access diverse schools without offering transportation, she said.
- The GOP has championed school choice, but via private school vouchers that opponents say deepen inequality.
Parents of Black students ranked academic performance, student body characteristics and the quality of teachers and staff as "very important" qualities when picking a school at higher rates than parents overall, per a 2024 National Center for Education Statistics report.
- Black parents have also expressed worry in polls about their children being welcomed in diverse environments, especially when moving into schools that were previously predominantly white, per Potter.
- Katherine Schaeffer, a research analyst at Pew Research Center, said: "It doesn't really seem to matter how diverse the individual state is; the schools once you look down at the district and classroom level are often fairly homogenous."
Zoom in: Shere Walker-Ravenell, a parent and director of the nonprofit Black Parents United Foundation, grew up in the South but is raising her kids in Colorado. When she moved away from Mississippi with a 9-month-old daughter 14 years ago, she realized she'd have to make a concerted effort to find diverse classrooms and Black teachers.
- Walker-Ravenell immersed herself in her daughter's elementary school classrooms to deal with the culture shock. She got to know her teachers, attended school events and maintained an open line of communication with the school employees, all of whom had an open door policy.
- "My biggest concern was not just the academics, but how is my child going to connect with teachers that doesn't understand the culture and where my child comes from," she said.
Context: Black and Latino families are fighting school inequality by filing lawsuits, challenging rigid school boundaries and pushing for more resources to poor districts, as previously reported by Axios' senior race and justice reporter Russell Contreras.
- Parents locked into strict school boundaries and forced to send their children to subpar schools have also developed clandestine networks to circumvent what they view as "unfair" local laws to get them into better ones.
The bottom line: "Our country is a diverse country, and we do better when we are exposed to that diversity in order to prepare ourselves for real life," said David Adams, chief executive officer of the Urban Assembly, runs career-centered public schools in New York City.
- "To the extent that we are isolating poverty, to the extent that racial and residential segregation create school segregation is the extent that we're not preparing students to be successful," he said.
For his 11- and 12-year-old kids, Adams prioritizes meaningful, rigorous schoolwork and extracurricular opportunities that "develop a sense of who they are in the world," he said.
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