Integration Hurts Black kids

Let's be truthful, if the American majority wanted integrated  schools, we would already have them. 

Instead, many white families select schools in ways that create social  distance between their children and other races. This leaves people of color who love our children to wonder how long we can chase them and continue to further the insulting delusion that Black student achievement can only be had in proximity to whiteness. 

Personally, I had the experience, in the 1950's of attending all Black elementary schools where there were no white teachers nor principals and acquired an outstanding elementary school education which allowed me to enroll in one of the two best high schools in the city. I simply made the mistake of leaving that school, enrolling in another high school, and afterwards dropping out during my junior year and not finishing high school until after being discharged from the military. 

No Evidence for Integration
Most black parents are realists. There is no evidence that perfect integration will occur soon, but our kids need an education today. With this in mind, it is unnerving to see integration fundamentalists criticizing policies aimed at educating our kids where they are. To them, reforms that assist marginalized communities are a consolation prize for our failure to achieve an idealized picture of Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream community. To us, they're an imperfect but ultimately useful pathway helping us to navigate our kids through  a racist society.

What if the supposed beneficiaries of public school integration aren't actually pining for it? There is a long  line of Black intellectual thought that questions the primacy of integration as an educational goal and as a  means of cultural health for Black children.

Thoughts of Great Black Leaders on Education
W.E.B. Dubois said: "The Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is  Education. What he must remember is that there is no magic, either in mixed schools or in segregated  schools. A mixed school with poor and unsympathetic teachers, with hostile public opinion, and no teaching of truth concerning Black folk, is bad."

King himself expressed reservations about integration, too. Black educators from his church recall him  saying of white schools and white teachers: "People with such a low view of the Black race cannot be given free rein and put in charge of the intellectual care and development of our boys and girls."  Kenneth Clark, the famed psychologist whose scientific evidence about the deleterious effects of  discrimination bolstered Brown v. Board of Education, expressed disappointment with its aftermath.

Years later he conceded that civil rights leaders may have underestimated institutional racism, writing a paper for the Harvard Educational Review that called for "realistic, aggressive, and viable competitors" for the  traditional public schools. His vision is not significantly different from today's school reform efforts. Research continues to tell us Black children mostly attend public schools where they are more likely to be suspended than white students and are less likely to be placed in gifted classes even when they qualify.

Black Schools Get the Worst Teachers

Traditional school districts crowd the least effective, least prepared and lowest-paid teachers in schools with the most low-income Black children and just as King feared, those teachers hold low opinions of their students' potential. Taken together, you can see why Black parents are the fastest-growing demographic of  home-schoolers, and when culturally affirming charter schools open up, waiting lists quickly develop.

Given all the evidence, the safest things Black parents is to support new schools that get results. The  fundamentalists can work on persuading the American majority to close the gap between what they say about integration and what they do when it's time to enroll their children in schools.

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