Jonathan Kozol has a new piece in the Nation in which he details what he calls Apartheid Education — the "hypersegregation" of inner-city schools. His definition of the problem:

"At the beginning of the twenty-first century," according to Gary Orfield and his colleagues at the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, "American public schools are now 12 years into the process of continuous resegregation. The desegregation of black students, which increased continuously from the 1950s to the late 1980s, has receded to levels not seen in three decades." The proportion of black students in majority-white schools stands at "a level lower than in any year since 1968." The four most segregated states for black students, according to a recent study by the Civil Rights Project, are New York, Michigan, Illinois and California. In New York, only one black student in seven goes to a predominantly white school.

The fashionable reflex nowadays is to declare that integration "failed" and to settle instead, in Orfield’s words, for better ways of "doing Plessy" in the urban schools as they now stand. Such declarations of futility ignore the reality that as many as 10 million black, white and Hispanic children have attended school together in interdistrict programs in which integrated schooling has become a fact of life for an entire generation of black children. In large numbers, the inner-city students in these programs have gone on to universities and colleges and become civic leaders in their own communities.

Kozol makes some really compelling arguments about why we should continue desegration efforts, and certainly, one of the strengths of Beacon — and one of the things I plan on being a strength of SLA — is the diversity of the student body, so I understand how powerful is argument is, but Kozol is talking about this issue on a much larger than a school-by-school basis.

And as usual, Kozol challenges us with his arguments, and I’m not sure of my own thoughts on this issue — how far should we go, what answers should we come to, or if the answers Kozol suggests are the right ones, but I do think we need to keep reading what he writes, keep questioning our own responses to it, and keep discussion of these ideas moving in hopes of moving forward in the answers we come to together.