The Dreamkeepers. Gloria Ladson-Billings
immersion school that was under consideration in her city.
“Correct me if I am wrong,” I said, “but don't 90 percent of the African American students in your city already attend all-black schools?”
“Well, yes, I guess that's right,” she responded. “So what you're really asking me is how I feel about single-sex schools?” I went on.
“No, that's not what I'm asking … I don't think,” she said, with some doubt. “But now that you've reminded me that the schools really are already segregated, I guess I need to rethink my question.”
The concern over African American immersion schools is not really about school segregation. Indeed, schools in large urban centers today are more segregated than ever before. Most African American children attend schools with other African American children. Further, as the whites and middle-income people of color (including African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans) fled the cities, they not only abandoned the schools to the poor children of color but also took with them the resources, by way of the diminishing tax base. In a better world I would want to see schools integrated across racial, cultural, linguistic, and all other lines. But I am too much of a pragmatist to ignore the sentiment and motivation underlying the African American immersion school movement. African Americans already have separate schools. The African American immersion school movement is about taking control of those separate schools.
I remember my first days in school. Despite the fact that there were close to thirty other five-year-olds vying for the attention of the one adult present, school seemed a lot like home. Everyone there was black. Several of my classmates were children I knew from my neighborhood. The teacher was an attractive, neatly dressed African American woman who told us how much fun we were each going to have and how much she expected us to learn. I thought school was a pretty neat place. It was safe and clean, with people who cared about you: again, a lot like home.
If one puts aside the obvious objections to separate schools that they are inequitable, undemocratic, regressive, and illegal and considers the possible merits, the current calls for separate schools may be understandable. First, most inner-city students already attend de facto segregated schools. At the time when a proposal was offered for the Milwaukee African American male schools, African American students in the Milwaukee public school system were already segregated in its inner-city schools. In fact, this proposal had been preceded by a call for the creation of a separate African American school district in Milwaukee.11
Second, the public schools have yet to demonstrate a sustained effort to provide quality education for African Americans. Despite modest gains in standardized test scores, the performance of African Americans in public schools, even those from relatively high-income stable families, remains behind that of whites from similar homes.
Third, some data suggest that African American children attending private and independent African American schools consistently perform at higher levels on standardized measures of achievement [than do those who attend public schools].12 Of course, one might argue that students who attend private schools are a select subset of the school population and usually have supportive and involved parents, are more motivated, and have other economic and social advantages. However, a closer examination of the African American children who attend private schools reveals that large numbers of them are successful in these schools after having been unsuccessful in public schools.13
Historically, African Americans have wrestled with the problems of a quality education and integrated schooling. For some, a quality education does not necessarily mean attending schools with whites. As far back as the post–Civil War era there were African American champions of separate schools. At the constitutional convention of North Carolina, one African American delegate said: “I do not believe that it is good for our children to eat and drink daily the sentiment that they are naturally inferior to the whites … . I shall always do all that I can to have colored teachers for colored schools. This will necessitate separate schools as a matter of course, wherever possible, not by written law, but by mutual consent and the law of interest.”14
However, not all African Americans believe that separate schools are the answer. In her study, Irvine found that many African Americans believe that resources and quality follow the white students.15 When they look at the physical facilities and the instructional materials and other resources of middle-class white schools and compare them with inner-city schools, African American parents cannot help but surmise that where white children are there is educational excellence. Irvine found that middle-income African American parents who voluntarily sent their children to suburban white schools for purposes of desegregation routinely commented that these schools were of higher quality because they had more computers. Similarly, W.E.B. Du Bois initially felt that separate African American schools had little to offer: “The well-equipped Jim Crow school is a rare exception. For the most part, such schools have been run on wretchedly inadequate resources, taught by ignorant teachers; housed in huts and dumps; and given just as little attention and supervision as the authorities dared give them.”16
But after witnessing the persistent mistreatment of African American students in desegregated Northern schools, Du Bois turned his efforts toward making the separate African American schools quality schools that offered equal education, not integrated education.
Certainly at the college level Fleming has demonstrated that African American students attending historically black colleges and universities (HBUCs) have significantly higher graduation rates than those attending predominately white institutions.17 Further, the graduates' ability to function successfully both in the workplace and at predominately white graduate and professional schools is not compromised by their having attended African American undergraduate schools.
Indeed, some argue that school integration has come at considerable cost to African American students. Researchers investigating the performance of African American students in desegregated schools indicate that they fare no better than those attending segregated schools.18 Lomotey and Staley suggest that school desegregation plans are deemed successful when white parents are satisfied, despite low academic performance and high suspension and dropout rates for African Americans.19 The figures for African American males, in particular, are quite disturbing because of their overrepresentation in the suspension and dropout rates.
This assessment—that success of desegregation is determined by the white community's level of satisfaction—is consistent with a fictionalized account (based on actual reports of school desegregation) in law professor Derrick Bell's And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice.20 In his discussion of the impact of school desegregation laws, Bell argues that the real beneficiaries of school desegregation are the schools, the white communities, and the white students. Desegregation often brings big dollars to a school district, which go toward instituting new programs, creating new jobs, providing transportation, and supporting staff development. Each of these means more personnel and better salaries. When white students are bused to African American schools, “desegregation money” is used to transform them into “magnet” schools—schools that attract students from throughout the district because they offer exemplary programs in mathematics, science, technology, the performing arts, and so on. Unfortunately, these magnet schools sometimes operate under a two-tiered system, virtually resegregating students within the so-called desegregated schools. Thus the white students who come