Here’s the GOP’s Formula for Resegregating American Schools
The following essay is adapted from the upcoming book Black Truth Be Told: A Case Against the Racist GOP. Written by Josh Johnson, the book will be available August 14th on Amazon and BarnesandNoble.com.
Segregation is a grand chess match, and white supremacy is the defending champion. Wishing only to occupy the same space, black challengers advance across the board. But their every move is countered by a patient and well-practiced opponent. As the seeds planted by Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson came to fruition, many federal judges ordered the desegregation of school districts across the nation. And for one generation, integrated schools flourished ever so briefly under court supervision.
However, white supremacy had already made its countermove before a single desegregation order was issued. As Civil Rights legislation and the Voting Rights Act unfolded, society’s puppeteers accepted that a brief period of integration would be tolerated, much like forfeiting a pawn. Nonetheless, quick action was taken behind the scenes. The Blaxploitation film genre and Nixon’s pseudo-war on drugs have already been discussed. It is also common knowledge that Nixon’s presidential campaign fanned the flame of racial discord into a roaring fire.
But the greatest legacy of Nixon’s regime is lesser-known. Between 1969 and 1972, Nixon successfully nominated four Justices to the Supreme Court, three of whom were conservative. Thus, nearly half the seats in the nation’s highest court were replaced in a three-year period by one of America’s most racist presidents. And during this single generation of tolerated integration, the vastly conservative Supreme Court would issue a series of rulings that paved the way for school districts to evade court supervision.
While precedent unfolded, white parents fled from integrated districts in droves, taking with them precious tax dollars and investor appeal. Starved of economic development and passed over by corporate expansion, their economies became anemic. This clever chess move would play out for nearly two decades. Like strongholds under siege are starved of food and water, these districts were deprived of vital resources until their leaders were ready negotiate terms of surrender.
As noted by Nicole Hannah-Jones in The Atlantic, “Behind closed doors, [black leaders] argued that if they did not create some schools where white students made up the majority, they’d lose the white parents still remaining.” However, the desegregation orders still in effect prevented any actions that would separate the races. By design, just as the siege reached the tipping point, the Supreme Court had established enough legal precedent for federal judges to lift the orders and liberate school districts from court supervision. Also according to Hannah-Jones:
The Court ruled that desegregation orders were never meant to be permanent, but were rather a temporary measure to remedy past discrimination, and that school decisions should return to local control once a district had shown a good faith effort to eliminate segregation.
At local levels across the nation, black and white officials worked out quid pro quo arrangements which gerrymanded attendance zones between black and white neighborhoods. In exchange, predominantly black schools would receive much-needed funding and resources. In theory, the return of white households would bring tax dollars and jobs back to anemic districts — and blacks would receive their fair share of both.
Unfortunately, making quid pro quo arrangements with tyrants is like making deals with the devil. The best intentions of blacks often turn into their worst nightmares. In this regard, thousands of well-meaning (yet naïve) black leaders failed to read the writing on the wall, which emphatically spelled the No Child Left Behind Act. And hidden within the fine print of this misleading legislation was a system not of incentives, but of rewards and penalties in a rigged competition.
The No Child Left Behind Act was a cover for the systematic defunding and dismantling of integrated schools. Like the Trojan Horse of legend, the legislation was presented to Black America as a gift. Yet hidden within its verbose provisions was a scheme not for improving schools, but for segregating them. White supremacy pretended to sail away into the sunset only to return in the dark of night. And when black leaders opened the gates of their citadels, integrated schools were pillaged from within.
Thus, the GOP followed the sage advice of President Harry Truman: “If you can’t convince them, confuse them.” To sell the illusion, society’s puppeteers even paid off black influencers with taxpayer dollars. As reported by Greg Toppo of USA Today, the Department of Education paid one black political pundit nearly a quarter-million dollars to peddle its propaganda on his television show and to “urge other black journalists to do the same.” Like making a deal with the devil, the obscured details of the No Child Left Behind Act were not made clear until after Black America had signed on the dotted line. As illuminated by Andrew J. Rotherham of The New York Times, the architects of the legislation were:
Slow to work with states and school districts and explain what the new education law requires, causing confusion among all parties…And when it finally did get regulations and information out, some were overly restrictive.
From a macro perspective, “the number of high-poverty schools serving primarily black and Hispanic students nationwide has doubled” since the passage of this poisonous legislation, according to The Washington Post. The widespread effects are also obvious from a micro perspective. In New York, for example, black and Latino students accounted for nearly 70 percent of the overall student body — yet they comprised only 11 percent of students enrolled at elite public schools, as reported in 2012 by Noliwe M. Rooks of Time Magazine. Thus, No Child Left Behind is perhaps the greatest step backward in the history of public education.
Schools are a reflection of the communities in which they serve. As such, poor schools are likely to achieve poorer outcomes, and vice versa. Pertaining to standardized testing, well-heeled white students are far better prepared than impoverished black students. Just a few advantages include college-educated parents, studious home environments, private tutoring, and better resources. As noted by Gary Carmell, “It’s clear that the more educated parents are, the more their children are as well.” Said another way by Anna J. Egalite of Education Next:
Parents who are struggling economically simply don’t have the time or the wherewithal to check homework, drive children to summer camp, organize museum trips, or help their kids plan for college. Working multiple jobs or inconvenient shifts makes it hard to dedicate time for family dinners, enforce a consistent bedtime, read to infants and toddlers, or invest in music lessons or sports clubs.
As if these disparities weren’t enough, No Child Left Behind rigged the system even more with its standardized testing scheme. Not only have testmakers seized control of the curriculum, but these corporations siphon precious taxpayer dollars out of inner-city classrooms. This leaves poor schools even more vulnerable to planned obsolescence. According to Meredith Broussard of The Atlantic, standardized tests are “inextricably tied to a specific set of textbooks,” which are priced beyond the means of poor districts. She goes on to say:
All of this has to do with the economics of testing. Across the nation, standardized tests come from one of three companies: CTB McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, or Pearson. These corporations write the tests, grade the tests, and publish the books that students use to prepare for the tests.
A perennial gap has been forged between the budgets and curricula of inner-city schools. By revamping the tests and textbooks annually — making new purchases necessary every year — the finish line is continually moved beyond the reach of black students, who are left with obsolete textbooks. Countless taxpayer dollars are paid to the Big Three publishers for the writing and grading of tests. With no money left for the corresponding textbooks, black students are grossly underprepared. Then poor outcomes are used as justification for slashing education budgets. Meanwhile, the contracts with the Big Three are last to go, which leaves even less money for textbooks the following year.
This cycle of testing sabotage works in cahoots with the Choice Program, which allows white students to transfer out of underperforming black schools. Even before No Child Left Behind, the average black student scored below 75 percent of white students on standardized tests. Rather than closing the test score gap between students of different races, society’s puppeteers exacerbated and exploited it. They devised a system by which white and black students were moved between schools like pieces on a chess board.
Hidden within the legislation’s verbose provisions was a six-year process not for improving schools, but for segregating them. As stated above, the average black student scored below 75 percent of white students on standardized tests. This correlation leads to an alarming yet accurate principle. Whenever a school loses white students while gaining black students, test scores will decrease. Of course, the inverse is also true. Whenever a school gains white students while losing black students, test scores will increase.
This principle would be exploited not only to disrupt integrated schools, but to privatize America’s education system. To receive federal funding, every public school was forced to administer standardized tests. And to remain in good standing, they had to achieve adequate yearly progress (AYP) on these statewide exams. However, as inner-city schools repeatedly failed to meet AYP — due to a realignment of white and black students — these desperately underfunded schools were pushed further and further down the rabbit hole. A school’s first step onto the slippery slope of resegregation was failing to meet AYP for the first year.
When the mark was missed for a second consecutive year, select students were given the choice of transferring to better schools within the district. Due to grassroots racism, this provision played out as “white students were given the choice of transferring to whiter schools.” Across the nation, a floodgate was opened through which white students fled en masse from integrated schools.
As planned, this chess move coincided with the buyout of hip-hop through the late 1990s and early 2000s — during which songs and music videos about hustling and gangbanging repelled white parents. For instance, the hit song Back That Azz Up peaked at number 19 on the Billboard Hot 100. And on MTV’s Total Request Live (TRL) — which had a cult following of hormone-crazed, impressionable teens — the so-called censored version ranked among the top 10 most requested music videos of January 2000. In the video, rowdy crowds of black men, women, and even young children cheered on rappers as they spewed profanity while women twerked to the beat. The following excerpt is taken from the chorus:
Girl, you looks good, won’t you back that azz up / You’se a fine motherfucker, won’t you back that azz up / Call me Big Daddy when you back that azz up / Hoe, who is you playin with? Back that azz up
Moreover, the racy video was laced with subtle cues toward resegregation. In nearly half of the scenes, crowds were positioned along fences with their arms draped over the bar or their hands gripping the chain links — subconsciously signaling white parents to keep blacks on their side of society. These subliminal messages were sent during the Teen Pop era when boy bands and Disney crossovers ruled the ratings. In the ensuing years, a wave of equally vulgar videos — through TRL, YouTube, and other channels — were a powerful call to arms for white America, setting the stage for the academic migration of white students from predominantly black districts.
As legion upon legion of white children were transferred out via the Choice Program, the test scores of inner-city schools declined dramatically, signaling the end of integrated education. In addition, administrators were required to develop a two year improvement plan. However, without the in-house resources or the money to hire outside consultants, these plans were often lacking in quality and substance — which was touted as a sign of incompetence rather than inequality. What’s more, black educators had to explain how they would achieve better outcomes with fewer resources.
Falling short for three consecutive years forced already underfunded schools to offer free tutoring and other supplemental programs. But when their anemic budgets couldn’t satisfy this requirement, public-sector inefficiency was blamed as the culprit — instead systemic inequality. Of course, privatization was proposed as the perfect solution to this orchestrated problem.
After failing to achieve adequate yearly progress for a fourth consecutive year, inner-city schools were subjected to wholesale replacement of staff and/or the introduction of new curriculum, as stated by J.B. Bragg, author of No Child Left Behind, Really?. Of course, the new curriculum would emphasize rote learning to improve test outcomes rather than real learning to improve life outcomes.
Falling short in the fifth and sixth consecutive years was the killing stroke. Then society’s puppeteers could close inner-city schools, convert them to charter schools, or hire private companies to run them. The latter two options not only loosened the regulations and safeguards that protect black children, but they were hailed as the saviors of public education. An additional option was handing control over to state bureaucracies. Bragg goes on to state that as test scores continued to drop:
Schools face[d] decreased funding and other punishments that contribute to increased accountability. According to supporters, these goals help teachers and schools realize the significance and importance of the educational system and how it affects the nation.
Rather than receiving more funding to turn around underperformance, inner-city schools were further deprived to prevent any hope of a turnaround. In defense of the Choice Program and yet another budget cut, President Trump’s Secretary of Education recently said, “Too many of our children are still unprepared, despite billions of dollars injected into the system with the goal of improving outcomes.” By speaking in such general terms, she avoids to topic of how the money is allocated, and to whom. She also fails to disclose what percentage of the budget ends up in corporate coffers rather than classrooms, to paraphrase Strauss.
The President is using biased data as justification for taking much-needed funds away from inner-city schools and giving it to well-heeled suburban schools and the corporations that run them. Furthermore, his policies and rollbacks are removing the safeguards that protect students from for-profit management companies — who measure success with income statements instead of report cards.
In Trump’s agenda, defunding black schools is just as important as lining corporate coffers. Well-educated, socially-conscious blacks are a threat to white America, a threat that must be neutralized at all costs. When black minds are freed from false consciousness, they begin to question the order of things and form their own answers. They begin to deliberately choose their own ideology rather than blindly accepting the dominant ideology. They begin to work together against oppression rather than fighting among themselves. There is a word for this awakening of the black mind: WOKE. When too many blacks “get WOKE,” the balance of power shifts away from the privileged few and toward the unprivileged many.
Across the country, countless black children attend separate and unequal schools with inadequate funding, overcrowded classrooms, and hand-me-down textbooks. In fact, according to a report by Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute, public schools are more segregated today than they were 40 years ago. Furthermore, he poses the following question: “How did test scores become the civil rights issue of our time?” The answer, of course, is another series of bigoted yet brilliant chess moves by white supremacy.
Even in somewhat integrated schools, college-bound white children are enrolled in honors courses, whereas blacks are pressured into vocational courses in preparation for trades rather than white-collar careers. Then when senior year approaches, black students are advised to apply at vocational schools and bottom-tier colleges better suited to their level of preparation. No longer under court supervision, school districts have done away with good faith efforts to integrate classrooms. As also stated by Strauss, “Most education policymakers and reformers have abandoned integration as a cause.”
At present, America is a massive time machine on its way back to the 1960s. The famous photo of a young Bernie Sanders, resisting arrest at a Chicago-based protest, accompanies a Trump-like story. Rather than complying with desegregation orders, the mayor of Chicago erected dozens of rickety trailers throughout the city, which would serve as classrooms for black children. Later named Willis wagons, after Chicago’s superintendent of schools, these thin-walked structures were scolding in the summer and freezing in the winter.
Jagged edges protruded from the from the floors and walls, threatening the physical safety of their fragile limbs. In addition to tattered books and meager supplies, black children were forced to share desks and even chairs. All the while, surplus furniture, books, and supplies were piled high in the empty classrooms of white schools. Sanders, who used his body to block a bulldozer at one the Willis Wagon sites, was photographed while resisting arrest, according to Dahleen Glanton of The Chicago Tribune.
History is clearly repeating itself under Trump’s racist regime. The President’s agenda involves turning the nation into 1960s Chicago, and inner-city schools into Willis wagons. And once again, Sanders is checking his white privilege and leading the resistance against racism, sexism, classicism, and every other “ism” that Trump stands for.
While the resegregation of American schools should be resisted, the current conditions may be a blessing in disguise (at the moment, anyway). In years past, white lies have been the only narrative permitted in the classroom. But in our isolation, we have an opportunity to teach black truth to black children. The inner-city school may be a broken-down house, but it’s our house. And as the saying goes, our house means our rules.
For centuries, black children have been bound to Eurocentric textbooks and curricula like a mental ball and chain. Now is our chance to break that chain with an Afrocentric curriculum designed to educate and edify a generation of WOKE children. We are already protesting in the streets and in the stores. Very soon, we will protest in the schools. We will not wait for their permission, nor will we act alone. From coast to coast, black schools will teach black children with black books. In fact, I have one of many Afrocentric textbooks in the works. So stay tuned. As always, the future of the free world is literally in your hands. Care, share, and vote!
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