Many well-to-do white families in the Fan District of Richmond send their children to the neighborhood elementary school, William Fox Elementary. By many peoples’ standards, the student body would be considered “diverse.” The student body is 64% white, 18% black, eight percent Hispanic, and ten percent Asian, multiracial and other, according to SchoolDigger.com. Roughly a quarter of the students are considered economically disadvantaged.
But that’s not diverse enough for Superintendent Jason Kamras, who has thrown his support behind a school rezoning proposal that would combine the student bodies of white-majority Fox and Mary Munford elementary schools with black-majority George W. Carver Elementary and/or John B. Cary Elementary, depending on which of three options is selected.
“It’s a creative way to increase diversity and bring communities together,” Kamras told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “It’s not perfect and there are significant implementation issues to be worked out, but I continue to believe it’s worth pursuing, as it will provide academic and social benefits to all children of all backgrounds.”
Some Fox and Munford parents have expressed concern about the proposed merger. According to The Virginia Mercury, some noted that they would no longer be able to walk their children to school; others worried that local property values might drop. Some insinuated that they would consider removing their children from Richmond public schools. On the other hand, many parents have publicly expressed their support for the change.
Kamras has no patience with the objections. In a tweet, he said, “The loudest feedback sounds eerily like Massive Resistance 2.0.” He told the Virginia Mercury: “A lot of folks are good with diversity in principle, or maybe they’re good with a little diversity. But in reality, when it hits a certain threshold, things suddenly change.”
That raises an interesting question: How diverse is diverse enough?
Kamras appears to be dissatisfied with an arrangement in which children attend schools in their neighborhood, an arrangement that has the obvious advantages of enabling students to walk to school and encouraging parental involvement. Instead, he’d prefer to spread the white children around, presumably to get a better mix. It is unclear from either the RTD article or the Virginia Mercury article what the ideal mix might be. Kamras’ comments to the Virginia Mercury reflect mainly a desire to achieve a more integrated school system as a goal in itself.
“Since our schools reflect [segregated] housing patterns, we remain a very, very segregated school system. I’m committed to doing whatever we can to reverse that,” Kamras said of Richmond.
Kamras said Fox and Cary’s geographic proximity presented an opportunity to address the [school integration] issue without too much disruption. “That is a part of the city where we actually have diversity in close proximity,” he said. “If you were to think a little bit more broadly about those school zones, you could end up with two schools that are roughly 50-50.”
The Virginia Mercury quotes Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, a Virginia Commonwealth University professor and an author of a 2013 UCLA Civil Rights report, as saying that more integrated schools can improve graduation and dropout rates and help students become more comfortable with different types of people. Desegregated schools often retain more experienced teachers and can get more students into college and then into well-paying jobs, she wrote.
Kamras agreed, noting diverse schools often have higher SAT scores and student satisfaction. “There’s a whole host of benefits to integrated, diverse schools,” he said. “On top of that, this is a city which has a diverse population, so it is a shame to not have schools that reflect that.”
Spreading around the white students also means spreading around the resources that the parents of white students bring to bear. The RTD article provides this quote from a parent:
“You should be able to walk into any school in RPS no matter the location or demographics and find the same resources, parent involvement, active PTA, after-school activities, academic performance and so on,” said Jenny Aghomo, a parent in the city and one of the leaders of the parent group supporting the idea. “As parents, this should be important to us for the sake of our children’s future.”
Bacon’s bottom line:
Everyone wants to provide the best education possible to all students, of whatever background, with the resources we have available. The question is how best to achieve that goal. The problem isn’t that Fox and Mary Munford are segregated — they aren’t. They are integrated schools. Rather, Kamras contends that optimizing racial ratios can improve academic achievement for all.
No evidence is presented on what the optimum racial ratio is. Kamras suggests that 50/50 ratio would be good, but he offers no data to support that over any other ratio.
Here’s how I interpret this movement. Richmond City Schools massively under-perform peer school districts. Attempts to reform the schools have led to repeated frustration. Richmond educators have run out of ideas. Steeped in the ideology of diversity, they desperately hope that changing the racial mix of schools will improve academic achievement.
Here’s my concern: Richmond educators are misdiagnosing the problem as insufficient diversity, the racist implication of which is that black children are incapable of learning without exposure to white children. By chasing the diversity phantasm they will ignore the real problems in pedagogy and discipline that need to be addressed. I predict that the rezoning will accomplish nothing for academic achievement. Indeed, it may set back the goal of diversity if white parents yank their children from Richmond public schools so they can attend schools where they will not be subject to the latest intellectual fashions of social engineers.
But, as always, I am willing to acknowledge my fallibility. I could be wrong. Perhaps Kamras is on to something. At the very least, if Richmond schools adopt Kamras’ plan, the district should track the results. Will the children at the affected schools see improved SOL pass rates? If they do, then skeptics like me will learn something valuable. If not, perhaps the social engineers will learn a little humility.
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