Tom Keane is a liberal, a Democrat, and a former Boston city councilor. He went to good schools (Catholic Memorial, Harvard, University of Virginia) and writes opinion columns for the Boston Globe. He’s an attorney for nonprofits that specialize in progressive causes like early childhood education and alternative energy.
Which makes his latest op-ed column about the significance of court-ordered school desegregation in the Boston public schools all the more infuriating.
After an opening bow to the larger context of the 40th anniversary of Judge Garrity’s Morgan v. Hennigan decision, Keane gets right to his main point:
“Busing — no matter which side you were on — was all about social engineering. Education, at best, was tangentially connected.”
Remember, Keane graduated from some of the finest schools in the country and has been in public life for over two decades. For him to write a sentence like that requires an almost willful ignorance, not just of the history of the United States but of the city he grew up in.
By 1974, African-Americans in Boston had campaigned intensively for over a decade to win access to quality education for their children. They’d testified before the School Committee. They’d drawn up proposals. They’d held demonstrations and boycotts. They’d worked to elect allies to the School Committee and to other public offices. They’d helped win passage of the state’s 1965 Racial Imbalance Act which threatened segregated school districts with the loss of state educational funding. They’d organized METCO, a voluntary desegration program, to bus thousands of minority students from Boston to nearby suburban public school districts. And ultimately, after every other tactic had failed, they went to federal court.
This didn’t happen because black folks in Boston were interested in conducting “social engineering” experiments on their children. It happened because they wanted what all parents want: equal access to quality education for their children. Throughout the two decades after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Boston School Committee had systematically, repeatedly, consciously acted to keep Boston’s schools segregated. If Keane wants to make a case for how and why the School Committee’s actions were intended to, or actually helped to, improve the quality of education for all students in the Boston public schools during that time, he should do so. But acting as if that history didn’t occur is an insult to his readers…and to the Black Bostonians who worked to end white supremacy in the city’s public schools.
“If the goal had been to bring education for black kids up to snuff — to provide schools in black neighborhoods with the resources needed to do their job — one could imagine a different result. The court might have insisted money be reallocated and policies changed to deliver a decent education to all. But school quality really wasn’t on the agenda.”
True, one could imagine a different result…but only if one were living in a different country.
The Boston NAACP filed Morgan v. Hennigan in 1972, 18 years after Brown v. Board of Education was decided by the US Supreme Court. Yet Keane argues that “The court might have insisted money be reallocated and policies changed...” as if the relevant precedent were Plessy v. Ferguson, not Brown v. Board of Education. However Plessy’s doctrine of “separate but equal” was no longer the law of the land. It’s still not the law of the land and yet, 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education was decided, Keane writes as if the case didn’t exist. (Did I mention that Keane is a practicing attorney?)
Keane next posits a false dichotomy: both sides were engaged in “social engineering”. Supporters of integrated schools favored “busing” and opponents favored “neighborhood schools”. He then gives a rhetorical pat on the head to each side:
“Both social engineering ideals have appeal. Schools ideally should be mixing bowls, where students learn about other kids and other families from far different backgrounds. And folks within tight-knit neighborhoods can support and help one another, creating community norms that pass on values from one generation to the next.”
Note the absence here by Keane of any mention of school quality. In fact, Boston advocates of “neighborhood schools” regularly and gladly put their children on buses to attend the city’s high-quality college preparatory high schools. Meanwhile, supporters of “busing” turned to that option only after repeated attempts to get equal access to quality education at their neighborhood schools had been rebuffed by the School Committee.
Keane doesn’t just create a false dichotomy between supporters and opponents of school desegregation, he immediately proceeds to dismiss both sides as having missed the point:
“But while both are nice — bonus points, if you will — each is trumped by education itself. Look at what rich people do: They seek out the best possible schools for their kids. They may move to towns where school spending is high and hence the education thought better. Or they may send their children to private schools. I know of more than a few young couples who profess themselves ardent supporters of public schools until their children are born and, suddenly, they find themselves back-peddling. It’s perfectly understandable. When it comes to your own kid’s future, everything else is secondary.”
Ah, those poor benighted working-class and middle-class Boston parents of the 1960s and 70s! If only they’d realized what rich people know—“when it comes to your own kid’s future, everything else is secondary”.
Keane may not mean to sound patronizing, but if so, he’s failed in the attempt. If there’s one thing that’s abundantly clear about the school busing and desegregation crisis in Boston throughout the 1960s and 70s—and this is well documented not only in media coverage of the time but also in numerous vivid and deeply insightful books like J. Anthony Lukas’ Common Ground, Alan Lupo’s Liberty’s Chosen Home, Ronald Formisano’s Boston Against Busing, and memoirs like Mel King’s Chain of Change, and Larry DiCara’s Turmoil and Transition in Boston—it’s that Boston parents were fighting—sometimes literally and at great personal cost—for what they thought was best for their children.
Keane then concludes that busing was doomed to be a failure. What’s interesting about that conclusion is the reasons he gives to support it:
1 – “For one, the real source of segregation is region-wide housing patterns….”
There’s no hint in Keane’s column as to what might have caused those “region-wide housing patterns“. For all the reader knows, those patterns might have developed just as haphazardly as Boston’s notoriously tangled roads.
There’s no mention of the rise of racially restrictive covenants in the 1920s. No mention of the Federal Housing Administration’s Underwriting Handbook which defined “residential security areas” and nationalized the practice of redlining in the 1930s. No mention of the development of Route 128 as “Boston’s Road to Segregation” and the responsibility borne by suburban public officials and residents for creating a metropolitan region in which just 2% of suburban residents were not white. No mention of the continued use of zoning restrictions to this day by suburban towns to limit housing opportunities for African-Americans, Latinos, and families with children.
Blaming “region-wide housing patterns” also lets the city of Boston off the hook. Housing segregation wasn’t just regional; most Boston neighborhoods were segregated, too. And residential segregation wasn’t created just by government agencies either. The Orwellian-named Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group (B-BURG)—with the assistance of unscrupulous realtors—“flipped” virtually the entire (previously Jewish) neighborhood of Mattapan between 1968 and 1972 by offering mortgages to African-American homebuyers only within Mattapan…and nowhere else. (The entire story is powerfully recounted in Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon’s book, The Death of an American Jewish Community.) When governmental, banking, housing and other business interests failed in their attempts to maintain rigidly segregated housing, local residents—both urban and suburban—often took matters into their own hands, using violence to prevent peaceful integration.
2 – “And more to the point, the key to wiping out poverty, ending discrimination, and giving all an equal shot at life is education….”
If this breathtakingly sweeping assertion (“the key“, really?) were true then we’d expect to see poverty rates steadily decreasing in the United States over the past 40 years as educational achievement has risen…but that’s not what we see. We’d expect to see a steady decrease in school segregation…but that’s not what we see. We’d expect to see declining income inequality as educational achievement continues to rise…but that’s not what we see.
It’s not that education doesn’t matter. It does. It’s just that there’s a growing body of evidence that education alone is not “the key” to a just and prosperous society. Other things—like decent wages, family-friendly policies, and equal justice under the law to name just a few—matter too.
3 – “…which busing and its aftermath effectively undermined.”
The implication seems to be that public education in Boston, as well as the city itself, is worse off today than it was 40 years ago. But by virtually every available measure, that simply is not true. Dropout and suspension rates are down, and graduation rates are up. Every year, Boston public school graduates gain admission to many of the finest colleges and universities in the nation. Every year, there are families that move from the surrounding suburbs into the city so their children can attend the Boston public schools. When Morgan v. Hennigan was decided 40 years ago, Boston was a dying city that had lost 1/4 of its population since mid-century. Today, Boston’s population has grown 15% since 1980 and exceeds the city’s population in 1970, just before Judge Garrity’s ruling “effectively undermined” the city and its schools.
“The take-away from our remembrances of busing should not be a rehash of the past, but rather a focus on the future…”
Quoting George Santayana here (“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it“) not only would be too easy, it would be off point. It’s precisely because of the importance of “a focus on the future” that we all—including liberals like Mr. Keane—need to reckon fully and honestly with the history that has brought us to the present.
Keane’s remembrance of busing—except for a brief, almost pro forma acknowledgement of the fact that Boston’s schools were, in fact, segregated—effectively begins in 1974 with Judge Garrity’s decision. It’s not that Garrity’s decision and the events that followed aren’t important (they are). It’s that a history of school segregation and the quality of public education in Boston that begins in 1974 (when Boston’s schools were segregated in 1820) is about as useful as a history of the formation of the United States that begins in 1789 with the adoption of the Constitution. There’s a lot of history that led up to those moments that’s relevant—both to what happened at those moments, and to their rippling impacts upon later generations—for those who want to focus on creating a better future.
The best social engineering of all would be to give poor and minority kids the same kind of educations as children of the rich.
In Keane’s defense, he’s stuck with a format that limits him to 700 words and expects him to produce a punchy and memorable closing line. And providing the “same kind of educations” to the poor as to the rich would be a step in the right direction. Even so, this last line not only doesn’t help us “focus on the future“; it doesn’t help us understand the present. Because the reality today is that just as working-class and middle-class parents can, with the best of intentions, make mistakes with the more limited scope of educational options available to their children, so can—and do—the rich.
One common mistake the rich make is to confuse an expensive education with a good education. Another is to “protect” their children (and themselves) from the risks associated with relatively unfettered interactions with the lower classes…such as can and do happen regularly in public schools.
For all its failings and limitations, the “social engineering” of universal free public education—regardless of race, creed, class, gender or any other defining characteristic of a child—is one of the great creations of American democracy in general and of the commonwealth of Massachusetts in particular. The work of dismantling and removing the ways in which racism has deformed that ideal is, in my view, a necessary part of the work to create the educational opportunities for all children to which Mr. Keane so passionately (and rightly) aspires.
Why? Because in the nation we live in, the outcomes he wants to see won’t come about as long as liberal reformers like Keane cling to a myopic (and, for many, all too comfortable and comforting) view of our educational past and present.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/
