1/20/2018 An ingenious bid to force improvements in Mississippi schools - Separate and unequal

Separate and unequal

An ingenious bid to force improvements in
Mississippi schools
This lawsuit may resonate far beyond the Delta

Print edition | United States Jul 13th 2017 | YAZOO CITY, MISSISSIPPI

“I WENT to these trailers when I was in kindergarten,” says Dorothy Haymer of her
six-year-old daughter’s temporary-but-permanent classroom at Webster
Elementary school in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Some of the main building’s windows
are cracked; the guttering is broken. Ms Haymer says parents are required to donate
paper towels and soap for the lavatories. Art and music lessons are not available,
she laments: “They don’t really have the resources to teach the kids.” There is a high
turnover of staff (the principal left this summer). Still, because Ms Haymer has no
choice, her son will join the school next year. “It’s just terrible,” she says.

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1/20/2018 An ingenious bid to force improvements in Mississippi schools - Separate and unequal

Yazoo City, on the edge of the Mississippi Delta, is graced by magnolias, wisteria
and a pastel-painted high street that bespeaks genteel decline. It is predominantly
black, but Webster Elementary is almost completely so: 97% of its pupils, including
Ms Haymer’s daughter, are African-American. They are almost all poor: 99% receive
subsidised lunches. The white people have their own school, Ms Haymer says
matter-of-factly, referring to a private Christian academy on the outskirts of town.
The school system was integrated peacefully (if belatedly) in 1970; but, as Willie
Morris, a local author, records in “Yazoo”, the children were more enthusiastic than
their parents, and the graft didn’t take. Today Webster lies near the bottom of state
rankings in reading and maths.

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1/20/2018 An ingenious bid to force improvements in Mississippi schools - Separate and unequal

over school desegregation in Cleveland, 75

miles north, reached a well-publicised conclusion—but, in places, de facto
separation is routine. Susan Glisson of Sustainable Equity, a pioneering
consultancy, ran a summer scheme that, for some high-schoolers, was their first
experience “with kids who don’t look like them”.

“Something needs to be done,” says Ms Haymer.

She is among the plaintiffs in a complaint recently
filed in federal court by the Southern Poverty Law
Centre (SPLC), a watchdog. It relies on research by
two lawyers, Bill and Rita Bender (Ms Bender’s first
husband, Michael Schwerner, was among three
civil-rights activists murdered in Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964). After the
civil war, Mississippi was obliged to pass a new constitution, which guaranteed “a
uniform system of free public schools”. Crucially, the act that formally readmitted
the state to the Union expressly forbade any abridgment of those “school rights”.
Yet beginning with the new, racist constitution of 1890, that education clause has
repeatedly been amended. As Ms Bender says, the dual aim was to perpetuate the
disenfranchisement of blacks and ensure a pool of cheap labour. The clause in
force today gives the legislature much wider discretion than the original one.

Meanwhile, although the gap in school resources has narrowed from the chasm of
the segregation era, discrepancies remain. Critics say a state funding formula,
introduced in 1997 to even out variations in local revenue in rich and poor
neighbourhoods, underestimates the extra cost of teaching deprived children. In
any case, the programme has been fully funded only twice in 20 years. A ballot
initiative that might have forced the state to fill the shortfall failed narrowly in
2015. (During the campaign, a Republican politician gave warning that, if the
measure passed, “a black judge” would oversee education spending.) As things
stand, the SPLC’s complaint alleges, the quality of education in Mississippi
“depends almost entirely on whether a child’s schoolmates are predominantly
white”. As a counter-example it cites Madison Station Elementary, which boasts
pristine lawns, tennis and basketball courts, and a pretty pond. It is over 70% white.

Bending away from justice

In some ways Mississippi is an outlier. As well as being the country’s least effective,
its schools have the highest share of black pupils. But the extent of their
segregation is less exceptional. Schools across the South—which, following the
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1/20/2018 An ingenious bid to force improvements in Mississippi schools - Separate and unequal

court rulings of the civil-rights era, became America’s best-integrated—have

become less mixed in the last few decades, according to data collated by the Civil
Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. But so, too, have schools
elsewhere, even as the population has become more diverse: nationally, the
proportion of schools composed almost wholly of minority pupils more than
tripled between 1988, the high point of integration, and 2013. Such institutions are
less likely to offer demanding courses such as physics or advanced algebra. On
some measures, the picture is worse than in 1970. Many of the most segregated
schools are in states that were less touched by the civil-rights push than was the
South: California, Illinois, New York.

The reasons for that grim retreat include the fragmentation of some school
districts, the release of others from judicial oversight and court decisions that
chilled integration drives. Since the era of white flight, economic inequality—with
which the racial kind overlaps—has hardened. Barack Obama’s administration
made some efforts to encourage socioeconomic diversity; Donald Trump’s has
partly ditched them. As Halley Potter of the Century Foundation, a think-tank, says,
countervailing initiatives by individual districts—redrawing catchment zones,
rejigging admission criteria, opening magnet schools—have not offset the overall
trend.

The suit in Mississippi does not expressly target segregation or discrimination,

explains Will Bardwell of the SPLC, though race-based inequity is at the heart of it.
Nor is it directly about money, even if the miserly, race-tinged funding of public
schools in Mississippi and elsewhere is arguably as grave a problem for many
African-Americans as mass incarceration. (Ronnie Musgrove, a former governor of
Mississippi, is making the case for higher funding in a separate action in state
court.) The SPLC, the Benders and Ms Haymer are merely seeking a declaration that
the state has violated its duties under the law of 1870.

The state’s response is due by July 24th. Officials declined to comment (privately,
some teachers are scathing about school facilities in poor areas). Since litigation
under the Readmission Act is more or less unprecedented, the outcome is
unpredictable. “Mississippi”, says Mr Bardwell, “has dug itself a 150-year-old hole.”

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "Separate and unequal"

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