Federal designation for Black K-12 schools

When we think about the Black-white opportunity gap, we think of a gap between two groups of students living in totally different worlds. We see white students as suburban kids frolicking the halls of modern facilities that resemble the set of a Disney movie. The opportunity gap pits them against Black kids we assume to be slugging through the metal detector-lined doors of run-down urban schools. The urban-suburban racial apartheid is not a universal reality. In truth, suburban school districts are now quite diverse (Diamond et al., 2021; Orfield & Frankenburg, 2012; Vail, 2023). While suburban districts have become diverse, their schools have become increasingly segregated, and white students are accruing what Amanda Lewis and John Diamond (2015) call “cumulative advantages.”

School segregation is relentless. It’s not just an urban vs. suburban problem. It’s surfacing across city type, geographic region, and school type. We have hundreds of schools specifically responsible for educating Black children.

On its own, this isn’t a problem. Black students can thrive academically in schools populated by Black students. As pedagogical scholars Bettina Love (2019) and Chris Emdin (2016) argue, Black and non-Black teachers can effectively teach Black students so long as they take an emancipatory and humanistic approach. Empirical research shows this to be true (Bristol & Martin-Fernandez, 2019). But, as a society, we haven’t made it desirable to be a Black student in a Black school (or a teacher in a Black school). We only bestow dignity and humanity on the “special” student who overcame the odds or the messianic teacher who “saves” students from the more probable reality. Everyone else remains invisible, what Eve Ewing (2018) refers to as “ghosts.”

Policy support for BSIs

In my last column (Collins, 2023), I introduced the concept of the Black-serving institution (BSI), which I defined as a K-12 public school whose student enrollment is mostly Black. I believe that federal lawmakers should adopt the BSI as a legal designation. Traditional K-12 public schools with a certain percentage of Black students (perhaps a 50% simple majority to start) for three consecutive years would qualify for the designation.

As a society, we haven’t made it desirable to be a Black student in a Black school.

Schools with the BSI distinction would receive specific benefits. For instance, they could be eligible for special land grants, enabling them to rebuild on land that is more environmentally safe or more conducive to experiential learning than their current locations. The idea of land grants for schools traces back to the Morrill Land-Grants Act of 1862. Originally, the federal land grant program was built on the confiscation of more than 10 million acres of land owned by more than 200 Indigenous tribes. This stolen land became the site of some our nation’s leading colleges and universities, such as Cornell, the University of California-Berkeley, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The federal government also has used the Morrill Act to provide land grants for historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), such as Florida A&M, Fort Valley State University, and North Carolina A&T.

The land grant is one of many benefits that could come with the BSI designation. Incentives to support partnerships with public universities, for example, could open doors for high-dosage tutoring, offered one-on-one or in small groups at least three times a week. It’s a strategy that some of my Brown University colleagues have been proving to be extremely effective. Federal research grants could allow university faculty and graduate students to train high school students at BSIs to conduct low-level research projects, making the BSI a site for knowledge growth and knowledge production.

The model for the BSI is, of course, the HBCU. The hallmarks of these institutions are their legacy and pride. They generate this through creating spaces that become home — a place of return, whether it be for homecoming or for a career. Policy cannot create tradition, but it can support its formation. Using HBCUs as a model, BSIs could create incentives for alumni to return. For example, they could offer student loan repayment for graduates who return as faculty, staff, or administrators or provide bonus pay for alumni serving in these roles.

The final layer of the BSI distinction is an investment in the schools’ surrounding communities through initiatives that support housing development and pathways to homeownership, particularly for parents of school-age children. BSI alumni could receive support to start small businesses, or companies could receive incentives to recruit them as employees. A voucher program could provide health insurance subsidies. This funding would not be new. It all aligns with existing federal programs. The only difference is that access to programs currently run through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, U.S. Small Business Administration, and the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would be streamlined into benefits for communities with BSIs.

Is the BSI legal?

Creating the BSI is feasible as a policy initiative. However, is it legally possible? The U.S. Supreme Court has all but nailed shut the coffin of affirmative action. For the past two decades, the courts have been softening the claws of school desegregation orders. How can we expect the federal courts to uphold a legal distinction that provides benefits based on race?

It’s important to emphasize that the BSI is not a distinction that places limits on liberty or individual choice. Civil liberty arguments lie at the core of the assault against affirmative action. Organized interests argue that the individual rights of white and Asian students are violated by race-based admissions. Similarly, parents argue that their rights are violated when desegregation plans limit their ability to send their child to their neighborhood school or the school they prefer.

It is much more difficult to construct a legal argument that the BSI infringes on individual rights. The BSI designation would benefit the school and its surrounding communities. Is the BSI discriminatory? In practice, students of all racial backgrounds would be eligible to attend schools that carry the BSI distinction and, therefore, benefit from its resources. Legally, following the HBCU model will help these schools stay on firmer ground. HBCUs can persist because the HBCU does not attract or interfere with the white middle-class. The BSI works in a similar vein. It does not encourage Black students to attend public schools that middle-class white parents covet. Instead, it supports the schools full of Black students that white middle-class parents actively work to keep their children from attending.

Is the BSI politically possible?

The more pressing question is whether a policy creating the BSI is possible in today’s political climate. For over a decade, political scientists have been demonstrating the powerful growing influence of negative racial attitudes. White Americans holding negative stereotypes of Black Americans have opposed explicitly race-based policies like affirmative action, as well as subtly racialized policies like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (welfare) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) (White, 2007). The BSI would seem like a flare gun shot in the air for racial conservatives.

Federal support for HBCUs, however, says otherwise. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed Executive Order 12232, which became the White House Initiative on HBCUs. Ronald Reagan reestablished this initiative the next year, when he took office, and every single president has done so since. In 2019, President Donald Trump signed the FUTURE Act into law, which was a bipartisan bill that made permanent the authorization of funding for minority-serving institutions of higher education. We’ve seen decades of quiet bipartisan support for colleges and universities that primarily serve Black students. We should demand the same kind of bipartisan support for schools doing this at the K-12 level.

It’s time to formally create the Black-serving institution.

 References

Bristol, T.J. & Martin-Fernandez, J. (2019). The added value of Latinx and Black teachers for Latinx and Black students: Implications for policy. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 6 (2), 147-153.

Collins, J.E. (2023). It’s more than money: Supporting the Black school. Phi Delta Kappan, 104 (5), 58-59.

Diamond, J.B., Posey-Maddox, L., & Velázquez, M.D. (2021). Reframing suburbs: Race, place, and opportunity in suburban educational spaces. Educational Researcher, 50 (4), 249-255.

Lewis, A.E. & Diamond, J.B. (2015). Despite the best intentions: How racial inequality thrives in good schools. Oxford University Press.

Emdin, C. (2016). For white folks who teach in the hood…and the rest of y’all too: Reality pedagogy and urban education. Beacon Press.

Ewing, E.L. (2018). Ghosts in the schoolyard: Racism and school closings on Chicago’s South Side. University of Chicago Press.

Frankenberg, E. & Orfield, G. (Eds.). (2012). The resegregation of suburban schools: A hidden crisis in American education. Harvard Education Press.

Love, B.L. (2019). We want to do more than survive: Abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom. Beacon Press.

Vail, K. (2023). Loudest voices and unequal opportunities in the suburbs: A conversation with John B. Diamond. Phi Delta Kappan, 104 (5), 24-28.

White, I.K. (2007). When race matters and when it doesn’t: Racial group differences in response to racial cues. American Political Science Review, 101 (2), 339-354.

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This article appears in the March 2023 issue of Kappan, Vol. 104, No. 6, pp. 56-57.

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