Classrooms Tell the Tale

[Professor]

Classrooms tell the tale

Eric Johnson
CHAPEL HILL - School districts across the country will be scrambling in the months ahead to cope with the Supreme Court's ruling against race-based student assignment. The Wake County Public School System can rightfully be proud that it won't have to, thanks to the system's longstanding policy of using economic status as a factor in student assignments. Wake's magnet programs and careful balancing of student assignment -- meant to ensure that no school has too great a percentage of poorer students -- have been hailed as a national model. The success of those policies has landed the county on the front pages of national newspapers, and given former Superintendent Bill McNeal a full calendar of speaking engagements.

And it means that Wake students will, for the most part, continue to attend impressively diverse schools, no matter what the impact of the court's ruling.

But as the country once again plunges into a debate about the merits and methods of keeping schools fully integrated, it is worth remembering that getting a diverse group of students into the same building is actually the simplest part of the process. Diversity within a school doesn't always mean diversity in the classroom.

I spent 13 years in Wake County schools, and I'm grateful for the depth and intensity of the curriculum they provided. My high school, William G. Enloe in Raleigh, is consistently ranked one of the best in the nation, and it has exactly the kind of racial and economic diversity that educators strive for.

But in a school with a heavy minority population, my classmates were overwhelmingly white and Asian. On the day that we graduated, my friends and I looked around a packed auditorium at hundreds of black faces we hardly knew. We had been integrated in the hallways, but rarely in the classroom.

That didn't happen by design, but it also didn't happen by accident. The programs and policies that drew me and other suburban students to an inner-city high school also separated us from the kids who didn't need to commute.

We drove or were bused-in every morning and spent the day taking the challenging curriculum that we had come for. The kids who lived nearby -- for whom the school was not a choice but a given -- were largely absent from those classes.

My Government and Politics teacher at Enloe once began a lesson by asking all of us to look around the room. "There's not a single black student in this class," he said. "I want you to tell me why."

The answer to that question, we would find, does not lie in any policy of race-based busing or economic redistricting. It has to do with the advantages or disadvantages, both subtle and profound, that accrue long before students reach the schoolhouse door. It has to do with an impossibly complex web of family, society and culture, and the ways they either create or suppress a child's ability to learn. It has to do with a whole range of challenges that can't be solved by a fleet of buses.

Getting a diverse group of students into the same school is only the very first step. The much tougher and much worthier goal is to see that they walk out with the same opportunities. If Wake County is going to remain a national model, we can't lose sight of that.

(Eric Johnson (Enloe '04) is a senior writer at The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper at UNC-Chapel Hill.)