Separate and Unequal

What it means to send education "back to the states"

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

I was born in 1980, just as President Jimmy Carter launched the Department of Education and Ronald Regan campaigned against it. By the time I entered elementary school, the battle to desegregate schools had been won, and my northern Virginia public education reflected it. My classmates’ families came from Kenya, Guam, Afghanistan and Vietnam. My favorite teacher was an African-American woman who taught me to double-dutch. I took for granted that some people lived in homes that were smaller or larger than mine, ate different foods, and worshipped different gods. We sang “We Are the World” and meant it.

Trump’s effort to “return education back to the states” is a thinly-veiled attempt to undo all of that.

To be clear: State and local governments already control most decisions about public education. The federal Department of Education provides funding to low-income students and students with disabilities, distributes federal student loans, and enforces civil rights laws. It’s that last part that conservatives have been angry about for decades. When they talk about states’ rights, they’re talking about a time when civil rights were ignored.

Before Reagan tried to get rid of the DoE, he campaigned against what he called “forced busing.” This was the practice of transporting kids from different parts of town to desegregate schools. The U.S. Supreme Court approved it in a landmark 1971 case, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education.

Over the next decade, Charlotte became a model of busing’s success. People from all over the country visited West Charlotte High School to learn from its example. The white billionaire C.D. Spangler sent his daughter there. Two of the school’s most famous graduates are former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx and sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom, a New York Times columnist and MacArthur Fellow.

But Reagan and his fellow conservatives didn’t care. When he campaigned in Charlotte in 1984, Reagan called busing a failure that “takes innocent children out of the neighborhood school and makes them pawns in a social experiment that nobody wants.” The audience responded with silence. They knew he was wrong.

I wrote about West Charlotte’s evolution when I was an editor at Charlotte magazine. In my reporting, I learned that students who attended the school during the height of integration had an experience similar to mine. In 2004, researchers at Columbia University and UCLA interviewed more than 200 Black and white alumni who graduated from desegregated high schools in 1980—including West Charlotte. They found that “students who lived through desegregation consider it one of the most valuable experiences of their lives.”

By 1999, the magic had ended. A Reagan-appointed judge ruled that Charlotte had successfully desegregated, and students could no longer be assigned to different schools based on race. Very quickly, the city’s schools resegregated. Today, West Charlotte’s students are overwhelmingly Black and low-income. Wealthy white students attend suburban or private schools. A similar story has played out in cities all over the country.

We don’t need Trump to remind us that our country has largely returned to separate and unequal schools. (Although I do wonder how different life would be if our current elected officials had attended desegregated schools). But until recently, we still had the Department of Education. It protected students from discrimination based on their race, sex, gender, age or disability. It attempted to give everyone an equal opportunity to learn.

If sending education “back to the states” means abdicating this responsibility, where does that leave our children?