The vast majority of white children living in the city
have access to a high-performing neighborhood school.
The vast majority of black students
have guaranteed access to nothing.
Do you think we're betraying
the legacy of Brown v. Board?
Absolutely, we have defied it in every way that you can.
America's schools are the most segregated they've been
in almost 50 years.
And for decades, the federal government
hasn't been doing anything about it.
Today's typical white student attends
a school that is nearly three quarters white.
The average black student goes to one
that's almost entirely students of color.
In 1954, Brown vs. Board of Education
declared that segregated schools should be dismantled
with "all deliberate speed."
We're sliding back into the two unequal systems
Brown promised to get rid of.
One for low-income black and latino students,
and another for more affluent white and asian students.
I went to speak with John King Jr.
the Department's first black and latino
Secretary of Education.
Since being appointed in 2016,
he's taken a firm stand in favor of integrating schools.
My teachers could have
looked at me when I was a kid and said,
here's an African-American latino male,
family in crisis, going to a New York City public school,
what chance does he have? They could have written me off.
But they didn't.
They invested in me, and I want to make sure
that all of our students have access to those opportunities.
Back when King was a student in the 1980s,
schools were at their most diverse in history.
Integration worked.
In 1988, the achievement gap between blacks and whites
was half of its pre-Brown levels.
No other education policy has ever come close
to matching that success.
So why did we turn the other way?
There was significant progress in terms of
creating schools that were more racially and
socioeconomically diverse.
But, we have to acknowledge, there are other places
where that didn't happen and where
there was real resistance.
Parents didn't want black and latino kids coming to their schools.
Ain't gonna be in my grandson's class.
Not here they ain't.
Some aggressively lobbied lawmakers,
and made cases to the courts.
Eventually this resistance worked.
Over the last three decades,
school segregation has come back.
The Department of Education was so discouraged
that King's predecessors wouldn't even say
the word 'desegregation' for years.
The same blessing that saved my life,
I want to make sure is available to more kids.
Our challenge now is to approach this diversity work
in a way that really lifts up
voluntary, locally-led efforts,
and accelerates those efforts.
King's plan isn't the forced busing of the past.
Instead he wants to make it easier for parents
to send their kid to a school outside their neighborhood.
This is called school choice.
In this system, students of color
can avoid bad neighborhood schools and apply for
better ones across town.
And white parents can choose to send their kids to more
diverse schools than the ones nearby.
The idea is that parents can voluntarily
integrate schools.
But it's not as easy as it sounds.
Washington, D.C. has tried something similar
and it hasn't worked all that well.
School segregation is so bad that you literally
can tell what school they're going to based
on what color they are.
Little black kids walking by themselves,
you know they're going either to Langley,
McKinley.
White kids on a bike,
with their parents on a bike,
they're headed this way to the Inspire Teachers school
or Lee Montessori.
Natalie Hopkinson, a journalist and parent of two,
has tried to get her two kids into largely
white schools for years.
They switched schools five times in ten years.
Eventually she gave up and sent them both to private school.
When it comes to D.C., race rules everything.
And it's really depressing to me.
The choice system
very clearly disadvantages black students.
Because the schools that are high-performing
are in white neighborhoods.
Period.
Families that are able, have the means,
to be able to buy into those neighborhoods
have a guarantee they will have access to those schools.
The wealthier, mostly white schools in west D.C.
have a small percentage of seats set aside
for kids outside their neighborhood.
But the lottery system is extremely complicated
and many low-income parents lack the know-how
to compete for these limited number of seats.
Just think about that mother who has three jobs.
How does she apply for ten schools?
Like I did even for my son.
Like how does she go to visit ten schools?
First of all, because it's all during the day.
You know you have to understand how to
look at spreadsheets,
even if they were well-informed, there are
not enough high-performing schools
for them all to fit in.
School choice is often used as a euphemism
when politicians say, "We want to integrate schools,"
but it's not the most politically palatable,
why do you think that's a flawed approach?
You really have to look back at Brown v. Board of Education
and what happened.
White people completely left,
they just abandoned the system.
So, that was the choice that they made.
If they keep relying on choice, they're going to
be set up for failure because white people
will not enroll their children in schools
unless they're already white.
I put this challenge to King.
Are we putting too much faith in parents?
You know, I think we have to acknowledge
some of the anxieties about school performance.
So folks will say,
I want to make sure my child goes to a school
that has strong academic programs,
that I'm worried that merging into another school
or changing our school assignment policy
will result in my child going to a school that is,
that offers less.
Some of the anxieties can be overcome
but there has to be thoughtful leadership.
For the first time in decades, integration is back.
But one has to wonder,
if the federal government doesn't force it,
can we really desegregate schools?
As long as it's up to parents,
it's going to be an uphill battle.
