It’s easy to make fun of young adults who get their current events from so-called “fake news” on TV, notably Jon Stewart’s (and now Trevor Noah’s) Daily Show.
But sometimes, the fake news is truer, or at least more revealing than the “real news.”
An Oct. 21 New York Times op-ed by University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone asks whether Detroit’s highly segregated high-poverty schools effectively deny thousands of poor students the education they need to have a fighting chance to build good lives for themselves. Michigan state law guarantees them just that.
Fair question , obviously.
“At one Detroit school,” Stone writes, “just 4 percent of third graders scored proficient on Michigan’s English assessment test. At another, 9.5 percent did. Those students are among the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed last month that asserts that children have a federal constitutional right to the opportunity to learn to read and write.”
Again, a fair issue to ask a court to review.
Stone goes on to say that, “in Connecticut, a state judge last month ordered sweeping changes to reshape the state’s public schools after concluding that ‘Connecticut is defaulting on its constitutional duty’ to provide all students with an adequate education. The judge concluded that the state’s funding system had ‘left rich school districts to flourish and poor school districts to flounder.'”
Clearly, this discrepancy between rich and poor is evident in urban areas, including ours, all across the United States. We have one set of schools for the poor (schools that fail nearly all the children who attend them) and another set of schools for the rich (who generally succeed even when they are near the bottom of their classes).
These discrepancies are totally unacceptable. Stone notes that in 1982, the Supreme Court pointed out that “illiteracy is an enduring disability” that will “handicap” children “each and every day” of their lives and take “an inestimable toll” on their “social, economic, intellectual and psychological well-being” for the rest of their lives.
But the Detroit case, like so many others before it, essentially asks the court to require that the state equalize the resources available to rich and poor students.
Of course, resources are important, but as we’ve been saying at Great Schools, it’s not just about the money.
On Sunday night, “fake news” anchor John Oliver, host of the HBO’s Last Week Tonight did an 18-minute segment on school segregation, noting, among other things, that New York has the most segregated schools in the country.
Oliver explained that high poverty schools, which are also typically racially segregated, are the product of decades of discriminatory housing and zoning laws that have kept the poor isolated. Indeed, Oliver explains—in ways you almost never hear on the “real news” shows—that the 1964 Civil Rights outlawed the officially segregated schools in the South, but not the segregated schools in the North resulting from discriminatory housing patterns.
Oliver showed some footage of diverse schools in Charlotte, N.C., where a former student says that as soon as poor schools started seeing middle class students, suddenly, there were new gyms and swimming pools and upgraded cafeterias. Of course, Oliver says, “funding tends to follow white people around.”
Yes. And as his “fake news” show also reports—correctly—when poor kids attend racially and socioeconomically diverse schools, they have much higher graduation rates and much lower rates of incarceration. By the way, in diverse schools, white kids show much less racial bias, according to Last Week Tonight.
Of course, modern facilities, state-of-the-art computers, comprehensive libraries, new athletic facilities and exposure to the arts are important.
But this week, only the “fake news” guy seems to ask, “What if the most important resource we can give to poor and affluent children is the gift of each other?”