Today marks the 53rd anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling, which said that racially segregated schools were inherently unequal. Moving ahead 53 years, I take you to Ferris high school in Jersey City, NJ. I studied at St. Peter's Preparatory School, also in Jersey City. My school, a Jesuit private high school, was about 2% black. Ferris is probably about 60% black. It has also been taken over by the state at least 4 times in the last ten years due to incompetent management by Jersey City. The school has almost no white students at all.What happened to the dream of the Supreme Court in 1954? Has it faded into the past, another lost attempt at a utopia which is not to be for NJ or anywhere in the US? From my vantage point, public schools in NJ cities have not exactly become bastions for racial diversity. If you live in a suburb, most likely your public school is mainly white, and if you happen to live in a place like Jersey City, it is probably black and latino.
Politics, it seems, and court rulings, do not change the economic and racial realities of our population.
2 comments:
more of the same in paterson... corrupt superintendents, a revolving door of principals at the worst performing schools, total emphasis on standardized tests, no time for arts & creative learning, under-resourced teachers, the list goes on. no wonder paterson's high school drop out rate is way above the state average. how's that for a fair start in life?
Even in New Jersey who have the "best" policies of school readjustment of funds in the nation the story is terrible and sad. I cannot add that much to both your comments, but we are still a nation divided when it comes to race and nowhere is the more evident in schools. Even in Hoboken, where yuppies have taken over the schools are still so segregated because the yuppies either leave before they send their kids to school or send them to private school.
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