"Dire Education" By Michael Corbin

"When you walk into a classroom of almost any Baltimore City public school this fall you immediately face the facts of 21st-century educational apartheid. The white children are absent. They left a while ago and won’t be coming back.

Standing in these classrooms you might think that you stumbled upon some remnant of white supremacy, some exemplar of American democratic, public institutions before 1954. What is striking is not the fact of segregation in America, but rather that we no longer care that segregation in public education matters to our democracy. In Baltimore, for instance, the generations-long struggle to integrate public education no longer has a place in public discourse. We complain mightily about the school system’s many woes, but we no longer remark that going to the city’s dysfunctional schools is almost exclusively a black thing.

“Why Segregation Matters: Poverty and Educational Inequality,” a 2002 report (reaffirmed in 2005) from Harvard University’s Civil Rights Project, ranked Baltimore City schools No. 1 in “black isolation.” That is, it found that students who attend Baltimore City schools have the “lowest exposure to whites” in the 239 school districts in the U.S. with a total enrollment greater than 25,000. The white children who still attend a Baltimore City public school are huddled in a diminishing number of schools and are often isolated within specific classrooms in those particular schools."

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