Notebook: Sorting It Out

First African-American student accepted to Arlington State College (1962). University of Texas at Arlington Photograph Collection, Wikimedia Commons

The nonprofit news site ProPublica had a startling investigation last week, on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, about the perseverance of private “segregation academies” that maintained de facto segregated schooling in the South after the decision. ProPublica found that “about three hundred schools that likely opened as segregation academies in the South are still operating … across Alabama’s eighteen Black Belt counties, all of the remaining segregation academies ProPublica identified—about a dozen—are still vastly white, even though the region’s population is majority Black.” In conversations they found families who were eager to form ties across racial differences, but traditions and habits of school life had perpetuated their mutual isolation.

After Tuskeegee High School was desegregated by court order in 1975, ProPublica tells us, the Alabama legislature approved $3.75 million ($36 million today) to fund tuition grants “to attend private schools rather than go to public school classes with Negroes.” The seven states adopting such programs “enabled the largest growth of private schools in the South’s history,” according to historian Steve Suitts. Advocates of such measures appealed to “‘choice,’ ‘freedom,’ and higher-quality (often Christian) education.” By 1978, public school enrollment Alabama’s seven Black Belt counties was more than 90 percent Black.

Since the pandemic there has been a wave of new legislation financially supporting private school attendance and homeschooling, and not only for families lacking means—to the point of vastly overpromising state resources, often in states otherwise committed to fiscal austerity, many of these also in “segregation academy” states. (Steve Suitts dubbed Alabama’s new tuition-support program the “Segregation Academy Rescue Act.”) Most recently Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed a law at the end of April providing a subsidy of up to $6,500 a year to some Georgia families for private school tuition or homeschooling. (New York City, identified in 2021 as the most segregated school system in the country, was for its part sued early in May by students and parents for failure to pursue desegregation efforts recommended by a 2019 task force.)

Some opting into such programs say they are in flight from what they consider (or fear) are “woke indoctrination” and LGBTQ+ inclusion measures in their schools, anxieties that are also fueling school library book challenges in many of the same states. The Colorado Republican Party this week called for all parents to remove their children from public school to elude the “fetishes of far left legislators in the name of equity” and as an expression of religious freedom. These “sorting” effects are also working the other way, as, in the face of new legislation limiting curriculum and resources touching on minority experience, Black parents opt for private schools and programs that teach Black history and culture—or elect to homeschool themselves. “I think a lot of Black families realized that when we had to go to remote learning, they realized exactly what was being taught. And a lot of that doesn’t involve us,” a Raleigh, North Carolina mother told the Associated Press. A PEN report on “Educational Intimidation” cited research indicating that over half of LGBTQ+ families with children in the Florida school system have considered leaving the state because of legislation prohibiting LGBTQ+ expression in schools. Anti-“DEI” (shorthand for “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion”) provisions in recent Florida legislation have also resulted in threatened accommodations for students with disabilities and removing of meals for Muslim students during Ramadan, likely prompting more sorting effects.

Professors and administrators are also leaving Florida, according to a December report from the Association of American University Professors, and their positions are increasingly difficult to fill. Kenneth Nunn, one of the few Black members of the University of Florida law faculty, recently retired after thirty years saying “Florida is toxic.” He told the compilers of the AAUP report, “We have been completely unsuccessful in getting any entry-level African American faculty member, because CRT [Critical Race Theory, now outlawed in eighteen states] is very important to African American scholars, particularly in legal contexts and law schools.” Post-Brown, Florida created thirteen racially segregated junior colleges; as late as 1977, the Supreme Court found the state’s education system to be noncompliant with the Civil Rights Act. The AAUP report also considers the 1956 to 1965 effort by state senator Charley Johns to expose gay people in Florida’s schools and universities, resulting in at least fifteen professors and more than fifty students leaving the University of Florida. In the wake of the passage of Florida’s HB 1521, requiring use of bathrooms corresponding to one’s sex assigned at birth, and HB 1557, the “Don’t Say Gay” law restricting LGBTQ+ expression in school, University of Florida Assistant Professor of Mathematics James Pascoe recently accepted a position at Drexel University, telling the compilers of the AAUP report, “the state didn’t seem to be a good place for us to live in anymore.”

The central concern of the AAUP report, driving these effects on who the Florida education system serves, is the deterioration of the tradition of “shared governance” between university faculty and administration, or “joint effort” in arriving at university policy. The AAUP’s 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, formulated with the American Council on Education and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, declares that “the faculty has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process.” The state of Florida’s interference in decisions around tenure, administrative appointments, curriculum, accreditation has fundamentally undermined traditions of joint governance, AAUP argues. Republican activist Christopher Rufo, who was the main spokesman nationally for attacks on DEI and CRT, and was in 2023 appointed to the board of Florida’s New College by Governor Ron DeSantis, tweeted on this point: “When public universities violate their part of this social contract, the people, through their elected legislators and appointed representatives, have every right to insist on reforms.” This language mirrors the language PEN identified in its report on “educational intimidation”: new laws opening up educational processes to public scrutiny and veto have had the effect of strengthening government/administrative intrusion on academic practice.

The principle of “joint effort” also arose in recent faculty condemnation of the administrative reponse to student protests against the war in Gaza. At Harvard on Tuesday the Faculty of Arts and Sciences overwhelmingly voted to restore diplomas to thirteen students who had been removed from the list by the Harvard College Administrative Board because of participation in student encampments, arguing that FAS “is the ultimate disciplinary body” on academic probation and degree conferral; a letter signed by 350 faculty members objected to “procedural improvisations” on the part of the Administrative Board that “threaten to undermine faculty governance and the integrity of our university.” The Harvard Corporation overruled their restitution of the degrees, and more than a thousand people walked out on Thursday’s commencement ceremonies in solidarity with the thirteen students. At Columbia President Nemat Shafik contravened a faculty senate established after student demonstrations in 1968 when she called in the New York Police Department to remove student protesters in April. The Barnard and Columbia chapters of the AAUP issued a declaration rebuking the president for violating “two central pillars of higher education in America: academic freedom and shared governance.” The chapters had also called her to account for “her willingness to appease legislators seeking to interfere in university affairs” in testimony before the US House Education Committee. Last December nine hundred faculty members at the University of Pennsylvania signed a letter to Penn’s Trustees objecting to a board member’s effort to reshape university policy. “Any attempts on the part of Penn’s trustees to close academic departments, constrain hiring, discipline faculty members for political reasons and without due process, censor faculty’s intramural or extramural speech, or impose new McCarthyite speech codes on faculty and students would constitute the most flagrant violations imaginable of the core principles of academic freedom and faculty governance,” the letter reads.

A recent study by the Lumina Foundation and Gallup, as Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote in The New York Times, found that students for their part want their education to include the “divisive” concepts regarding race, gender, and ethnicity being removed from curricula by new state regulations. “61 percent of Republicans who cared about this issue when choosing a college preferred a state that did not restrict instruction on topics related to race and gender. That’s compared with 83 percent of Democrats and 78 percent of independents.” The AAUP report noted that a March 2023 survey found that 91 percent of college-bound Florida high school students “disagree with DeSantis’s policies” restricting divisive concepts in curricula and programs for inclusion, along with 79 percent of currently enrolled college students in the state. Nearly 13 percent of high school graduates said they won’t attend a Florida state school because of the state’s educational policies. Among those who do plan to enroll, 78 percent worried that the states “policies will have a negative impact on their education.” (DeSantis has said students who disagree with Florida educational legislation should “go to Berkeley.”) A group of students at Little Rock Central High School is suing the state to receive AP instruction in African American history, which had been cancelled for fear of violating Arkansas’s “LEARNS” Act outlawing “indoctrination with ideologies” as part of school instrucation. (Our post on the African American history AP here.) The New York desegregation suit was brought by students. ProPublica spoke to students who regretted the uniformity and limited opportunity of their schools in a town with a surviving segregation academy.

So constraints on what students are being taught and how their educational environment is shaped are being resisted by students and teachers, and are being advanced in the name of “the public” by advocates whose effects are to divide and sort the society—in the classroom and by intention beyond—into mutually uncomprehending cells, mutual estrangements that may be strengthened by the 2023 Supreme Court decision outlawing affirmative action in educational admissions. A distrust in the transformative powers of those who learn and devote their lives to learning is a common thread among those who police such divisions. Anti-intellectualism has arrived at education’s very gates. Somehow, the few who want this world that the rest do not want to live in seem to have the upper hand. Meanwhile, the chip maker that enables artificial intelligence dominates the US economy and tech and social media giant Meta has announced an AI advisory council that is composed entirely of white men who are—not computer scientists, not philosophers or ethicists, not linguists, not historians of science but—corporate executives. 

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Ann Kjellberg is the founder and editor of Book Post.

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