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Nineteen years ago, I suggested that New Bedford redraw its elementary school boundaries so that middle-class and working-class neighborhoods on the peninsula could attend school together.
At the time, I was writing about the plans to build two new elementary schools at the tip of the South End. I suggested that since enrollment had been declining, the city only needed one school.
But the reason I wanted only one school was not about enrollment or saving money. It was about the fact that the planned school on the south end of the peninsula (The Taylor at Sea Lab) and the planned school on the north end of the peninsula (which came to be known as the Jacobs School) were pretty much segregated by income, and also by race.
The Taylor School, located amidst a neighborhood of mostly single-family homes was more middle-class and white; the eventual Jacobs School (which replaced the old Hannigan School where the roof had collapsed, and which was located in a neighborhood of triple-deckers) was more low-income and students of color.
City officials at the time dismissed my perspectives, with former Mayor Scott Lang telling me there was no call from the two peninsula neighborhoods to be united under one school.
The rest is history.
It took roughly a decade before the two schools were completed.
The city lost state assistance to build several elementary schools after it encountered cost overruns when it built the new Keith Middle School on an environmentally contaminated site. A few years later the state cut way back on the amount of money it was reimbursing municipalities for school construction.
A new mayor, Jon Mitchell, showed no more interest in a combined school for the peninsula than Mayor Lang. He successfully argued to me that educational research showed smaller schools were better in urban settings than mid-sized or large ones.
My brilliant-in-my-own-mind ideas about redrawing New Bedford elementary school districts by mixing low- and middle-class neighborhoods went nowhere. At the time, I had also argued that in the great mid-section of the city, elementary school district boundaries should be redrawn along east-west, as opposed to north-south geographies, in order to better mix middle-class neighborhoods with low-income ones.
The idea of mixing adjacent low-income and middle-income neighborhoods (which really means mixing Black, brown and white sections) has been political suicide in this country for more than 50 years. We saw it in Boston with the great school busing controversy of the 1970s and 1980s. And we have seen it in New Bedford with the ways boundaries and admission schools have been set up for decades.
It has not been shocking that no one in power in New Bedford has ever wanted to better integrate school districts, and it has not been shocking that the state has never enforced the school segregation laws that it has had on the books, even watered down as they are since the Civil Rights era of the 1960s and ’70s. Colin Hogan’s fine New Bedford Light story showed all this a few weeks ago.
At the time I was writing my columns and blogs years ago, I was unaware that the state’s desegregation law classified schools as segregated if they had more than 71% of one race. During the Civil Rights era, the cutoff had been 50%.
If I had been aware, I believe I would have been better able to argue that the way school district boundaries have been drawn in New Bedford is directly related to the success, or lack thereof, of schools with homogenous low-income neighborhood boundaries.
Hogan’s story brought to light that the annual report of state’s Racial Imbalance Advisory Council recently showed that 10 New Bedford schools (nine district schools and one charter) are currently classified as non-white segregated schools.
In case you are curious, those schools are: the Carney, DeValles, Gomes, Jacobs, Hayden-McFadden, Pacheco and Parker elementary schools; Roosevelt Middle School; Whaling City Jr./Sr. High School; and Alma del Mar charter school.
Ironically, the Greater New Bedford Regional Vocational Technical High School is described as racially diverse, but when it comes to low-income and immigrant students it is not. Segregation, it can be argued, these days is not just about race but about income and language.
By the way, I’m talking about de facto segregation, not de jure segregation that existed in the old South. De jure segregation is by law, while de facto is segregation by circumstance, or reality as it exists.
Hogan’s story noted that Voc-Tech’s 4% of students being English Language Learners is the lowest of any school in the city, and that it also has a lower percentage of low-income students than New Bedford High. The Voc-Tech student body, of course, also includes students from the suburban districts of Dartmouth and Fairhaven.
The reason for the difference between Voc-Tech and New Bedford High is that Voc-Tech is an admission school and can choose its student body. There are not sufficient safeguards to ensure minority participation in it, but there will be someday.
By the way, if you want to find overwhelmingly segregated schools, the New Bedford suburbs have them. Hogan’s story reported that the DeMello Elementary in South Dartmouth, just a stone’s throw over the New Bedford border from the DeValles in the South End of the city, has just 4% ELL students, while the DeValles has 53%.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the suburbs to make a concerted effort to make their schools integrated with nearby urban communities.
Since 1991, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was constitutional to end a federal desegregation order if it had succeeded in eliminating past discrimination, there hasn’t been much enforcement of Massachusetts’ own desegregation law.
The penalties in that law include the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education withholding state aid, denying money for school construction projects, and even the elimination of exemptions from school choice limits. School choice is a system in which involved parents place their children in schools perceived as better while children whose parents are not so involved remain wherever they are.
The problem, or at least the reality, is that Massachusetts’ segregation penalties are never enforced. After the Racial Imbalance Advisory Council asked DESE this year if local school committees had ever been informed in the last 20 years that schools in their district were segregated, DESE said no.
New Bedford Superintendent of Schools Andrew O’Leary said that while he is happy to hear of RIAC’s focus — during this year of the 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision — he is apprehensive because segregated schools in urban environments are often described negatively in terms of substandard academic achievement.
O’Leary did praise, however, RIAC’s focus on inequities in the Massachusetts School Building Authority’s formula for construction and renovation, which he has long described as biased against low-income and urban communities. He also decried the current system, in which public charter and vocational-tech schools choose their own student bodies, as a big reason that further imbalances the racial and income compositions of district schools, and specifically in New Bedford.
O’Leary supports school choice within the same school district. And during an interview with me this week, he said he’d “have no problem” changing some New Bedford district boundaries if the effort came from the community.
Don’t hold your breath on that one either. Middle-class neighborhoods have never demonstrated much willingness to have their kids integrated with low-income ones. That’s why I’m suggesting nearby adjacent neighborhoods of different demographics be combined.
But I’m glad you said that, Superintendent O’Leary. Let’s see if there is any groundswell in the city for more integration of New Bedford’s middle- and low-income neighborhoods into single schools.
Yes, we have the magnet schools, where parents can advocate for their kids to attend whatever school in the whole city that they think is best for their kids. But the spots are limited. Schools that mixed nearby neighborhoods would help us go a long way toward creating a more holistic, successful school system.
And while we’re at it, we need to make sure the middle and admission schools are similarly creating integrated student bodies by reserving seats for English language learners, disabled kids and kids from low-income neighborhoods.
Email columnist Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.
