I had the pleasure of attending a panel discussion at this year’s SXSW Education conference featuring the Odyssey Initiative’s Todd Sutler (we went to college together). The panel was called “Does School Desegregation Still Matter?”
Ethnic and economic segregation is rampant across America’s schools, and even within schools that are ethnically and economically mixed, there are still barriers between students that maintain society’s divided and unequal status quo.
One of the
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panelists, author Sarah Garland, recalled her own experience attending a school that was desegregated on paper but highly segregated in practice – her advanced placement classes were almost all “white.”
Panelist Michael Magee of the Rhode Island Mayoral Academies informed us that their schools have been able to improve learning among poorer students when there is a mix of socio-economic backgrounds, with no decrease in the performance of students from affluent, whiter backgrounds.
My hometown, Austin, Texas, is very segregated by ethnicity and class, like most large Sun Belt cities. While we no longer have city-sanctioned housing discrimination, we do have market-based discrimination. You want your child to go to that great public school? Then you’ve got to be able to afford to live in that school’s attendance boundary.
My wife, our five-year-old, and I live in the Travis Heights Elementary School attendance boundary. This came as surprise to us, as we had been active in a gardening program at the elementary school closest to our home, Becker Elementary. Becker draws from our neighborhood association’s boundaries, with the exception of the sliver where we live.
Both Becker and Travis Heights Elementary Schools draw from a diverse mix of families: mostly Hispanic and black residents in three Section 8 housing complexes (two privately owned, one owned by the City of Austin) and mostly white homeowners with rapidly rising property values.
When the Austin Independent School District threatened to close Becker and other central city schools because of low attendance, our neighborhood association rallied with parents of students at Becker to speak up for the school. We cited the growing number of families with small children moving into the neighborhood, future Becker Bobkats. And parents researched and advocated for an innovative way to re-invigorate their school: Dual Language learning.
Texas is home to millions of people who primarily speak Spanish at home, including families with generations of roots in Texas and recent immigrants from Mexico,
and Central and South America.
Yet most Texas school children receive little Spanish language learning until junior high school! Native Spanish speakers are placed into English as a Second Language programs, ghettoized by their language difference from the other children at the school.
Becker and Travis Heights both applied for a limited number of Dual Language programs that the school district offered as an alternative to
closing schools. Becker was granted Dual Language, beginning with kindergarten and following that class as it progressed to fifth grade, adding bilingual teachers each year.
Travis Heights was not granted Dual Language status by the school district, but the school decided to go for it anyway with a “rogue” kindergarten class taught by a bilingual teacher already at the school. The following year, the school district awarded Travis Heights official Dual Language status, which covers half of the incoming kindergarten classes.
With Dual Language learning in Austin, native S70-662panish speakers are in the same class with native English speakers, all being taught by a bilingual teacher. There is considerable research on the learning benefits for children through Dual Language learning.
Sharing a classroom, a native Spanish speaker’s knowledge of Spanish becomes an asset instead of a liability: the white kid from the fancy house doesn’t know the word for “spoon” and needs help from the child of recent immigrants living in the housing projects. As one parent told me, the “power dynamic” is altered when the formerly segregated students are learning together in the same classroom
As another Travis Heights parent told me, Dual Language classes change who gets invited to birthday parties, since parents most often invite the kids in their child’s class. A practical consequence of this intermingling between class and ethnic boundaries is that the well-off parents become aware of the struggles of other parents to get by, according to one Travis Heights mom.
One parent from a single-family home expressed concern about losing Dual Language families to relocation during the proposed redevelopment of some of the public housing in the school’s attendance boundary.
The ideal ratio of English to Spanish speakers is one to one. While Travis Heights has more English speakers than native Spanish speakers, the students AND parents are engaging with each other on more equal terms than before Dual Language classrooms arrived at the school. To make native Spanish speakers welcome and included, school meetings and PTA emails have Spanish translation.
Rather than finding a way to have their children separated from the kids from the housing projects, well-to-do white parents are eager to have their children learning Spanish in a class with native Spanish speaking children. The more affluent white parents who might have transferred their children away from Travis Heights or Becker are now more likely to support their local elementary school by enrolling their children there.
Parents who moved to neighborhoods with the “good schools” are now transferring into Becker and Travis Heights so that their children will reap the benefits of Dual Language learning. One Travis Heights parent told me that when her children finish fifth grade, they will be “bi-lingual, bi-literate, and bi-cultural.”
For parents living in Section 8 housing, Dual Language gives their children a more level playing field and the opportunity to learn two languages by fifth grade. For children growing up speaking only Spanish, Dual Language learning shatters the isolation of the English as a Second Language track.
While still in the early stages in Austin, Dual Language offers an exciting approach to learning that just might further America’s ongoing struggle for liberty, justice, and education for all.
