I confess. When I saw the headline of the article on the front page, first column, above the fold in today’s Washington Post — “Montgomery Schools Hit Diversity Landmark” — I couldn’t help wondering whether it broke. (For some reason the headline in the online edition of the story is “Montgomery Schools At Diversity Landmark.” Montgomery, by the way, is suburban Montgomery County, Maryland.)
This article is a good example. It makes the interesting point that the Montgomery County school system really is a tale of two cities, one increasingly white and the other increasingly black and Hispanic.
One-half of its schools, in a vast ring of communities from Chevy Chase up to Damascus and down through Olney, represent the historical image of Montgomery County’s student population: mostly white and relatively affluent.
The other half, a swath of communities from Takoma Park in the southeast up to Gaithersburg in the county center, educate the vast majority of Montgomery’s poor and immigrant children. “It is a racially, economically and language-identifiable geographic area,” [Superintendent Jerry D.] Weast said, similar in size and makeup to some of the nation’s larger urban school districts. “If it was a stand-alone system, it would be called a failing system….”
Weast called attention to the dichotomy when he became the Montgomery superintendent in 1999. He named the affluent area the “green zone” and the more diverse area the “red zone,” and since then he and the school board have focused $20 million in extra resources on the latter — most notably, to reduce class sizes and introduce all-day kindergarten.
A pie chart that appears in the hard copy (but not online) reveals that about 75% of the black and Hispanic students in the county attend the 65 red zone schools, and about 75% of the whites attend the 60 green zone schools.
Why, then, does the Washington Post describe the red zone (which Superintendent Weast referred to as covering a “racially, economically and language-identifiable” area… language identifiable?) as “the more diverse area”? If present trends continue and the red zone becomes 100% black and Hispanic, will it then be even more diverse?
The article very revealingly quotes Gary Orfield, co-director of Harvard’s Civil Rights Project (and someone who has never seen a busing arrangement he opposed), saying
policymakers should look at ways beyond the schools to maintain true diversity, in which populations — and therefore political power and family resources — are more evenly balanced.
What are “family resources”? Perhaps I’m over-reading (or Orfield is over-speaking), but I read this as a claim by Orfield, a recognized authority on diversity issues, that “true” diversity requires a redistribution of wealth.
In other words, diversity will be achieved once everyone’s — or, more likely, every group’s — resources are identical. Since race is now widely seen to be more important than class, it makes perfect sense for diversiphiles to abandon the old redistribution — taking from the rich to give to the poor — in favor of taking from whites (and Asians?) in order to give to blacks and Hispanics.
policymakers should look at ways beyond the schools to maintain true diversity, in which populations — and therefore political power and family resources — are more evenly balanced.
The sentence is deliberately obscure. However I read it to mean that he wants the county to find a way of moving the poorest families from the less affluent areas into the more affluent areas so that the population of both areas would have approximately the same average income.