The Backlash Against All-Black Schools

This Magazine ran a recent article making the case for all-black schools in Toronto, and while I think the idea is risky (hence why the article proposed looking at it as a "test"), I find as more disturbing the constant arguments thrown against it based on principle.

Jonathan Kay's piece in the National Post takes as its basic argument the most obvious source of opposition: that the Brown v. Board of Education case ruled that "separate but equal" was inherently racist. But the argument completely divorces the fact that the case was about the rights of black children to attend public schools with whites; something that's not even remotely threatened by the concept of an alternative school. Ironically, the opposition seems to fall more in line with the history of the forces behind segregation, which has been more about telling black families and their children what they can and cannot do than black or white children (or any other racial groups) being separate per se.

It's odd considering the segregation which exists already on some level. Kay brings this to mind when he mentions "the negative correlation between the black population of schools and school-wide academic performance". This presupposes a rather dubious theory about education: that the primary goal of any school is the overall average academic standing of its students, rather than the quality of education they receive. Naturally, a school which in all likelihood is going to be receiving students who have struggled academically (the whole reason for the school in the first place) will receive lower academic standing. Surely this is more positive and constructive than the mostly-black public schools which have become naturally ghettoized over time. By consciously creating a black school, the school board allows for the city's best educators -- who otherwise might have been apathetic about teaching at a low-scoring school -- to potentially contribute to something that breaks the cycle of marginalization that already exists.

By concentrating on a school's overall performance record, Kay unwittingly points to something symptomatic about the majority of the widespread opposition against the school, which is an unwillingness to readily admit the racism that already exists in our public schools and in society at large. At the very least, anyone can admit that the legacy of racism is enough that something constructive needs to be done to counter the effect.

Kay's other arguments seem like window-dressing; piling up useless conjecture that ultimately has no necessary relationship to the proposed school. His claim that the school presupposes the a correlation between self-esteem and academic scoring -- something he dismisses based on evidence that black students statistically have higher self-esteem -- seems to suggest a compact, linear notion of personal well-being that doesn't exist. As if feeling a strong sense of self-worth (something which, at a certain level, becomes more a symptom of feelings of inferiority anyway) is the exact same as having an education that's relevant to your own history and culture; as if self-esteem and self-realization are the same thing. Other points Kay makes -- that Afrocentric schools teach "bizarre fairy tales", or that teaching everything in terms of race is reductionist -- assumes that all-black schools will necessarily by the very fact of their existence teach a certain curriculum.

Perhaps all these problems in black education can be solved within our current public schools, but the point is that it's a question that needs to be approached pragmatically, without all this idealistic baggage.