Thanks so much for being on this intense electoral year roller coaster ride with me since May. This is the last month of these weekly emails about issues related to our struggle for democracy. I’m not sure what’s going to come after that, so let me know if there’s content you’d like from me in the coming months! When I went to the Religious Freedom Summit in April (hosted by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State), I felt an urgency around this series, so I’ve been sharing content on a different theme each month. This month, it’s individual standing issues, so plunge in as you have curiosity!
And again, thanks for reading, for being a paid member, for sharing this newsletter, and most of all for engaging in the fight for democracy in any way, big or small. (Including getting out to vote and asking your friends if they’ll commit to going as well! Turns out that’s a really effective way of increasing voter turnout!)
Race and education today
Today I want to talk for a minute about school segregation, and how even though we’re against it, it keeps happening. And if you’re thinking, “but we outlawed school segregation—and all segregation—during the 1954 supreme court case Brown v the Topeka Board of Education,” absolutely. And yet a 2022 report by the Century Foundation found that “As of the 2018–19 school year, one in six public school students attended schools where over 90 percent of their peers had their same racial background.”
That’s because of a thing called de facto segregation. We got rid of legal segregation—or de jure segregation—in 1954. But because public education is tied to property taxes, it’s possible for people with more income to move to places where the schools are better while people without can’t, leading to de facto segregation, or segregation that just is, whether there are laws about it or not. So even if no person in the entire US were prejudiced, schools segregated by race and also by class could – and do – still happen.
This matters because diverse schools where all of the students’ gifts, contributions and cultures are honored lead to healthier children who perform better academically and contribute in meaningful ways to our democracy. Assaults on public education hurt us all and hurt the country…but the system as it is hurts us, too. I hope together we can imagine a better future for our kids.
Race and education in our history
So this week’s focus is on people who don’t want us to get an education, and I want to share a story with you that just blew my mind when I heard it. When I was a student at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, the Dean of Students, Winnifred Sullivan, gave a lecture about the Klan and…wait for it…their campaign in favor of public education.
What?!
Dr. Sullivan is an expert on church-state separation and also on the ways in which religious freedom has been unevenly applied particularly in relation to Catholics. Her research showed that back in the 1920s, the Klan was obsessed with what they believed was the secret power of the Catholic church, bolstered by an influx of immigrants from Europe, including from Catholic-leaning countries. That combination of nativism and anti-Catholicism led them to collaborate with the National Education Association, the NEA, to support MANDATORY public education because in those days, most private schools were Catholic, and most Protestant schools were technically secular but functionally Protestant. It was partly about making sure kids got indoctrinated with what they saw as the right morals, and it was partly about removing a source of income from Catholic parishes. I’m not sure the NEA asked too many questions or wanted to think too deeply about this extra source of support.
You already know their efforts failed, and it wouldn’t be long before they were trying to abandon public schools altogether after the 1954 Brown v Board court case that integrated the schools. This feels like a good lesson because it reminds us that when our opponents are on our side, it’s worth exploring WHY. It might make you revisit whether you’re actually doing what you meant to do, or whether you created an unintended and very undesired outcome.
Psst…if you missed me talking about the Segregation Academies of the 1950s, here’s the link to that piece, as well as a substack I wrote on barriers to education and how people fought back!
How our forebears fought for education access:
Since we’re talking about education this week, I wanted to share the story of a movement ancestor you might find really encouraging right now. Her name is Mamie Tape, and in 1884, she was an 8-year-old whose parents wanted her to go to an English language school in San Francisco. The school district said the Cantonese language school was where she was supposed to go. Mamie and her parents took their case all the way to the California Supreme Court, where they won their fight for integration in public education. This case, Tape v. Hurley, was used in building the case for desegregation nationally in the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education Supreme Court case in 1954. So whenever you feel overwhelmed by your desire to make public education better and more accessible, remember you have an 8-year-old ancestor—and her parents—cheering you on. You can learn more here!
And another thing…
On the theme of attacks on public education, I would like to complain about a now-famous, still-in-use excerpt from a widely used public high school US history book. It came to people’s attention in 2015 when this image went viral, lifting up the caption: "The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations."
In 2020, the NYT did an analysis of high school history textbooks and found the same textbook for a California market and for a Texas market focused on different things, and since the state of TX requires all public schools use the same history textbook, and they are such a big market, their choices affect the books other schools in other states choose. Which is why this textbook is so widely used, and while McGraw-Hill immediately changed the digital version to talk instead about “forced migration,” the physical copies remained available for sale for at least another four years before an updated print version was made available. It frustrates me that in their efforts to appease a political agenda, they’re willing to lie about our history. And rob our children of a real education.
Thanks for letting me be cranky. I hope you enjoy your weekend and I hope we find a way together to create public education that really is for all children and isn’t afraid of facts.