Submission + - Tech Billionaires and the Separate-But-Equal Revival
theodp writes: "As we approach the sixtieth anniversary of the Brown decision," writes the New Yorker's Jelani Cobb in The Failure of Desegregation, "the landmark case seems, in hindsight, like a qualified victory. Racially homogenous schools remain a fact of American life." And the resegregation of schools isn't limited to the Deep South. In the New York City public-school system, Cobb notes, Black and Latino students have become more likely to attend schools with minimal white enrollment, and a majority go to schools defined by concentrated poverty. And, despite the backing of Bill Gates and other like-minded super-wealthy tech "education investors", charter schools are no panacea for integration's failures. "Three-quarters of the city’s charter schools, which were a key component of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's efforts at education reform," writes Cobb, "have fewer than one per cent white enrollment," which UCLA's Civil Rights Project terms "apartheid schools". And at KIPP Schools, a darling of Gates, Netflix's Reed Hastings, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, "more than 86 percent of our students are from low-income families and eligible for the federal free or reduced-price meals program, and 95 percent are African American or Latino.' So, would Bill send his own kids to a charter school? 'A family like mine should not use up the inner-city capacity of these great schools,' Gates explained, 'but if by some happenstance, my kids had to go to KIPP schools [instead of, say, BillG's alma mater], I wouldn't feel bad at all.' So, while well-intentioned, are tech's billionaire education reformers inadvertently contributing to today's separate-but-equal revival?
