ST. LOUIS 鈥 The chairman of the Black Leadership Roundtable told about 70 area educators and businesspeople Saturday that the best way to ensure children in high-poverty neighborhoods receive the education they need is to dissolve school district boundaries.
鈥淎 city-county school district is the only way all children would have access to a quality education,鈥 said Ron Jackson at a summit on education organized by the roundtable at Harris-Stowe State University.
Several in the audience expressed the unlikelihood that a city-county school district would ever catch on, considering the region鈥檚 fractured politics. But Jackson said too much is at stake for black leaders not to try.
鈥淯nless you鈥檙e willing to take radical or dramatic action, nothing ever changes,鈥 he said.
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The roundtable鈥檚 annual summit centered around the inequities that persist throughout public education, particularly in the 最新杏吧原创 area.
Children in high-poverty schools are overwhelmingly black. And in those schools, students are a third less likely to pass state exams as children in schools with more economic diversity, state data show. Children in high-poverty schools tend to go on to high schools that don鈥檛 offer high-level courses, such as calculus and advanced placement courses.
Mike Jones, vice president of the Missouri Board of Education, told the group this is a community problem that goes beyond the classroom. Children who are black and poor often come from neighborhoods that have lost their structural integrity, he said, after generations of dwindling investment and resources.
Jones also called upon black leaders to make education their rallying cry.
鈥淚f we鈥檙e going to successfully change the system of education, we as black leadership are going to have to have the same position on education that the NRA has on guns,鈥 he said.
Panelists included Amy Stuart Wells, a Columbia University professor who has explored the impact busing and desegregation had on 最新杏吧原创 children. Nikole Hannah-Jones of ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization, examined the history of housing segregation in the 最新杏吧原创 area and the impact it has had on schools.
鈥淲hat we have really been talking about is structural inequality,鈥 said Cedric Merlin Powell, a professor at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law. One way to address it, he said, is 鈥渢o move away from these imaginary district boundaries.... If everyone has the same stake in this endeavor, then everyone rises and falls together.鈥
Last year, district boundaries came down, in a sense, for 2,200 children in the Riverview Gardens and Normandy districts as some transferred to higher-performing schools under a Missouri Supreme Court ruling. That experience amplified the conversation many educators and policymakers are having about giving disadvantaged children more opportunity.
