Thread by @travtufts

“A city with barely half as many children as it had in 1950. And those who remain are likely to be in families that are poorer, on average, than the city as a whole.” #bospoli bostonglobe.com/business/2020/…

“Reasons, researchers say, range from the high cost of housing to the perception that the city’s public school system is inferior.”

Sound familiar, @BostonGlobe? Spend barrels of ink to paint @BostonSchools as “bad” and folks believe you.

What @BostonSchools suffers from is structural racism. White families fled the desegregation order. A district that serves largely black and brown students was left to physically crumble until facilities became an embarrassment. Decades of city leadership ignored them.

The largely white and suburban Boston press painted the district as “inferior”.

Privileged families consumed this fiction, bolstered by conscious or unconscious white supremacy and the belief that black and brown schools are “bad”.

Research on the subject shows that kids benefit from attending well-integrated public schools.

As Thurgood Marshall famously said in his Milliken dissent. “Unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever begin to live together.”

A few more thoughts:

I have two white, privileged kids in BPS. (Their experience is obviously different from that of their Latinx and Black classmates.)

My kids benefit from learning and playing in a racially diverse school, and I make no apologies for that. #bospoli #kidstoday

Beyond the social and cognitive benefits of an integrated school, my kids are growing up in an America where white folks will be <50% of the population. But by living in Boston and attending BPS, they’re already in this future and learning how to navigate a diverse society.

But school integration has historically been besieged by forces both active and passive, malicious and unconscious. Boston’s white flight of the 70s has a counterpoint in today’s gentrification, high-end development, and displacement in black and brown neighborhoods.

It should come as no surprise that we’re losing families when median 3BR rents are $2550/mo., when we plan and build housing only the wealthy can afford, when there is a property tax boom, yet kids can’t drink safe water at school and their art teacher is cut. #bospoli

Segregation *within* BPS continues to increase as a result of the home-based assignment system and residential segregation patterns.

Half of our schools are now “intensely segregated”, and the number of majority-white schools has grown in recent years.

We can’t rely on leaders who have been party to the decades-long disinvestment in a global-majority BPS.

We can’t expect those who plan Boston as a playground for the rich and childless to turn this trend around. Those of us with the privilege of options must exercise them.

Don’t move when your kids turn four. Visit our schools. See the learning and joy happening in them.

Enter global-majority schools humbly and not as an authority on how it should run for *your* kid.

Give your kids the gift of integration and then work to support *all* our kids.

Note: these are huge, systemic problems. Talking about race is tricky for someone who has the privilege to be able to ignore it when convenient.

I am often wrong or off-base, so I accept your criticism of this thread.