Fibonacci Blue
Somali Independence Day celebration on Lake Street in Minneapolis.
At a Minneapolis school board meeting in December, parents, teachers and students from the city’s Lyndale Community School lined the walls of the board room, clutching bright blue signs in support of their school. Farhiya Del, a second grade teacher at Lyndale Community School, took to the microphone to express her concern over a recent change in busing options for the school.
“We love each other, we are a community,” Del told Minneapolis’s nine school board members. Lyndale School has been “a very special home to the Somali community for over twenty years,” she continued, highlighting the school’s supportive, diverse population. “Even if you go to Mogadishu today, people know what Lyndale is. I’m not kidding,” Del emphasized, referencing Somalia’s capital city. The packed room broke into claps and cheers.
A handful of Lyndale parents then took a turn at the microphone, explaining that, due to district changes in bus service to the school, many Somali families were being forced to consider other options for their students—including sending them to charter schools. (To attract students. charter schools often promise, and sometimes actually provide, door-to-door transportation, which is paid for by the state.) Not only is the current and projected loss of Somali students causing Lyndale to lose funding and cut staff, it is also threatening what supporters say is one of the school’s greatest assets: its racially integrated population.
"If you go to Mogadishu today, people know what Lyndale is. I’m not kidding."
While addressing the school board, Lana Barkawi, the parent of two Lyndale students, rattled off a list of what makes the school so special, from the “warm feeling” that surrounds Lyndale to its unique Arab language program. Lyndale is an “academically excellent, racially integrated, K-5 community school that has flown under the radar for years,” Barkawi insisted.
What is also notable about Lyndale, Barkawi added, is the fact that it has been “removed from the state’s racially identifiable schools list.”
In Minnesota, schools that have more than 80 percent students of color are considered “racially identifiable.” In the recent past, Lyndale School served a larger percentage of students of color, partly because the Minneapolis Public Schools’ choice system once allowed families (primarily white families) in the neighborhood to send their kids to majority white schools in less diverse corners of the city. Nearly ten years ago, the district stopped this practice and made Lyndale into a neighborhood school; its demographics have changed and become less “racially identifiable” as a result.
Minnesota Department of Education statistics show that, today, one-third of Lyndale’s 548 students are white and just over 50 percent are black. Other racial and ethnic groups are present in the school as well, a fairly accurate reflection of the neighborhood (also called Lyndale) the school serves. This makes Lyndale a rarity among public and charter schools in Minneapolis and across the United States. Thanks to decades of blatant housing discrimination and choice-fueled education policy, segregation in America’s schools remains a thorn in the side of attempts to improve outcomes for all students.
The issue of segregated schools has blown up, locally and nationally, in the past few weeks. In early December, the Associated Press published an article addressing the increasing “racial isolation” of U.S. charter schools. AP reporters analyzed enrollment and student achievement data in the “42 states that have enacted charter school laws” and made an important discovery. Charters, the AP found, “are vastly over-represented among schools where minorities study in the most extreme racial isolation.” What’s more, they found, hyper-segregated schools (both public and charter) often do little to boost student outcomes.
The AP article also discusses the finer points of why some families may prefer racially isolated schools, including concerns that traditional public schools are “sometimes seen as hostile environments.” These concerns are stoked by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, whose director, Vanessa Descalzi, refuted the idea that segregation exists. Calling charter schools “modern schools of choice,” Descalzi insisted that racially isolated schools are simply a reflection of parental choice, “rooted in the belief that the school will meet their child’s educational needs.” This, Descalzi declares, is “not segregation.”
“It is clear that segregation, and who gets a quality choice, matters.”
Not so fast. Several responses to the AP article followed, including Andre Perry’s piece in the online education news outlet, The Hechinger Report. Perry, currently a fellow at the Brookings Institution, has focused much of his work as an education researcher and journalist on the all-charter New Orleans school system. The New Orleans schools are graded on an A-F scale, and Perry notes that “virtually no (less than one percent) white students attend schools that have earned a ‘D’ or ‘F’ performance rating.” The majority of white students in the city are enrolled in “A- or B- rated schools.”
Perry’s point is blunt: “It is clear that segregation, and who gets a quality choice, matters.” His take on the AP story also includes a look at how frequently district schools are built around (and still promote) segregation, observing that, “We’ve simply given up on the radical idea of integrating schools.” There is hope, he writes, in the efforts of some to create “deliberately integrated schools.”
Perry would have perhaps been pleased to see Lyndale parents, staff, and students standing up for their school, and calling on board members to help them “fill the bus” with Somali parents. Losing these students means the school will become more white, parents pointed out, disrupting the uniquely strong and integrated community that has taken root at Lyndale.
“Look,” one parent told board members, “the kids that come into the doors of Lyndale Elementary are treated like amazing people and that’s not a guarantee for black kids anywhere in this country.”
Sarah Lahm is a Minneapolis-based writer whose work has appeared in The Progressive and other local and national publications.