Courtesy of Sarah Lahm
On a recent morning, I woke up to a happy sight: my kids’ public magnet school, in Minneapolis, was featured in the local newspaper. “At Minneapolis magnet schools,” the Star Tribune headline crowed, “diversity has been on the rise.”
All my children attended Barton Open School, a K-8 district magnet, built around a progressive education philosophy. In recent years, thanks to purposeful district action, Barton has become a welcoming site for all, where almost half of the students are kids of color.
At Barton, the growing diversity is “‘absolutely a success,’” according to assistant principal Diane Bagley. Speaking to Star Tribune reporter Beena Raghavendran, Bagley waxed poetic about the changes at Barton, noting that having a “global society” within the school is part of its educational mission. It is also a key way to prepare students for “what they are going to see out in the greater world,” Bagley promises, as Minnesota, and the United States, become increasingly nonwhite.
Barton, though, along with the other magnet schools profiled in Raghavendran’s article, are anomalies. Magnet schools came along in the 1970s, when the federal government sued states like Minnesota for failure to comply with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, requiring schools to actively pursue integration plans. In the early 1970s, the Minneapolis Public Schools received federal grant money to develop a district-sponsored desegregation plan that included setting up progressive schools.
Barton is a holdover from that era, and the fact that the district is now making this a priority puts both the district and the school at odds with an alarming national and local trend: resegregated schools. A recent Vice News article notes that ninety-three schools in the Twin Cities metro area are now “hypersegregated,” meaning ninety-five percent of the student body is nonwhite.
Of those ninety-three schools, sixty-three are charter schools. This is no accident. In that Vice News article, Allison McCann provides a succinct overview of the switch from federally mandated desegregation plans to “voluntary integration efforts.” A series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings have largely let states off the hook for mandatory school integration plans. Minnesota was no exception.
In 1999, Minnesota “got rid of” required desegregation rules, and switched to school choice schemes that paved the way for what we have today: a rapidly growing landscape of racially and economically isolated charter and public schools. Here’s what’s most startling: At the time, Minnesota lawmakers exempted charter schools—and charter schools only—from having to comply with even “voluntary integration plans.” This meant that the growing list of charters (which started in Minnesota in 1991) could drop any pretense of serving all students, and could instead operate as ethnically, racially or even gender specific schools.
Allowing schools to abandon desegregation plans flies in the face of what most research says is best for students of color. In her Vice News piece, McCann cites long-term studies of black adults showing that integration leads to better lifelong outcomes for minority students in terms of employment, housing and avoiding incarceration.
Minnesota is the only state in the nation where charter schools do not have to follow even voluntary integration plans. Some chalk this up to a “policy conflict between the importance of integration and the importance of choice,” McCann’s article reveals. This easy breezy way of thinking, which reduces segregation to a “choice,” is supported by current Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, who has been far less concerned with quality or accountability than with pushing for a completely market-driven education system.
Back at Barton Open School, maintaining a strong, diverse magnet program will not be easy. The Minneapolis Public Schools face a $28 million budget deficit for the coming school year thanks to years of a statewide disinvestment in public education. Still, the pro-immigrant, handmade posters lining the school’s hallways speak to a hopeful future by simply declaring: All Welcome Here.