Deseg

They give power to DeVos and Sessions to regulate desegregation they will
circumvent the plan they hate minorities FIAT doesnt solve since they dont
FIAT use of data

Education exacerbates inequality and results in mass incarceration may other

policies are key
Berkshire interviewing Kantor 17 Writer and editor Jennifer Berkshire chronicles the
unintended consequences of the effort to make our education system function more like a
market. In addition to her popular blog, EduShyster.com, her writing as appeared in Salon, the
Progressive, the Baffler and the Washington Post. She is also the co-creator of a new education
podcast, Have You Heard, Harvey Kantor is a professor of education at the University of Utah,
he has a Ph.D in education from Stanford, 9-23-2017 ("Why do we keep insisting that education
can solve poverty?", No Publication, Accessed Online at
http://www.salon.com/2017/09/23/why-do-we-keep-insisting-that-education-can-solve-
poverty_partner/, Accessed on 9-23-2017, SV)
Unions are weak. Wage growth is non-existent. Plutocrats have all the power. And yet the
myth that education is all we need to finally "fix" poverty persists. AlterNet education editor
Jennifer Berkshire talks with historian Harvey Kantor about how the US gave up on the idea of
responding to poverty directly, instead making public schools the answer to poverty. Hint: it all
starts in the 1960s with the advent of the Great Society programs. Fast forward to the present
and our belief that education can reduce poverty and narrow the nations yawning inequality
chasm is stronger than ever. And yet our education arms race, argues Kantor, is actually
making income inequality worse.
Jennifer Berkshire: I read in the New York Times recently that education is the most powerful
force for *reducing poverty and lifting middle-class living standards.* Its a classic example of
what you describe in this excellent history as *educationalizing the welfare state.*
Harvey Kantor: Education hasn't always been seen as the solution to social and economic
problems in the US. During the New Deal, you had aggressive interventions in providing for
economic security and redistribution; education was seen as peripheral. But by the time you
get to the Great Society programs of the 1960s, education and human capital development
had moved to the very center. My colleague Robert Lowe and I started trying to think about
how that happened and what the consequences were for the way social policy developed in the
US from the 1960s through No Child Left Behind. How is it that there is so much policy making
and ideological talk around education and so little around other kinds of anti-poverty and
equalizing policies? We also wanted to try to understand how it was that education came to
shoulder so much of the burden for responding to poverty within the context of cutbacks in
the welfare state.
JB: You argue that by making education THE fix for poverty, weve ended up fueling
disappointment with our public schools, a disillusionment that is essentially misplaced.
Explain.
HK: One of the consequences of making education so central to social policy has been that
weve ended up taking the pressure off of the state for the kinds of policies that would be
more effective at addressing poverty and economic inequality. Instead were asking education
to do things it cant possibly do. The result has been increasing support for the kinds of market-
oriented policies that make inequality worse.
If we really want to address issues of inequality and economic insecurity, there are a lot of
other policies that we have to pursue besides or at least in addition to education policies,
and that part of the debate has been totally lost. Raising the minimum wage, or providing a
guaranteed income, which the last time we talked seriously about that was in the late 1960s,
increasing workers bargaining power, making tax policies more progressive things like that
are going to be much more effective at addressing inequality and economic security than
education policies. That argument is often taken to mean, *schools cant do anything unless we
address poverty first.* But thats not what we were trying to say.
JB: But isnt part of the attraction of todays education reform movement that it holds out the
tantalizing possibility that we can correct the effects of poverty without having to do anything
about, well, poverty?
HK: Thats right. Whats interesting about our our contemporary period is that were now
saying schools can respond to problems of achievement and that we dont need to address
any of these larger structural issues. When you think about these larger questions what
causes economic inequality? What causes economic insecurity? How are resources
distributed? Who has access to what? theyve been put off to the side. Were not doing
anything to address these questions at all.
JB: The belief that poverty can be overcome if we just find the right technocratic fix for what
ails our schools reached a crescendo during the Obama Administration. You describe this as
substituting accountability for redistribution.
HK: One of the end results of the way the accountability movement has transpired and
evolved has been to narrow the questions about educational inequality to very technical
questions. If we can just put in place the right teacher accountability system, or figure out the
right curriculum standards, thats going to solve the problem of schools with large numbers
of poor kids not doing as well. What I consider very technical questions bracket the larger
questions of why it is we have so many kids concentrated in poor schools. Why do the rich
kids get better schools? These arent just questions about accountability. Theyre more
fundamental questions about class and race and power and inequality. Even though the
accountability movement has often couched itself in the language of *no excuses,* and *every
kid can learn,* its approach has been to narrow the debate even more and make it harder to
address the questions that really underlie why some kids get an education that is so much
better than other kids.
JB: Well that sounds easy enough. We'll just just address those fundamental questions about
class, race, power and inequality. You go first.
HK: Its not that easy, in part because in the system we have now education is so key to the
allocation of opportunity. People who have the most resources preserve their advantages
and continue to operate in ways that serve those advantages. Its a strange paradox, but its
almost as though the more we try to increase opportunity, the more we increase inequality.
It happens largely because upper middle class parents, knowing that education has become
this allocative mechanism and the key gateway to preserving ones advantage, do everything
they can to make sure that their kids will have access to the resources that preserve those
advantages.
So even while education policy is focused on the schools that poor kids attend, were not
addressing the inequalities that have to do with the advantages richer parents have and work
so hard to maintain. It works to create more inequality at the same time that it cant really do
anything about the other things that are really driving income inequality: minimum wages,
unions, tax policy, the concentration of income at the top. So we have this strange situation
where were trying to address educational inequality while economic inequality is expanding
in ways that make educational inequality even worse. We dont address that kind of paradox
at all.
JB: You just used the word paradox. Id like to throw another *p* word into the mix: plutocrat.
Im thinking, of course, about the outsized role played by billionaires in trying to *fix* our
schools while benefiting from the income inequality that you argue is beyond the power of
schools to fix.
HK: We always think of businessmen and really rich people as being opposed to social policy
and against spending money to ameliorate social problems. But since the Progressive Era,
weve had these periods of really active involvement by business people in social policy,
including education. This seems to be one of those times where you have these really rich
philanthropists trying to intervene to improve schooling, largely because theyre trying to
legitimate the social system. What they wind up doing, though, is displacing the problems of
economic inequality that theyve created through their own economic policies back onto the
schools. They can say: *see were doing something about inequality,* but theyre not doing
anything about the way that wealth is distributed or the way their companies work that would
more fundamentally and directly impact those questions of inequality.
JB: There are some obvious similarities between the current debate over healthcare, which is
defined almost completely in terms of individual responsibility, and the direction we seem to be
heading educationally. In other words, will future generations even have need for the term
*social policy*?
HK: I think what has happened in education policy really parallels whats happened in social
policy more generally. Youve seen a tremendous disillusionment with the idea of social
responsibility and *the public.* Weve seen a shift in thinking about issues of inequality as a
social responsibility to a matter of individual responsibility. Each individual is responsible for
their own outcome, which is really how the market works. I think thats the underlying
ideological shift thats driving education policy, and social policy more generally.
JB: We started this interview talking about history and I want to finish there as well. You've
been thinking about how the *educationalizing* of our approach to poverty went hand-in-
hand with the rise of mass imprisonment. This seems like an urgent issue for us to come to
grips now, while also demonstrating the essential importance of historians.
HK: It now seems to me that we probably need to re-conceptualize the Great Society, not just
as an effort to bring African Americans, Latinos, and others into the New Deal social state by
expanding educational opportunity and fighting racial discrimination, but also as an effort to
address the fear of social disorder those demands for inclusion created. The Great Society
centered education policy in ways that intensified the commitment to educational solutions
to economic inequality and poverty that is driving educational policy today to the neglect of
other positive social policies. But it also planted the seeds of the carceral policies that later
blossomed into more punitive policies, aimed at policing the poor and controlling urban
unrest, that have resulted in the skyrocketing growth of the prison population. In this sense,
we might say that the Great Society set in motion or institutionalized a kind of dual social
policy or dual state: a *soft* state focusing on expanding opportunity through education and
a *hard* state focused on punishment. From this perspective, the historical question thus
becomes not only why the Great Society focused on education rather than expanding the
nascent welfare state put in place by the New Deal but also why the war on poverty
subsequently gave way to the war on crime.

Changing residential segregation is necessary to solve school segregation

Rothstein, 16 --- research associate of the Economic Policy Institute, a senior fellow at the
Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.
(12/12/16, Richard, We Cant Meaningfully Integrate Schools Without Desegregating
Neighborhoods, http://www.naacpldf.org/news/thurgood-marshall-institute-senior-
fellow-richard-rothstein-we-can%E2%80%99t-meaningfully-integrate-sch, accessed on
5/5/17, JMP)

A bill introduced in the New York City Council proposes to establish an office of school
diversity within the human rights commission dedicated to studying the prevalence and
causes of racial segregation in public schools and developing recommendations for
remedying such segregation.
But it is not reasonable, indeed it is misleading, to study school segregation in New
York City without simultaneously studying residential segregation. The two cannot
be separated.
School segregation is primarily a problem of neighborhoods, not schools. Schools
are segregated because the neighborhoods in which they are located are segregated.
Some school segregation can be ameliorated by adjusting school attendance
boundaries or controlling school choice, but these devices are limited and mostly
inapplicable to elementary school children, for whom long travel to school is neither
feasible nor desirable. We have adopted a national myth that neighborhoods are
segregated de facto; i.e., because of income differences, individual preferences, a history
of private discrimination, etc. In fact, neighborhoods in NYC are segregated primarily
because of a 20th century history of deliberate public policy to separate the races
residentially, implemented by the city, state, and federal governments. Just a few
examples:
when the city and state created Stuyvesant Town in the 1940s, they cleared an integrated
low-income neighborhood to build a segregated development for whites only;
 when the government financed suburbs like Levittown, it did so with a federal
requirement that no homes be sold to African Americans, and whites left the city for these
federally subsidized segregated suburbs;
when the federal government and city collaborated to build public housing in the mid-
twentieth century, they built separate projects for whites (e.g., the Williamsburg Houses)
and for African Americans (e.g., the Harlem River Houses). It was only after most whites in
public housing were given suburban housing options in federally segregated subdivisions
that vacancies in public housing for whites were opened to African Americans.
The most important service the proposed Office of School Diversity could perform
would be to call attention to this history, educate the public about it, and develop
political support to remedy NYCs unconstitutional residential segregation with
housing policies that integrate the city. Without this, schools in NYC will continue to
be segregated.
Most Americans today believe that the policies followed by government to segregate
New York City were characteristic of cities in the South, not the North, Midwest, or
West. This belief is mistaken. Such policies were pursued by government in every
region and metropolitan area in the nation. These policies were conscious, purposeful,
not the unintended consequences of benign policies, and not pursued primarily from an
accommodation with southern politicians. The policies have never been remedied; they
are the cause of the school and residential segregation we see everywhere around us.

Multiple other government and societal structures fill in to ensure racism continues
Cobb 14 Professor of Journalism at Columbia University, he won the 2015 Sidney Hillman
Prize for his journalistic race opinions.
(Jelani Cobb, Professor of journalism at Columbia University, won the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize
for his journalistic race opinions. 4/16/14, The Failure of Desegregation,
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-failure-of-desegregation, SR)

The Supreme Court decision on Brown, in 1954, marked a moral high point in American
history, but the practice that it dispatched to the graveyard had already begun to mutate into
something less tangible and far more durable. What would, in the end, preserve the principle
of separate inequality was not protests like the one staged by Orval Faubus, the governor of
Arkansas, who deployed the National Guard to Little Rocks Central High School, in 1957, in
order to keep black students out. Instead, it was policies like the Interstate Highway Act, whose
passage one year earlier helped spawn American suburbia. In the wake of Brown, private
schools, whose implicit mission was to educate white children, cropped up throughout the
South. The persistent legacies of redlining, housing discrimination, and wage disparity
conspired to produce segregation without Jim Crowmaintaining all the familiar elements of
the past in an updated operating system.
To the extent that the word desegregation remains in our vocabulary, it describes an antique
principle, not a current priority. Today, we are more likely to talk of diversitybut
diversification and desegregation are not the same undertaking. To speak of diversity, in light
of this countrys history of racial recidivism, is to focus on bringing ethnic variety to largely
white institutions, rather than dismantling the structures that made them so white to begin
with.
And so, sixty years after Brown, it is clear that the notion of segregation as a discrete
phenomenon, an evil that could be flipped, like a switch, from on to off, by judicial edict, was
deeply nave. The intervening decades have shown, in large measure, the limits of what
political efforts directed at desegregation alone could achieve, and the crumbling of both
elements of separate but equal has left us at an ambivalent juncture. To the extent that
desegregation becomes, once again, a pressing concernand even that may be too grand a
hopeit will have to involve the tax code, the minimum wage, and other efforts to redress
income inequality. For the tragedy of this moment is not that black students still go to
overwhelmingly black schools, long after segregation was banished by law, but that they do so
for so many of the same reasons as in the days before Brown.
Devos will cut budget and not hire individuals with expertise to implement the
aff
Quinlan, 2/17/17 (Casey, Betsy DeVos interviews show a willingness to cut the
Department of Education; In her second week on the job, DeVos has shown she distrusts
department staff and plans an audit of all programs, https://thinkprogress.org/betsy-
devos-education-policies-46608a6da03a, accessed on 5/27/17, JMP)

Betsy DeVos has only been education secretary for a week and a half, but its already clear
that she will make decisions that would cut the Department of Education
significantly, undermine civil rights and protection from sexual assault, and continue
more partisan hires.
During the confirmation process, DeVos, who does not have any experience running or
working for public schools, showed a lack of knowledge of major federal laws and
education concepts. She refused to commit to collecting data on civil rights matters,
keep guidance on how to investigate campus sexual assault, or not cut public education
funding. DeVos only experience with education has been through her work as a
philanthropist and a political operative.
Heres what we can expect:
Devos wants to cut funding for the department.
Although DeVos tried to strike a conciliatory tone in her first speech as education secretary
before the department staff, her remarks since then have been fairly hostile to the
departmentpromising audits and assuring Americans that the department could do
much less.
In an interview with Michael Patrick Shiels of the Big Show radio program on Tuesday,
DeVos said that although she has only been on the job for few days, she can guarantee
there are things the department has been doing that are probably not necessary or
important for a federal agency to do.
DeVos added:
Well be examining and auditing, and reviewing all of the programs of the department
and really figuring out what is the core mission and how can the federal department of
education really support and enhance the role of the departments in the states. Because
really when it comes down to it, education and the provision of education is really a state
and local responsibility to a large extent. So these sorts of things will be part of our focus in
the coming weeks and I think well have some good robust conversations about that.
In an interview with Axios on Friday, DeVos responded to a question about whether the
federal government should have any role in education by saying, It would be fine with me
to have myself worked out of a job, but Im not sure thatIm not sure that there will be a
champion movement in Congress to do that.
During President Donald Trumps campaign, he said he wanted to cut the department
significantly, if not eliminate it entirely. The Department of Educations responsibilities
include data collection, awarding Pell grants and federal financial aid through loans, and
provides oversight over states in cases of discrimination. Although it would be difficult to
eliminate the department, and it is not likely to happen, it could be significantly
weakened depending on what is requested for the education budget.
A conservative group with ties to the Trump administration as well as DeVos in particular,
published a document pushing for the dismantling of the department, The Washington Post
reported on Wednesday. The Council for National Policy document is a proposal for a
gradual, voluntary return at all levels to free-market private schools, church schools and
home schools as the normative American practice. The proposal to abolish the
department dovetails with the long-held views of many Republicans, and Trump
suggested during the 2016 campaign that the agency could be largely eliminated. The
Council for National Policy took the document down after the Post reported on it.
Devos has little regard for civil rights or sexual assault.
In her interview with Axios, DeVos said that the department tackled important civil
rights issues, but did not acknowledge that those issues still exist today. She said
Title IX and school desegregation are important issues, but when asked if there are
remaining issues like that where the federal government should intervene, she
responded, I cant think of any now.
That statement may be cause for concern for educators, parents, and advocates for
disadvantaged students, since it indicates DeVos could propose making cuts to the
Office for Civil Rights. That office handles complaints about Title IX violations, which
includes womens access to sports and the investigation of campus rape, the rights of
students with disabilities, and racially disparate student discipline.
These issues have not been resolved. School segregation by race and class persists. In K-12
education, black students are 1.9 times more likely than white students to be expelled from
school without educational services. Black students were also 2.3 times more likely to be
disciplined through involvement of officers.
A 2015 national poll from the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation found
that one in five women who attended a residential college said they had been sexually
assaulted. Although two in five girls play sports in school now, compared to 1 in 27 when
Title IX was enacted, they still have far fewer opportunities to play sports in high school
compared to boys. Girls are also more likely to drop out of sports earlier in life.
DeVos vision for the department will become clearer when it comes time to prepare a
budget, said Lindsey Tepe, senior policy analyst for education policy program for New
America. By April at latest, Americans will know what DeVos intends to improve funding
forand what areas she would like to reduce funding for.
If they have hope of implementing a large scale voucher program or putting any money
behind the initiatives theyve spoken to it has to be brought up in the budget and it as to be
done right away, Tepe said. Youll see if certain offices, such as the Office for Civil Rights,
get the funding they need to support the current personnel they have in place The dollars
really talk.
DeVos needs staff with expertise. She may not welcome them.
It is particularly important for DeVos, someone with no experience working in a
public school, to surround herself with people with the experience and expertise to
help her guide the department, said Tepe. However, her choices so far have been
mostly political and ideological rather than veterans of the department who have
worked through both Republican and Democratic administrations.
In the next couple weeks if she doesnt start assembling people who have some leadership
in the department, who have policy chops, its going to be really troubling, Tepe said. It
should be troubling for everyone frankly.
But DeVos does not appear to trust staff at the department. Townhall, a conservative
website, interviewed DeVos and published a piece on Thursday that says she believes
there are people in the department who are committed to her not succeeding and
that she pledges to do whatever can be done to render them ineffective.
The department has a fairly small staff for the number of programs it administers, so it
wouldnt be easy to cut the department without significantly hampering its effectiveness,
Tepe said. According to the Congressional Budget Office, more than 95 percent of the
departments 2012 budget was obligated for grants for students attending college or to
state and local governments.
The department is, for the number programs they administer and for amount of
responsibilities they do have, its a really small staff, Tepe said. A lot of new leaders
coming in will do these audits, but the tone and buying into conventional wisdom that Of
course there must be waste, from the get-go is going to sour a lot of relationships with
people she will depend on and rest of her appointees will depend on to enact any sort of
agenda.
There is also some evidence that the department may not be properly vetting staff. A
field organizer for Trumps campaign, Teresa UnRue, left her position at the department
only a few days after she was hired, Politico reported, after it was discovered that she made
Islamophobic statements on social media.
Desegregation wont solveracism is too entrenched in society and white privilege is
maintained within the context of desegregated schools
Wells, et. al, 04 - Professor of Sociology and Education, Columbia Teacher's College
(October 2004, Amy Stuart Wells, Anita Tijerina Revilla Assistant Professor of Women's
Studies at UNLV, Jennifer Jellison Holme Post-doctoral Fellow, Graduate School of Education
and Information Studies at UCLA, and Awo Korantemaa Atanda Senior Survey Specialist,
Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., Virginia Law Review, 50 YEARS OF BROWN V. BOARD OF
EDUCATION: ESSAY: THE SPACE BETWEEN SCHOOL DESEGREGATION COURT ORDERS AND
OUTCOMES: THE STRUGGLE TO CHALLENGE WHITE PRIVILEGE, 90 Va. L. Rev. 1721, Lexis-Nexis
Academic, SR)

While few commentators have made the connection between greater segregation and a
growing achievement gap, and even fewer have contemplated efforts to stem the tide of racial
segregation, there has been no shortage of ideas regarding how to equalize student
achievement across separate schools. Some argue in favor of tougher accountability measures,
and some encourage school finance equity lawsuits designed to bring more money to
segregated and poor urban schools. n6
The collective conclusion emanating from this commentary is as follows: The Brown decision
was a historic ruling, clearly one of the most significant Supreme Court decisions of the
twentieth century. Still, despite the optimism that this case fostered fifty years ago, school
desegregation failed as a public policy. Thus, today, we need to find alternative means of
fulfilling the promise of Brown within more racially separate schools.
Is this a more acceptable way of saying we gave up on Brown and now we are simply trying to
do right by the promise of Plessy v. Ferguson? n7 What is lost by fast-forwarding history from
1954 to today is a consideration of the daily struggles within local communities to
desegregate public schools and how the vision of Brown was compromised by many facets of
racial politics in the United States.
In other words, if, as some have argued, segregation is but a symptom of the larger disease of
white supremacy or racism, n8 it is clear that efforts to desegregate public schools and
thereby eradicate the symptom have been compromised by the ongoing disease. In the
process of attempting to alleviate segregation amid a society still firmly grounded in a belief
system based on white supremacy, [*1723] the public schools were forced to swim against a
tide so powerful and so pervasive that we should not blame them for failing, but should
applaud what progress they made in spite of larger societal forces.
We have just completed a five-year study of six communities that tried to racially balance their
public schools during the 1970s. n9 Through this research we have learned of the details that lie
between the court orders (or whatever desegregation policy existed) and the student outcome
and demographic data that have been captured in quantitative analyses. In the space between
the mandates of desegregation and the results, we found that the schools and communities
we studied often unwittingly reproduced racial inequality by maintaining white privilege
within the context of desegregated schools. Yet at the same time, these schools provided
spaces where students and educators crossed the color line in ways they had never done
before and have not done since.
We argue that the school desegregation policies that existed in these school districts were
better than nothing, but simply were not enough to change the larger society single-
handedly. We illustrate how difficult it was for the people in these schools to live up to the
goals of school desegregation given the larger societal forces, including racial attitudes and
politics, housing segregation, and economic inequality working against them. We also
document how deeply committed some of these actors, both educators and students, were to
trying to bring about change.
In this way, our study speaks to larger lessons about the role of schools in society and the uphill
but worthwhile efforts of lawyers and judges to use schools as one of very few tools for social
change. The desegregated schools of the 1970s embodied both the hope and the
disappointment of Brown's promise to lessen racial inequality in the United States. We should
not view the disappointment as an indictment of the idea of school desegregation or the legal
levers that allowed it to happen in hundreds of school districts across the country. Rather, we
should use this historical, qualitative data to help us better understand the degree of burden
we placed [*1724] on the public schools to solve a systemic, societal problem that affects
every dimension of our lives, from where we live and how much money we make to who we
pray with and who our close friends are. Racial inequality and the resultant segregation did
not begin in the public schools; thus, we should not expect remedies in the public schools to
solve the problem alone. But we can rely on racially diverse public schools - to the extent that
current policies allow them to exist - to be important sites in the struggle for a more just
society. Lawyers and legal scholars who helped fight for school desegregation and who
continue to push for racial diversity in educational settings need to understand this more
complex view of the history and reality of school desegregation in the United States in order to
move forward with new legal strategies.