How housing policies led to segregated schools

Richard Rothstein has long been the go-to scholar for journalists writing about segregated schools. In books like “Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right” and “Class and Schools,” he sounded the alarm about the harm done by segregating children by race and socioeconomic status.

Recently the Economic Policy Institute research associate has turned his attention to the forces that caused much of that school segregation. He blames government policies that created racially segregated neighborhoods through much of the 20th century.

Richard Rothstein

“I contend we do not have de facto segregation in this country,” he said Friday at a Public Policy and International Affairs conference at Indiana University. “Every metropolitan area in this country has been segregated purposefully by public policy.”

Two strands of federal policy created and maintained segregated housing, including in neighborhoods that had previously been integrated, he said. One was construction of separate public housing for whites and blacks. The other was promotion of whites-only subdivisions.

Segregation also was protected with restrictive deed covenants that prohibited the buyer of a home from subsequently selling it to a non-white family. For decades, Rothstein said, government officials and university legal departments used their clout to enforce those restrictions.

Today, public housing is generally associated with crowded projects in cities. But the first public housing was built for middle-class white families who had trouble finding decent housing in the Great Depression, Rothstein said. Later, segregated public housing for blacks was built to accommodate factory and shipyard workers who migrated to cities during World War II.

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Candidate claims own path, but will it matter?

Jennifer McCormick, the Republican candidate for Indiana superintendent of public instruction, seemed to walk back her support of school vouchers at a candidate debate this week. She also came out forcefully for better pay and more autonomy for teachers.

But that may be too little, too late to win her much support from educators, often a key constituency for anyone who wants to be elected the state’s chief school officer.

McCormick is challenging Democratic Superintendent Glenda Ritz, who won the loyalty of many teachers by slaying the education-reform dragon Tony Bennett in the 2012 election and later by standing up to Gov. Mike Pence and his appointed State Board of Education.

At the debate, which took place in Fort Wayne and can be watched on the State Impact Indiana website, McCormick attacked Ritz for sloppy management of the Indiana Department of Education and poor communication with school districts. Ritz defended her record and pointed to her Vision 2020 plan for universal pre-K, less testing and improved high school graduation rates.

Ritz’s supporters have cast McCormick as “Tony Bennett 2.0,” a kinder, gentler version of the former superintendent, whom teachers loved to hate. McCormick, the superintendent of Yorktown Community Schools, insists she’s just a professional educator who decided to run out of frustration.

“It is time we put students before politics, which has not happened for the last eight years,” she said.

That’s a smart statement, because going back eight years takes in Bennett’s tenure as well as Ritz’s. But the idea that you can remove politics from an elected office in this era of