A history of racist policies, such as housing segregation and unequal funding, means that schools with a high proportion of black students often have resource constraints for specialized programs. There are real, systemic factors that fuel the disparity in access to gifted and specialized education.
The implication is clear: Black students are regularly excluded from schools’ conceptions of what it means to be gifted, talented, or advanced. Yasmiyn Irizarry, a professor of African studies at the University of Texas at Austin whose child attends LASA, wrote that this design was “ reminiscent of apartheid.”
The magnet students, who are mostly white and Asian, take classes on the second floor, and the LBJ students, who are majority black and Latino, take classes on the floor below. In 2007, the district moved to split part of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Early College High School into a separate Liberal Arts and Science Academy (LASA), a public magnet high school now ranked the best Texas high school and the 11th-best high school in the United States. The idea that tracking can create a “school within a school” became a physical reality in one Austin, Texas, school. Though the Office for Civil Rights ordered the district to hire a consultant to fix this, segregation remains an ongoing challenge. In the South Orange–Maplewood School District in New Jersey, the American Civil Liberties Union stated in a 2014 complaint that racial segregation across academic tracks “has created a school within a school at Columbia High School,” where more than 70 percent of the students in lower-level classes were black and more than 70 percent of the students in advanced classes were white. At the other end of the state, in San Diego, 8 percent of students are black, but just 3 percent of GATE students are. A Department of Education Office for Civil Rights report from 2014 called attention to a Sacramento, California, district where black students accounted for 16.3 percent of the district’s enrollment but only 5.5 percent of students in GATE programs. The level of disparity varies across the nation. Read: New York City high schools’ endless segregation problem This disparity across tracks is what social scientists commonly call “ racialized tracking”-in which students of color get sorted out of educational opportunities and long-term socioeconomic success. A shocking 53 percent of remedial students are black. Yet less than 10 percent of students in GATE are black. Other students are kept in grade-level classes, or tracked into remedial courses that are tasked with catching students up to academic baselines.īlack students make up nearly 17 percent of the total student population nationwide. These programs are tasked with challenging presumably smart students with acceleration and extra enrichment activities. The minority gap in enrollment at elite academic public schools is a problem across America.īut more troubling, and often less discussed, is the modern-day form of segregation that occurs within the same school through academic tracking, which selects certain students for gifted and talented education (GATE) programs. The fact that not even 1 percent of the incoming freshman class identifies as black at New York City’s elite Stuyvesant High School made national headlines last month. The segregation of America’s public schools is a perpetual newsmaker.