50 years on, integration results are mixed
MIAMI (AP) – Five decades ago, Gary Range became one of the first black students to integrate Miami public schools when he marched into an all-white elementary school three blocks from his house.
Today when he walks the halls of Orchard Villa Elementary, he sees new, cream colored walls where the smaller schoolhouse once stood, along with dedicated teachers and administrators.
What he doesn’t see: A single white or Asian student. Orchard Villa is 97 percent black.
“It’s not been fulfilled,” Range said of the district’s efforts to integrate the school. “Change has been fulfilled. Change from a white school to a black school. Integration’s supposed to be a mixture.”
Fifty years after the Miami-Dade School Board assigned the first black students to Orchard Villa, the county’s high level of residential segregation still trickles down into its schools. Orchard Villa is located in a predominantly black neighborhood.
It’s a story replicated in communities nationwide. Researchers largely point to continuing patterns of residential segregation and demographic changes in explaining why many schools have not become more integrated. U.S. Census data show that residential segregation of Hispanics has generally increased since 1980. While black segregation has declined, they are still more isolated than other groups.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2007 a district couldn’t explicitly use race in assigning students to schools unless it was federal court supervision in racial inequality cases.
That and other Supreme Court rulings have largely chilled plans to make schools more diverse, says Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California in Los Angeles.
“We’re going backwards, comprehensively,” said Orfield. He said districts could make assignments based on characteristics likely to increase diversity – neighborhood, language, test scores.
Thirty miles south of Orchard Villa, officials at Air Base Elementary in Homestead have used some of those characteristics to achieve varied racial makeup. At the A-rated magnet school, 59 percent of students are Hispanic; 21 percent black; 14 percent white and 6 percent Asian or multiracial. Air Base integrated soon after Orchard Villa.
“Some kids really, really respect other children around the school,” 9-year-old Fancy Blunt says.
Principal Raul Calzadilla Jr. says school officials take academics, attendance and geography into account when they recruit students, but also try to attain a good ethnic balance.
“When you have a school that’s either 100 percent Hispanic or 100 percent African American, you just don’t see the kind of spark, the kind of opportunities for learning that you get from being exposed to other cultures,” he says.
At Orchard Villa, less than half of all third, fourth and fifth grade students performed at or above grade level in math on the state’s annual standardized test this year, and reading results were similar.
It’s located in Liberty City, a low-income neighborhood storied for its crime and riots. Near the gated school are storefront churches, a newly painted “Obama Market” grocery store and small, pastel homes.
“If you ask the children, ‘How many of you have been to Disney World?’ you might get a couple hands,” says Nancy Yates, a third-grade teacher at the school. “But if you ask them, ‘How many of you have had a relative shot or this or that?’ And all hands go up. ‘How many of you have seen a drug deal?’ All hands go up.”
It’s a different picture from when Range and his parents moved to the neighborhood in the 1950s.
“This was their dream, to own their own business, in a good neighborhood,” says Range, whose family opened and still runs a funeral home there. “And at the time it was a good neighborhood.”
The Ranges were one of the first black families to move in and Orchard Villa was the nearest school. Despite the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court Brown decision ordering school desegregation nationwide, there was reluctance in the community and in government to actively integrate. It wasn’t until the Miami-Dade School Board ran out of legal options to continue upholding segregation that it agreed to allow four black children into Orchard Villa.