In this week’s Valley Advocate, Maureen Turner has an interview with journalist and author Susan Eaton (pictured), who wrote The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial. Eaton was also interviewed for NPR.
Choice bits from Turner’s piece:
"There’s been an enormous amount of research done on the benefits of integration for everybody, and also on the harms of racial isolation and segregation, especially in its extreme forms, like we have in neighborhoods in Springfield, Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, Stamford. There’s been so much done on these questions [that lingering resistance] is amazing to me.
"I think it’s in part because state legislatures are dominated by suburban interests. I think it’s hard for a suburban legislator to see what the interests of desegregation would be for his or her constituency. It takes a really strong person of exceptional moral character to stand up and say, ‘This is a policy that benefits everybody and I’m going to support it; we all should support it.’
"To see the inequalities, you can’t just look at the numbers or the test scores. You’ve got to go to both your classic segregated urban school and then go to a suburban school and see what the differences are.
"It’s an environment that’s man-made, created through racial discrimination that corrals the most stressed-out, exhausted, disenfranchised members of society into one little corner. And then we say, ‘Well, of course we can’t attract professionals to come into an environment like this.’"
