Episode Details

If you think about a “segregated school”, what image comes to mind? Quite often, the cultural narrative says that that is a school with almost exclusively students of color. What about a school with 98% White students? Is that a “segregated school”? While we don’t often think of it that way, it is clearly segregated. Tomás Monarrez is an economist by training. As he was studying the question of school and housing segregation at the Urban Institute, he was struck by the ways that the field of economics falls into the same traps that we fall into as a culture – segregation means concentrations of Black, Brown and Indigenous students. This seemed wrong to Tomás, and he and his colleagues set out to define segregation, using the tools of economics. Their definition takes the district average demographics and holds that as the baseline to which other schools should be compared. In this framing, in a district with 70% students of color, a school with 90% students of color is segregating, but so is a school with 50% students of color. What he quickly found was that the schools that often contribute the most to segregation within a district are not the schools we often focus on – are not the schools with 95% students of color, but rather, the schools with 75%, 85%, even 90% White students. His hope is that this shift in framing can focus the efforts of local policy makers who care about decreasing segregation.

He joins to talk about his work, why he does it, and what sort of social good he hopes his economics focus can achieve.

LINKS:

• Segregation Contribution Index
• Dividing Lines: How School Districts Draw Attendance Boundaries to Perpetuate School Segregation
• A Vox explainer highlighting the work of Tomàs Monarrez and the Urban Institute on school boundaries
• Home Owners Loan Corporation – 1930s entity that drew redlining maps
• Look up redlining maps for your city
• Michelle Adams on our podcast – traces the history of desegregation law in this country
• The Parents Involved Case
• Harry Belafonte on King saying “I fear we are integrating into a burning house”
• Dr. Elizabeth McRae on our podcast – White Woman and the Politics of White Supremacy
• Dr. McRae’s Mother’s of Massive Resistance
• Richard Rothstein Color of Law
• SFUSD’s new student assignment policy
• Tree Equity

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