Conclusion

Three Steps toward Change

Terry Dade was young, handsome, and relentlessly upbeat. He charmed the Rochester school board in his 2019 interview for the superintendency by referring to the city as “our family” and its students as “our babies.” Just three months after he was hired, however, the scope of his task changed dramatically. A routine year-end audit uncovered serious irregularities in the district’s finances. It eventually emerged that the district, under the leadership of the previous superintendent, Barbara Deane-Williams, had completely exhausted its fund balance and then over-spent its 2018–19 and 2019–20 budgets by about $60 million. The sum staggered the community and triggered a review by the state comptroller as well as the appointment of an outside monitor. The reckoning came in the winter and spring of 2020, when Dade was left to slash away at district spending. The district cut scores of employees in the middle of the year then hundreds more in the 2020–21 budget. Millions of dollars were taken from a special education program that had just come back from the brink of a major federal lawsuit. Social workers were reduced by more than a quarter. A last-minute emergency loan from the state legislature prevented even greater losses before the end of the 2019–20 school year. Nearly one hundred people signed up to protest at the first public budget hearing; only the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the school board to hold meetings online, spared Dade the spectacle of a packed and hostile room. “Someone’s going to hell,” one former board member said.1

What the public did not know was that Dade, less than a year into his three-year contract, had already found an exit door. The same week as the budget hearing, Dade interviewed for the superintendent’s job in the Cornwall Central School District, a small, wealthy district on the Hudson River in Orange County, New York. Its total annual budget of $75 million was smaller than the revenue shortfall RCSD faced for 2020–21. Cornwall announced that it had hired Dade in the middle of a Rochester school board meeting before he had told anyone in Rochester, and the news spread like wildfire on social media before board members could react. “Unfortunately, I have not been able to focus on what I was brought here to do,” Dade wrote later that evening in an open resignation letter. “While I will be transitioning to another school district in New York, my heart will forever be a part of the RCSD family.” To reporters in Cornwall, meanwhile, Dade said he was excited about moving there “because it’s the kind of district where he’d feel comfortable with his children . . . attending school.”2

In Rochester and cities across the country, this is the reality of urban education almost a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century. Once-proud school districts stand scandalized and scorned, hemorrhaging students and money, lurching from consultant report to consultant report and on and off state sanction lists. Promising early results are never mentioned again after the pilot program loses funding. The refreshing new approach of one administration is the regrettable error of the next. Families with means find alternatives elsewhere for their children or cluster in a few select programs, whereas the children who need the most care—those with disabilities, or a lack of English proficiency, or no stable place to live—receive the least. Exhaustively compiled and disaggregated academic data show that wealthy and white children mostly do well, whereas poor and nonwhite children mostly do not.

Urban school districts find themselves in this pathetic position only at the end of generations of complacency and half-hearted calls for reform. White leaders in northern cities, content to juxtapose themselves against Birmingham and Little Rock, did not acknowledge the problem of racial segregation until it had reached a crisis level. Their initial attempts to address the issue were mostly feeble, whereas opposition, often explicitly racist, grew, finally bursting out politically in the late 1960s. It was at this fateful juncture that Rochester, for the one time in its history, faced the question of segregation squarely. Voters revolted and district leaders backed down in the face of shouted protests, ignoring other parents who urged them to carry on. Since then, with few exceptions, school and political leaders in Rochester and Monroe County have hardly dared address the problem, even as the evidence of harm to nonwhite and white children alike has become obvious.

All of this is Rochester’s educational inheritance—but not the whole of it. Recall the first chapter of this book; Rochester did desegregate its schools once. Frederick Douglass is more than a totem for the city. He helped lead Black children, including his own, into white Rochester schools from which they previously had been barred. To be sure, that was a very different time. Desegregation involved a hundred or so Black children in a student body of thousands, for one thing. Still, the way it happened then is instructive for the present. Parents and strong community leaders agitated on behalf of Black children, persisting for decades despite setbacks and periods of apparent stagnation. School leaders eventually succumbed to economic pressure rather than moral pressure. Formal desegregation in the nineteenth century proved elusive for decades, from the founding of the first village schoolhouse in 1812 to the city’s adolescence 38 years later, and the situation for Black children was far from perfect once it was achieved. Still, Rochester was the first city in New York, and one of the first anywhere, to desegregate its schools. Now, 150 years later, Rochester again has the opportunity to lead.

The thesis of this book is that Rochester, like most places in the United States, has always quailed when called to confront the racial and socioeconomic segregation that underlies and perpetuates its most pressing problems, education first among them; and, further, that no lasting solution to these problems is possible until segregation is addressed.

Nothing can happen overnight. There are, however, immediate steps to be taken that go beyond idle wishing. Three of them are listed below. The first would give the community a solid foundation to consider, seriously and with eyes open, the creation of a comprehensive, undivided, racially diverse educational system. The second would be an immediate and significant step toward racial equity for local school districts as currently constituted. The third would involve no immediate structural change or student transfers but would help ensure that children and teachers in the Rochester area recognize the racist past that shaped the unequal present in the schools where they study and work—an absolutely necessary precondition for change no matter when it occurs.

1. A comprehensive report on potential major metropolitan reforms in education and other areas, including the viability of a unified countywide school system.

The drafting of a report is not an exciting first step, but it must be done. Breaking school district lines in the name of efficiency and equality has been discussed since the 1920s, but only at a conceptual level. Proponents have never had good answers to the most basic questions: Who would pay for it? What legislation would be required? How would children be assigned to schools, and how long would they ride on the bus? In the absence of facts, speculation and fear have filled the void. The very word “metropolitan” has become a bugaboo.

A report addressing these questions would have much ground to cover. It could encompass the idea of moving revenues, rather than students, across district lines. It could revisit the concept of a federation of school districts as laid out in 1971 as part of RCSD’s ineffectual 15-Point Plan. It must, too, include at last a fully fleshed-out vision of what true desegregation might look like in Monroe County as well as possible legal means to achieve it. This vision would require consideration of an overarching governing body; a mechanism for local, state, and federal funding; a framework for state legislation, including an analysis of legal obstacles; and the cost of action as well as inaction. It should have clear roles and immediate action steps for all involved parties, including school districts and the state legislature, should they choose to act. A mechanism for robust public participation would be vital, with a privileged position for the nonwhite families who have been disadvantaged for generations. This report could be completed within eighteen months. Informing and mobilizing residents, as well as passing legislation and weathering potential judicial challenges, would take longer, of course. But no work can begin until solid information is available.

Crucially, the report would be an opportunity to examine other potential areas for metropolitan collaboration as well. Inequities in housing, transportation, jobs, and public infrastructure, among other things, are equally stark and could be addressed best in concert. Researchers Jennifer Jellison Holme and Kara Finnigan laid out the case for a “regional equity framework,” in their words, in their book Striving in Common: “Countering the powerful forces that perpetuate the geography of inequality in education and in other domains (such as housing and economic development) requires addressing the web of forces—economic, political, and personal—that weave together to sustain these inequities. The causes and effects of inequality are regional in nature, and they require a regional solution that is specifically focused on equity across multiple policy domains.”3 The framework that Holme and Finnigan have in mind is based on a model from Omaha, Nebraska, called the Learning Community. It includes some elements with clear applicability to Rochester, including more robust “mobility practices,” such as greater accessibility in Urban-Suburban, as well as a regional governing body. It also calls for pooling education funding at the county level to enable fairer distribution. It is not exactly a metropolitan school district, but rather a form of “federated regionalism” with some similarities to the “voluntary cooperative federation of school districts” floated in 1971. Countywide solutions hold great promise in education, housing, and other areas, both in combating the historical effects of racism and in general municipal efficiency. Numerous guideposts already exist, including effective collaborative measures in water supply and emergency response systems. It is far past time for the same concept to be extended where it is needed most.4

2. Written policies for greater equity in enrollment and participation for suburban districts in Urban-Suburban.

Successfully developing an action plan from the report outlined in the first recommendation would take several years in the best case. Fortunately, Monroe County already has a tool in hand to create change immediately. It is written into state law and has been in place for more than fifty years. It has permanent staff and widespread public support, at least in its current incarnation. This is Urban-Suburban, and the flexibility that suburban districts long have wielded to maintain exclusivity can be used to make it more equitable, immediately.

Each participating school district has complete freedom in how it selects its students from among the hundreds of applicants each year. These policies are typically not written down; instead, autonomy is given to building administrators in choosing students for their schools. There is no reason, however, that a district’s selection criteria could not be prescribed in advance by the board of education. Indeed, putting these criteria in writing would provide needed transparency and help guide a conversation about education equity for Rochester children.

One such rule should be that students are chosen at random from the entire pool of applicants, without regard for academic performance, disciplinary history, family structure, special education status, or English-language proficiency. Younger siblings of Urban-Suburban students should get automatic placement in the same district.

Students should not be exited from their suburban district for any reason other than the uncoerced desire of their parents. If children from Rochester do poorly in class, or fight at school, or require costly special services, they should receive all the support that district has to offer until they graduate or age out, just as they would if they lived in the district.

Data on Urban-Suburban students, academic and otherwise, should be disaggregated and monitored in order to flag disparities early. This does not mean that children from the city must wear a badge in the hallways. Rather, districts should abandon their color-blind philosophy and find ways to support students according to their circumstances. By the same logic, teachers, counselors, and school administrators should proactively identify and offer support to Urban-Suburban students as needed.

The basic transportation provided by the Rochester City School District should be supplemented at the suburban district’s expense to ensure that Urban-Suburban students are able to partake fully in all extracurricular and social opportunities at school. This would mean extra late buses for students who stay after school for any reason. More generally, consideration would be given to how students in the city—and their parents—could attend events outside school hours (or, for parents, during school hours), including performances and games, parent-teacher conferences, and school board meetings. The districts should pledge—surely it is not asking too much—that Urban-Suburban students will not spend many hours every week sitting in the bus loop, weary from a long day of school and waiting to go home.

The Rochester school board, for its part, could pass a resolution ending its participation in the program if the above conditions are not met. It could go further and allow parents to check a box to enter the Urban-Suburban lottery on the standard kindergarten intake form. This would vastly diversify the pool of students applying for the program. As of early 2021, the program is not advertised at all, and awareness of it is only shared through word of mouth, privileging well-connected and resourceful city children over their less fortunate (or non-English-speaking) peers and further skewing the applicant pool.

Suburban districts could also design their enrollment policies in a way that creates a mutually beneficial relationship with the city rather than an extractive one. Districts in western Monroe County could select only students from zip codes on the city’s west side, and similarly to the south and east. This could lead to investment from the suburban community in a particular section of the city. Examples might include student and teacher learning exchanges or neighborhood service projects. This would save money on transportation, because city students would not be crossing the county. In time, it could serve as the nucleus—or at least a data point—for more significant metropolitan cooperation.

These changes likely would have a negative impact on Urban-Suburban’s current sterling academic and social reputation. This reputation, though, is ill gotten. It is based on the performance of a few students chosen against formidable odds to participate—chosen, in part, for their perceived ability to overcome stiff program-specific challenges, including a punishing daily commute and a lack of dedicated social and academic supports in their new district. If these challenges become insurmountable—or if students struggle for too long to get good grades or turn out to have a significant disability—then they are ejected from their purported home school, leaving the program’s record untarnished. These hidden detriments of the program accrue exclusively to the city school district. It loses its brightest students and instead ends up with an even heavier concentration of those whom the suburban districts reject. A fairer program design would set Urban-Suburban on a path toward the lofty ideal it was designed to achieve.

3. Intensive antiracism education for children and adults in all Rochester-area school districts.

Much of the skepticism of metropolitan school reform in the Black community stems from the belief, borne out repeatedly over time, that white families do not want a substantial number of Black children sharing their own children’s classrooms. Similarly, many Black people assume that their children would be asked to assimilate into a predominantly white environment rather than the other way around. “To be immersed in and judged by a system that fails to recognize the history, culture and needs of black students may, indeed, be worse than being excluded,” Derrick Bell wrote.5

It is true that physical desegregation is only the necessary first step toward true social integration. Equally important is a widespread understanding of the value of the proposition. For any large-scale school integration measure to succeed in the Rochester area, children, parents, and educators everywhere, but especially in mostly white, suburban districts, must be educated. Children must learn explicitly about the harm that racism has caused and continues to cause, both around the world and in their own communities. They must learn that segregation is not naturally occurring but was willfully imposed and today is willfully maintained. They must learn that it harms them—all of them.

As James Baldwin wrote:

White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded—about themselves and the world they live in. . . . The reason for this, at bottom, is that the doctrine of white supremacy, which still controls most white people, is itself a stupendous delusion: but to be born black in America is an immediate, a mortal challenge. People who cling to their delusions find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn anything worth learning: a people under the necessity of creating themselves must examine everything, and soak up learning the way the roots of a tree soak up water.6

Of the three recommendations given here, this is the simplest and least expensive to implement. In fact, districts have already begun the work. Since at least 2017 the majority of Monroe County school districts have recognized the need for antiracist action in every facet of their operations, including the classroom. They made a collective pledge in 2020, after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, to “take responsibility for educating ourselves and [be] intentional in rebuilding our educational system which has not served underrepresented student populations well.”7 Two separate teams of educators—one jointly sponsored by all Monroe County districts, another at the Pathstone Foundation, led by Rush-Henrietta teacher Shane Wiegand—have begun creating curricula that not only address racism frankly but also show its local manifestation in housing and education, among other things. Some districts are further along in these varied efforts than others, and none are close to claiming victory. Significantly, no school leaders in Rochester or its suburbs have seriously broached the question of equity across district boundaries; instead, the focus has been on better accommodating the children of color within each district, however few they may be.

Such antiracist efforts have much ground to cover and many deeply ingrained assumptions to correct. Perhaps the most damaging assumption, and the most far-reaching, is that good schools are those with mostly white students, to which Black students may be admitted as a special dispensation. This was the attitude, for instance, when RCSD launched its first iteration of open enrollment in 1963. Superintendent Herman Goldberg addressed Black parents directly in a letter: “We would like to know if you want your child to have a chance to attend a school where there are more white children.”8 It was not the company of white children, of course, that Black parents wanted for their own children. Rather it was the advantages that seemed to follow those children naturally: more money, higher expectations, greener ballfields, greater future prospects.

It is important to note that this work—not just revising curricula and discipline policies, not just hiring more nonwhite teachers, but fundamentally changing the way children and adults understand the world—is essential whether metropolitan desegregation happens or not. This means striving in our own time and place to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice. It means fulfilling our promise to leave a more equitable world for our children. For Rochester and for the United States, it means breaking out of the racial snares that for so long have held us back.

As a graduate of Wilson Magnet High School and the University of Rochester, as a banker, as a school board member, and as a city councilman, Malik Evans recognizes the value of racial and socioeconomic integration.* He supports the idea of metropolitan education reform and has written about the need for targeted desegregation measures before schools in Greater Rochester can serve students to their full potential. He is a believer, and so it is disheartening to hear his brusque response before the question is even fully posed to him of whether such a vision might come to pass.9

“Never going to happen.”

The worst of Rochester’s past and present is embedded in that short phrase. It encapsulates despair in the face of injustice and ingrained pessimism against even the suggestion of planned progress. Evans may be right; he certainly is not alone in his assessment. If so, the prognosis for the community and the nation is poor.

But let us look to the children. Beginning in 2016, students from high schools throughout the Rochester region began gathering twice a year to discuss racism and bias in their schools through an initiative called Roc 2 Change. Within a few years these summits were drawing more than five hundred students from nearly every high school in the area. Their enthusiasm is sustained as well through multicultural and antiracist groups that have appeared at many schools, where students have pushed for policies to better address discipline and academic opportunity but also to look more holistically at racism in their own communities. “People telling their stories made me feel it’s OK to talk about racism and my experiences and how to make school more equal,” one Black Penfield High School student said after a 2018 gathering. Even in the whitest suburbs, these opinions and calls for action are rapidly gaining credence and followers. Protests for racial justice in 2020, after the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Daniel Prude in Rochester, drew hundreds of Rochester-area teenagers ready to fight for change.10

Such efforts can be frustratingly transient. A commitment that begins with one charismatic leader or influential report fades imperceptibly, only to be reborn five, ten, or fifty years later. Roc 2 Change, for instance, bears a close resemblance to the Students Union for Integrated Education (SUIE), founded in 1968. SUIE boasted more than a hundred student members from across Monroe County who met twice a month “to discuss intercultural relations and urban-suburban education.” It saw some victories—it persuaded the Brighton school board to permit a student exchange and live-in with teenagers from Madison High School in Rochester, for instance—but otherwise struggled to gain footing, then folded as its leaders graduated. One of its last, unsuccessful pushes was in support of the Woods plan for educational parks spanning district lines.11

“If my father had taken a few steps in this direction, things would have been a little easier for me,” Glenn Edwards, a Black SUIE student leader, said in 1968. “But if I shrink before the immenseness of the problem now, my children will find it even harder.”12 Edwards and his peers did not shrink. Fifty years later, though, the immensity of the problem remains daunting. The renewed and sustained student activism apparent in Roc 2 Change is a positive development, but youthful hope has faded before. Justice in education will require more than a series of gatherings, more than one generation’s burst of energy, and more than promises or pledges.

Rather, places like Rochester—their educators, their parents, their children—must acknowledge the past and tear down the walls that were built to divide them. They must forge and uphold new physical and conceptual bounds to their communities. They must consider anew their commitment to educating all children, steadfast in the face of opposition and with full faith in the worth of the investment.

* Evans won the Democratic primary election for mayor of Rochester in June 2021, making him the likely mayor beginning in January 2022.