I grew up here and I always have to remind myself of exactly where Milton is:
And the Milton Public Schools look like this:
And the (next door) Boston Public Schools look like this:
And the thing is, in Massachusetts, we largely don't even blink at seeing numbers this disparate in districts that are right next to each other. It's not just true of Boston; it's true of Worcester and Springfield and most of the cities in the state.
That doesn't happen by accident.
I was thinking of this again this past week in part after reading this post by two sisters Caroline and Emily Joyner, who grew up in Southborough and graduated from Algonquin Regional High School, where I taught until 2001. They rode the bus with Devin Brosnan, who is among the officers charged in the killing of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, and with Matt Colligan, who was among those at the Unite the Right demonstration in Charlottesville last year. I would urge you to go read their post. Algonquin, reflecting the towns of Northboro and Southborough from which it draws, is a very white district.
We have a lot of very white districts in Massachusetts.
We have a lot of very white districts in Massachusetts.
That's doesn't happen by accident, either.
It's been observed over and again, but we tend to think of ourselves as good blue Massachusetts, far too often not doing much observing as where we are and how we got there. The disparities in school districts that city leaders called out this morning isn't accidental. It's created. It was created and it is, still, sustained.
Thanks for this. I read both links. Very compelling stuff.
ReplyDeleteI went to college in Milton at Curry. The other side from Mattapan is Hyde Park. Back then, couldn't be whiter. I once got beat up for walking out of the wrong house in the project. Friends of a buddy of theirs did it on principal because his ex girlfriend lived there even though I wasn't with the girl. My friend was. The people who felt most sorry for me were some Blacks guys I knew from the basketball team. They reffed our intramural games and I played pickup games with them and bumped into them occasionally at a party. They probably had experience with the project kids and could relate.
Growing up in Clinton and playing sports against Ayer, it was always known as the Black town. Meanwhile I'm not sure we had a dozen Black kids in the entire high school. Now I live in Ayer.
While it's more diverse than the average suburb, it lost a lot of the African American students and families when Fort Devens closed.
A young Black girl is organizing a march Thursday. My son has been involved in helping her and will be a speaker. While the daughter of two Black parents, her mother remarried a white man and she took on her mother's married name.
The husband was a great athlete while the base still open and played and was friends with many of the African American kids. He is well known in the town. Her mother runs a female empowerment program for young girls as a way to give back to the community. Still, the daughter has heard racial slurs at school as Ayer has begun to "gentrify."
However, I was very proud to read a Twitter exchange between one of our English faculty, a white man, and others about the place, or lack of, for To Kill a Mockingbird in today's curriculum. Other texts being suggested Ayer Shirley was already teaching in class or had assigned as summer reading. It was apparent many other teachers were just now beginning to consider teaching those books. He also made a case to keep teaching TKAM despite its faults as a period piece and contrast it to newer texts like The Hate U Give and Dear Martin. That gave me hope.