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The Continuing Reality of Segregated Schools

Normandy High School, Michael Brown's alma mater, is a part of the Normandy Schools Collaborative district, which remains unaccredited by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education as of March 2015.Credit...Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post, via Getty Images

Soon after her oldest son was killed by a police officer, Michael Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, emphasized her struggle to ensure her son’s education. “Do you know how hard it was for me to get him to stay in school and graduate?” McSpadden said to a reporter. “You know how many black men graduate? Not many.”

That stuck with me.

Next month will mark a year since Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., a small St. Louis suburb. The death of the unarmed black teenager and the ensuing protests helped focus the nation’s eyes on the long-ignored specter of police brutality against black Americans, birthing a movement to assert that black lives matter.

Brown quickly became a national symbol of police violence against black youth, but after spending the last year reporting on the devastating consequences of the resegregation of America’s schools, I realized he was also a symbol of something much more common.

Most black children will not be killed by the police. But millions of them will go to a school like Michael Brown’s: segregated, impoverished and failing. The nearly all-black, almost entirely poor Normandy school district from which Brown graduated just eight days before he was killed placed dead last on its accreditation assessment in the 2013-2014 school year: 520th out of 520 Missouri districts. The circumstances were so dire that the state stripped the district of its accreditation and eventually took over.

In the months following Brown’s death, I traveled to Normandy and wrote a piece called “School Segregation, the Continuing Tragedy of Ferguson” for ProPublica and The New York Times, published last December.

But I couldn’t stop reporting this story, as I had found something there that seemed straight out of a history book. A Missouri law had inadvertently created a new school integration program in one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in the country by allowing Normandy students to leave their unaccredited school district and transfer to white, high-achieving ones.

I teamed up with Chana Joffe-Walt, a producer for the radio program “This American Life,” to tell the story of Michael Brown’s school district through the students who remain there. It is a story of children locked away from opportunity, what happens when those children are given a chance to escape failing schools and what happens to those children left behind. It is a story of how powerful people decided to do something only when the problems of the worst district in the state were no longer contained. And above all, it is a story of the staggering educational inequality we are willing to accept.

The hourlong episode, called “The Problem We All Live With,” airs on public radio stations across the country.

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a staff writer for the magazine.

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