562: The Problem We All Live With - Part One

Ira Glass

Nikole Hannah Jones is an investigative reporter, these days at The New York Times. We've had her here on This American Life before too. But her first big reporting job was back in 2003. She was reporting on the schools in Durham, North Carolina. And like most places, there were good schools and there were bad schools. And at the time, it was the heyday of No Child Left Behind. Durham was working really hard to improve the bad schools.

Ira Glass

And what she noticed was that it never worked. I mean, like, never. The bad schools never caught up to the good schools. And the bad schools were mostly black and Latino, the good schools mostly white. And sure, there might be a principal here or a charter school there who might do a good job improving student scores. But even there, they were just improving the students' scores. The minority kids in their programs were still not performing on par with white kids. They hadn't closed the achievement gap between black kids and white kids.

Ira Glass

That thing that is so effective but never discussed? That's not one of the tools that educators reach for normally? Can you guess?

Ira Glass

In other words, on standardized reading tests in 1971, black 13 year olds tested 39 points worse than white kids. That dropped to just 18 points by 1988 at the height of desegregation. The improvement in math scores was close to that, though not quite as good. And these scores are not just the scores of the specific kids who got bused into white schools. That is the overall score for the entire country. That's all black children in America. Halved in just 17 years.

When I asked Nikole if that was fast, she was all like, "Well, black people first arrived on this continent as slaves in 1619. So it was 352 years to create the problem. So yeah, another 17 to cut that school achievement gap in half? Pretty fast."

Ira Glass

The US Department of Education put out data in 2014 showing that black and Latino kids in segregated schools have the least qualified teachers, the least experienced teachers. They also get the worst course offerings, the least access to AP and upper level courses, the worst facilities.

The other thing about most segregated black schools, Nikole says, is that they have high concentrations of children who grew up in poverty. Those kids have greater educational needs. They're more stressed out. They have a bunch of disadvantages. And when you put a lot of kids like that together in one classroom, studies show, it doesn't go well.

Ira Glass

This is why after years of studying this, Nikole thinks segregated schools full of poor kids are probably never going to catch up to other schools. The job is simply too hard. But integration-- before I talked to Nikole about this, I had this vague sense about integration-- maybe you had this too-- that we tried that. It didn't go so well. Which Nikole has heard before.

Ira Glass

Nikole says that her parents sent her and her sister to a school across town, which was all white, except for five black kids, which included the two of them.

Ira Glass

And so today, we thought we would put it on the table and talk about it. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today, after years where very few communities were launching new desegregation programs, Nikole found a place that just three years ago, unintentionally, started school desegregation. Seriously, nobody in charge planned this. A school system got integration and Nikole got to see what happens to the kids, what happens with the parents, which is not pretty, and what happens with the politics in modern day America, when school desegregation shows up uninvited to the table by any of the usual people in charge. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

And with that, I will turn things over to Nikole. A quick heads up, somebody uses a racial slur in this first part of the story.

Nikole Hannah Jones

I stumbled on this place by accident. I was watching the coverage of Michael Brown almost a year ago, like the rest of America. There was one moment that I could not get out of my head. It's news footage of his mother, Leslie Mcspadden, right after he was killed.

Nikole Hannah Jones

She's standing in a crowd of onlookers, a few feet from where her son was shot down, where he would lie face down on the concrete for four hours, dead. And this is what she says.

Nikole Hannah Jones

I watched this over and over. A police officer has just killed her oldest child. It has to be the worst moment of her life, but of all the ways she could have expressed her grief and outrage, this is what was on her mind-- school, getting her son through school.

Michael Brown became a national symbol of the police violence against black youth, but when I looked into his education, I realized he's also a symbol of something else, something much more common. Most black kids will not be shot by the police but many of them will go to a school like Michael Brown's.

It took me all of five minutes on the internet to find out that the school district he attended is almost completely black, almost completely poor, and failing badly. The district is called Normandy. It's made up of one high school, the one that Michael Brown attended, a middle school, and five elementary schools. It's in a town also called Normandy that borders on Ferguson.

Each year, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education puts out a report that shows how each of its 520 school districts is doing. It's a numeric snapshot of the type of education students are receiving. Districts get points for academic achievement, for how many students graduate, for how well they're prepared for college.

In 2014, Michael Brown's senior year, here's how the Normandy School District was performing. Points for academic achievement in English-- 0, math-- 0, social studies-- 0, science-- 0, points for college placement-- 0. It seems impossible, but in 11 of 13 measures, the district didn't earn a single point. 10 out of 140 points, that was its score. It's like how they say you get points on the SAT just for writing your name. It's like they got 10 points just for existing. Normandy is the worst district in the state of Missouri.

Maybe Michael Brown's mom knew these scores. Or maybe she just knew her son's school didn't graduate about half of its black boys. I don't know. I reached out to her several times and she didn't want to talk. But in the Normandy district, mothers who are worried about the quality of the schools aren't hard to find.

Over the last couple of months, I spent a lot of time with one of them, a Normandy mother named Nedra Martin. And it was through her that I learned the story of something that happened in this district, something that almost never happens anymore. Nedra grew up in Normandy and works in human resources. Her daughter, Mah'Ria, is a star student. Still, Nedra found herself worrying about Mah'Ria's education all the time.

Nikole Hannah Jones

When you ask them questions, Nedra, Mah'Ria, their eyes fix on each other. I've got a daughter and I kept wondering what magic parenting spell Nedra has cast to get her teenage daughter to like her so much. Nedra's older daughter went to Normandy too. She almost didn't graduate on time because the school lost track of her credits.

By the time Mah'Ria got to middle school, little things started happening that begin to worry Nedra even more. Mah'Ria usually brought home As, but when she got a C, Nedra asked the teacher why she had not been notified. The teacher told her that she had too many kids in her class to call all their parents. Nedra said teachers did not seem to care. Classes were dumbed down and often unorganized and unruly. And even things that should have been good news turned to bad news.

In seventh grade, Mah'Ria was invited to a special breakfast. It was to celebrate kids who made the honor roll. They began calling kids up, one by one, to get their certificates.

Nikole Hannah Jones

They never called her name. When Mah'Ria asked the school counselor about it, the counselor told Mah'Ria maybe she wasn't supposed to be there. Nedra, who had taken off of work to come, was watching from the side.

Nikole Hannah Jones

Mah'Ria had the invitation to the breakfast in her bag. She'd brought it just in case something like this happened. Think about that. This is a 12 year old girl who is so used to the school screwing things up that she knew enough to bring proof. It was a small thing, but for Nedra and Mah'Ria, it was the last straw.

Nedra knew that the district had been performing poorly for years. In fact, it had been on probation for 15 years. Schools in Missouri get accredited by the state. Almost every district is accredited. But if you're doing really bad, you get put on notice. That's called provisional accreditation. That's supposed to be like a warning. But Normandy had provisional accreditation for 15 years. That means there are entire classes of students, nearly all of them black, who came in as kindergartners and graduated 12 years later without ever having attended a school that met state standards.

In the St. Louis area, nearly one in two black children attend schools in districts that performed so poorly the state has stripped them of full accreditation. Only 1 in 25 white children are in a district like that. That's one in two black kids, 1 in 25 white kids.

Nedra Decided she had to get Mah'Ria out of Normandy. She made a list of nearby school districts and private schools. Then she turned her car into a mobile situation room. The mission-- get Mah'Ria into a better school.

Nikole Hannah Jones

The nearby districts told Nedra they would enroll Mah'Ria, but since she lived outside of their boundaries Nedra would have to pay tuition, upwards of $15,000 a year. She couldn't afford that.

Nikole Hannah Jones

She checked into those, but even with financial aid, she couldn't afford private school either.

Nikole Hannah Jones

In most of the thousands of poor, segregated schools in America, that would be it. Your zip code is the anchor that traps you. That would have been it for Nedra too, if it weren't for what happened next.

Nikole Hannah Jones

In January of 2013, just a few months after that breakfast, Normandy lost its accreditation from the state. No one really explained why they'd lost it after all this time. Remember, they'd been on probation for 15 years. The school stayed open, but this rare event triggered a little known Missouri law called the transfer law. The transfer law gives students in unaccredited districts the right to transfer to a nearby accredited one for free. Any student in Normandy was now allowed out.

Nikole Hannah Jones

Under the law, while Normandy students can enroll in any nearby accredited district, Normandy has to provide transportation to just one. Normandy officials chose a district called Francis Howell. Francis Howell was 85% white. It sits across a river in another county, roughly 30 miles away from Normandy. One of the best districts in Missouri was just five miles away.

It would have been very easy for Normandy students to get there. Why not send them there? Well, if you don't want students to leave your district, one way to keep them is to make leaving inconvenient. Make them ride a long distance to school every day. Though Normandy officials deny that's why they chose Francis Howell.

Douglas Carr was a teacher in the Normandy district. He says when they first heard about the transfer option on the news, a lot of the Normandy teachers didn't expect many kids would take it.

Nikole Hannah Jones

1,000. That's how many kids wanted to do that. That fall, fully one quarter of Normandy students chose the evacuation plan the law created, even though many of them would have to get on a bus at 5:00 in the morning and travel a good 30 miles away.

The word "integration" does not appear in Missouri's transfer law. When the law was passed, no one thought an entire district would lose accreditation. Integration was not the law's intent. But the Normandy kids are almost all black, the Francis Howell kids nearly all white. And that is how Missouri accidentally launched a school integration plan in what was an unfashionably late year for such a thing-- 2013.

Though Normandy chose to provide free transportation to the Francis Howell school district, Francis Howell wasn't part of that decision. By law, they had no say in the matter. So a week after the announcement that Normandy would bus kids to Francis Howell, officials there held a town meeting to talk about it. Nedra and Mah'Ria decided to go.

Nikole Hannah Jones

They parked and walked in. Mah'Ria looked around, surveying the gym-- a sea of 3,000 mostly white faces.

Nikole Hannah Jones

St. Louis Public Radio recorded the meeting. One by one, parents tick off concerns. There are questions about class sizes, money, how this will affect special ed, fire safety.

Nikole Hannah Jones

A woman says she was an education professor and warned Francis Howell officials not to be naive about the type of students they'd be receiving.

Nikole Hannah Jones

The elected school board was sitting at tables in the front of the gym. Now and then, one of them jumped in.

Nikole Hannah Jones

One mother asked why residents did not get to vote on letting in Normandy kids like they vote on public transportation.

Nikole Hannah Jones

A mother named Beth Cirami approaches the microphone.

Nikole Hannah Jones

To be clear, Normandy did not lose its accreditation because of violence. It's easy to judge these parents, but I think part of what makes this scene so startling is that we rarely fight these battles anymore. The reaction to large numbers of black children moving into white schools would probably sound no different in New York, or Chicago, or Boston. It's just that, in most of the country, no one is even trying. These parents don't want to try either. So one of them offered a helpful solution.

Nikole Hannah Jones

Mah'Ria was watching it all on the monitors in an overflow room. At a certain point, she grabbed her mom's hand and told her she wanted to speak at the mic.

Nikole Hannah Jones

That's what she planned to say.

Nikole Hannah Jones

Nedra saw her daughter freeze. She said she thought about Ruby Bridges, the first black child to attend an all white elementary school in the South. She's the little girl guarded by US marshals in the famous Norman Rockwell painting called The Problem We All Live With.

Nikole Hannah Jones

The conversation in the gym is taking place in one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in the country. Of course, there are poor white children in the St. Louis area, but they live in mostly middle class areas, so they aren't attending schools as terrible as Normandy's. In St. Louis, poor white children are twice as likely to go to good schools than black children of all incomes. But race barely comes up that night, except when white parents insist it is not the issue.

Nikole Hannah Jones

The year the Supreme Court handed down the Brown versus Board of Education ruling banning school segregation, St. Louis was the second largest segregated school district in the country. It was 1954. After a lot of resistance, many school districts went through desegregation battles, but St. Louis came to it extraordinarily late.

Real desegregation didn't get going in St. Louis until the 1980s. Even then, it was only because black families sued. But by that point, there were hardly any white kids left to integrate with. That's why a federal judge ordered white suburban schools to take thousands of black students from the city to the suburbs. He did that because he said St. Louis's white suburbs shared the blame for the segregation in the city schools.

This was 30 years, a full generation after Brown. And the students who went through that, some of them, anyway, grew up to be the parents in the Francis Howell gym. So when they got to the mic, they aren't just talking about the current situation. A lot of what they're saying is a referendum on what happened to them when they were kids. For instance, here's how Beth Cirami, the mother of three who was asking for metal detectors, began her remarks.

Nikole Hannah Jones

This is how white parents in the gym frame the story, that schools failed in the past because black children were forced in. That's what went wrong, not the other part of the equation, that white families chose to leave. But the few black parents who stand up to speak have a remarkably different memory of the exact same period of time.

Nikole Hannah Jones

A generation of black St. Louis residents, tens of thousands of them, remember the St. Louis desegregation program just as she does, as a great opportunity. They will be the first to tell you it was hard, but also that it was necessary. And for the most part, it worked. In the schools where white families chose to stay, test scores for black transfer students rose. They were more likely to graduate and to go to college. After years of resistance, St. Louis had created the largest and most successful metro-wide desegregation program in the country.

But from the moment it started, state officials worked to kill it. In 1999, just 16 years after real desegregation came to St. Louis, the desegregation order ended. Just a much smaller voluntary desegregation program remains. Michael Brown's mother, by the way, was part of that brief 16 year window. She was one of the students who was bussed out of St. Louis when she was a kid. But her own son, Michael, went to one of the most segregated districts in the state.

This is what happened in cities all over. With Brown versus Board of Education, we as a nation decided that segregated schooling violated the constitutional rights of black children. We promised that we would fix this wrong. And when it proved difficult, as we knew it would be, we said integration failed instead of the truth, which is that it was working but we decided it wasn't worth the trouble.

Nikole Hannah Jones

It's not an empty threat. "If you let those children in, we will leave-- again."

Nikole Hannah Jones

On the ride home, Mah'Ria felt intimidated, but she was determined to go to Francis Howell.

Nikole Hannah Jones

And so, though she didn't think about it this way, that fall, Mah'Ria joined an old American tradition-- black children headed on buses to heavily white schools that had been forced by the courts to take them.

She hadn't ridden the school bus since she was little. On the first day of school, she rose to catch the bus at 5:45 AM. She found a seat, rode the 30 miles to Francis Howell, and as the bus pulled into the school parking lot, she peered nervously through the window. And what she saw surprised her.

Nikole Hannah Jones

Francis Howell administrators would not talk to me, but best as I can tell, some teachers at the school were horrified by what happened at the parents meeting. And they wanted to make sure the new students felt welcomed. Here's Nedra.

Nikole Hannah Jones

That day, Mah'Ria was just the new kid in a new school, trying to make her way through her first few classes.

Nikole Hannah Jones

"Friend like that" meaning a white friend. Mah'Ria had never had a friend who was white before. Mah'Ria's story sounds kind of like an integration fairy tale, but it wasn't that way for everyone coming from Normandy.

Rihanna Curtain is a year below Mah'Ria. She also earns good grades. And she decided to research Francis Howell herself on the internet. She told her mom she wanted to go. She started seventh grade in the Francis Howell district, but in a different middle school than Mah'Ria.

Nikole Hannah Jones

Rihanna thought about leaving and going back to Normandy. Her mom told her she could if she wanted to. She thought about it again and again, but she could not get that girl who called her names out of her head.

Nikole Hannah Jones

It was hard for Rihanna but she ended up having a good year. So good that one of Rihanna's teachers even asked her to help the girl who called her names with her math, something that Rihanna found ironic, given that the girl had called her stupid. So no, it wasn't always easy, but Rihanna and Mah'Ria both made it through their first year Francis Howell. It was going well, that is until the grownups came up with a new plan.

Ira Glass

Nikole Hannah Jones. Coming up, Adults to the Not Rescue. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today, The Problem We All Live With. If you're just tuning in, we're telling the story of the Normandy School District that Michael Brown graduated from. In the 2013 to 2014 school year, Mah'Ria, who we heard in the first half of the show, finished eighth grade at the mostly white Francis Howell School District.

Meanwhile, the same year, the mostly black Normandy District that had lost its accreditation, was still operating, though barely. The way the transfer law works, the failing district has to pay to educate its students, even if they leave. So Normandy was paying for 1,000 students to be educated in accredited districts elsewhere, like Francis Howell. It also had to pay for transportation for the students. Altogether, it was $10.4 million that year. Everybody expected that losing a quarter of the students in the Normandy District would be bad. Nobody knew just how bad it was going to turn out. Again, here's Nikole Hannah Jones.

Nikole Hannah Jones

It didn't take long before the transfer law was bankrupting Normandy. By the fall of 2013, the impoverished Normandy District was sending more than a $1 million a month to whiter, wealthier ones. Back at the height of the St. Louis desegregation program in the 1980s, they had a term for this-- black gold.

While wealthier districts were getting an influx of cash, Normandy was careening towards financial insolvency. It shut down a school. The district had to cut staff. That's when the state made a desperation move.

Nikole Hannah Jones

The state was taking over the Normandy District. At first, nobody knew what that meant. Douglas Carr, the Normandy teacher, says they received no explanation.

Nikole Hannah Jones

If Normandy folded, all of its students, an additional 3,000 of them, would have to be absorbed into other school districts. Bankruptcy, it turns out, will be the ultimate integration plan. So instead, the state took over. And its first big move was to give the district a new name.

Nikole Hannah Jones

The Normandy Schools Collaborative. But this was more than just rebranding. According to the state, a shiny new name also came with a shiny new accreditation status.

Nikole Hannah Jones

The difference between unaccredited and non-accredited, those three letters, changed everything.

Nikole Hannah Jones

Nedra Martin remembers getting the letter when Mah'Ria was at a camp for the Francis Howell volleyball team.

Nikole Hannah Jones

Normandy Schools Collaborative.

Nikole Hannah Jones

So Nedra found herself back in her car on lunch breaks, making calls. She called Francis Howell administrators and teachers and extolled the virtues of her daughter. She told them Mah'Ria was an honor student at Francis Howell and that she stood out on the volleyball team. Nedra found herself pleading for an exception. But Francis Howell was firm. It was not going to be taking any Normandy Collaborative transfers.

Nikole Hannah Jones

Mah'Ria had spent a year making new friends, joining sports teams, settling in. Now she'd be leaving. Think about how this would feel if you were 14, about to enter ninth grade. Mah'Ria shut down. She didn't tell any of her friends at Francis Howell she wasn't coming back, not even Brittany. She just disappeared.

When the state took over, it fired all the teachers over the summer. And then, scrambling, it rehired some of the same ones before the school year started. Morale was incredibly low. This was last August, almost a year ago. Michael Brown was killed August 9, nine days before school started. Michael Brown was buried in the cemetery alongside Normandy High School's football field. He'd just graduated three weeks before.

Mah'Ria started her freshman year at Normandy High School. In the meantime, a group of parents, including Nedra, had filed a lawsuit against the state and were crossing their fingers that a judge would intervene. And eventually, a judge sided with the parents. He wrote in his ruling, "Every day a student attends an unaccredited school, the child could suffer harm that cannot be repaired." He said that Normandy students should be allowed to leave.

But even after that, Francis Howell forced every Normandy student who wanted to return to get his or her own personal injunction from the judge. Again, Francis Howell did not respond to requests to talk to us. For nearly three months, Mah'Ria tried to make it work at Normandy High School. But finally, she gave up and transferred back to Francis Howell. Last month, she completed her freshman year. She's continued to do well.

Nikole Hannah Jones

A lot of Normandy kids opted to stay put, even Rihanna, the girl who was called a racial slur in the lunchroom and was determined to stay at Francis Howell. The back and forth just wore her down. She decided to stay. She's paid a cost for staying.

Here is what the last few months at Normandy Middle School have been like. The principal at Rihanna's middle school, not even a year into the job, resigned. And at Rihanna's graduation, the vice president of the Missouri State Board of Education spoke. He apologized to the graduates, he said the state owed students, quote, "A collective apology for failing to provide you with the education experience you should have." In all of my years of reporting, I don't think I've ever heard a state official apologize to students for failing to educate them.

The guy who now has the job of transforming the Normandy schools is Charles Pearson. He's the third superintendent in three years. When we meet in Normandy, Charles Pearson is dapper, in a gray pinstripe suit and bowtie. He has a long track record in education, but until he was asked to lead Normandy he had never spent a day as the head of the school district. Still, he sounds like any other superintendent of a struggling district. He's a cheerleader and upbeat about the potential for a turnaround.

Nikole Hannah Jones

Here's what the evidence shows. A few weeks after I met with Charles Pearson, a reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch named Elisa Crouch spent the day following a Normandy senior to all of his classes. She chose Cameron Hensley, a driven honor student. She met him at Normandy High School in time to head to his first period.

Nikole Hannah Jones

She says at some point Mr. Drummer gave the two students a worksheet. This was advanced placement. That's the highest English class the school offered. But Elisa said the worksheet looked to be at the middle school level. Cameron and other students finished in five minutes. They had 40 minutes left.

Nikole Hannah Jones

So four periods of music, three academic classes, one where a teacher actually taught. It's hard to imagine a bar lower than that. And Cameron's an honor student. For his part, Pearson, the superintendent, said he was shocked to read in the paper what was happening, or more accurately, what was not happening at the high school.

While Normandy is falling apart, over at Francis Howell, none of the things that parents were worried about came true. No one got stabbed. Test scores did not drop-- at all. And at least so far, the influx of black students hasn't caused white parents to flee. Mah'Ria's thriving. Where the transfer law forced integration, it's working.

The educational devastation in Normandy has finally gotten the attention of the state's most powerful people, including state legislators and the governor. The law says they can't keep the Normandy kids in schools that aren't accredited. So they're proposing charter schools and virtual school programs that students would attend. They're sending in teacher coaches from wealthier districts. The idea is, try anything they can to keep Normandy students inside the district. This is how far they will go to avoid that one thing, that one thing that already seems to be working-- integration.

Ira Glass

Nikole Hannah Jones, she's a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. She also did a great story about the Normandy schools for Pro Publica. You can read that at their website, propublica.org. And she's written this amazing article-- I cannot recommend this highly enough-- about choosing a school for her own kid in New York City's segregated school system. That's at The New York Times website.

[MUSIC - SYL JOHNSON, "IS IT BECAUSE I'M BLACK?"]

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Chana Joffe-Walt and Jonathan Menjivar with Zoe Chase, Sean Cole, Stephanie Foo, Miki Meek, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike, editing help from Joel Lovell. Julie Snyder was the consulting editor for this episode.

Other editing help for this episode from Neil Drumming. Production help from Emmanuel Dzotsi. Our technical director is Matt Tierney. Our staff includes Elise Bergerson, Emily Condon, Kimberly Henderson, and Seth Lind. Research help today from Michelle Harris. Music help from Damian Graf from Rob Geddis.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he finally explained to me why he showed up at work wearing hiking boots and a suit covered in dirt.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.