On Not Drawing the Wrong Conclusions from Racial Disparities

One generally walks on eggshells when discussing race in America. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing, considering some of the alternative scenarios. But then there’s a recent fairly well publicized study to remind us of just how limiting it can be to stick to the “safe” parts of the topic.

A new Southern Poverty Law Center publication, Suspended Education: Urban Middle Schools in Crisis, reports “the high and disproportionate suspension rates being experienced by youth of color,” and more specifically, “the pronounced differences for Black males.” Authors Daniel J. Losen (of UCLA) and Russell Skiba (from Indiana University) found the student group with the lowest rate of suspension was “Asian/Pacific Islander,” followed by “White,” and then “Hispanic” – all three of them actually with rates below the overall average. Slightly above average were “Native American” students, while “Black” students were suspended at a rate more than double the average of the 18 urban school districts the study looked at.

This last statistic troubles the authors – as it should trouble anyone involved in education. They reason it is “unlikely that poverty could sufficiently explain the gender and racial differences in these current data.”  Now, I happen to think that they’ve got that right. Unfortunately, a certain narrowness of vision sets in and instead of considering the broader social or historical picture that might factor into this situation, they narrow their field of vision to what they can find within the middle school walls. Their only recommendation – beyond the gathering and dissemination of more information – is to investigate “the possibility of conscious or unconscious racial and gender biases at the school level .”

Certainly history tells us we cannot and should not rule out the possibility of discrimination in any of the situations under consideration, yet there are also even larger issues here – the actual life situation of many in the black community. As anyone who spends time around urban public schools pretty well understands, predominantly black schools are much more difficult places to teach than the average school – kids do not leave their difficult circumstances at home.

Unfortunately, however, the authors at no time convey any sense of awareness of the conditions of actual classroom teaching, and instead cite studies that purport to show that what is cannot be.  And really, you don’t even need to go anywhere near the schools to know this  – popular culture does a more than adequate job of conveying some of the harsh realities of the black urban scene  – to the point of celebrating them, some might say.

We get the sense, though, that Losen and Skiba might be satisfied if schools would just cut the suspension rate of black males to the national average – which would improve the situation about as much as a mandate that black students receive the same proportion of “A”s and “F”s as any other group would represent a genuine improvement in strictly academic matters.

The authors mount an argument against suspensions given for reasons they find insufficiently specific:

disrespect, excessive noise, threat, and loitering – behaviors that would seem to require more subjective judgment on the part of the referring agent.

And to demonstrate the inefficacy of school suspension, they raise an argument that we could only charitably call “obtuse”:

It is difficult to argue that disciplinary removals result in improvements to the school learning climate when schools with higher suspension and expulsion rates average lower test scores than do schools with lower suspension and expulsion rates.

In other words, they found that tougher schools have lower test scores!

I don’t for a minute mean to denigrate the authors’ concern for the education system’s inability to do much of anything to improve the situation of the students who are suspended, but dismissing the efficacy of suspension in this manner seems about on a par with judging a policy of evicting law breakers from public housing projects to have failed if the projects remain poorer and more dangerous than the average neighborhood.

Losen and Skiba seem to be either oblivious to or ignoring the truism that all parents want disruptive students out of their children’s classrooms – with the possible exception of the parents of the disrupters themselves.  (In fact, a formidable part of the basis of the highly promoted charter school movement is the claim and/or hope that a charter school can deliver a better educational product if it doesn’t have to deal with the “trouble-makers.”)

At times it almost seems that the authors may fail to grasp the simple fact that students are suspended not primarily for their own educational benefit, but for that of everyone else in the classroom.  And if we didn’t know it already, recent studies remind us how race-separated America’s schools remain, even after decades of desegregation efforts – which means that children whose education is negatively impacted by classroom disruption will disproportionately tend to be from the same group as the disrupters.

So if the fact that “certain racial/gender groups are at far greater risk” of suspension from school means that “harsh discipline policies becomes a civil rights issue as well,” as the report argues, then the fact that “certain racial/gender groups are at far greater risk” of experiencing significant disruption to their educational process must be a civil rights issue as well. The issue – and solution to the problem, then, is unfortunately not so simple as the study might wish it to be.

(As for the presumed “gender bias” identified in middle school suspension rates, I don’t think we’re even dealing with a particularly sensitive/controversial issue here – it’s hard to imagine anyone with the slightest familiarity with middle school-age children not being aware of the fact that there are substantially more truculent boys than girls among the age group.)

WHAT THEY MIGHT HAVE SAID

When Losen and Skiba touch upon the question of safety, they hint at broader issues they might usefully pursue:

To the extent that safety is the motivation behind the use of suspension, it is short sighted at best to fail to understand that removing many students from school simply leaves them unsupervised on the street. The frequent use of suspension by schools may thus lead to a net reduction in community safety.

Surely if we can argue – and rightly, I think – that putting these kids on the streets probably makes those streets less safe, we must know that we don’t want to be arguing that the solution is to just leave them in the classroom.

Why do schools suspend students?  For a thousand specific answers, most of which have to do with removing barriers to the educational process in the classroom from which they were removed.  Should they be sent home to watch videos all day?  Of course not.  So why are they?  Because so many schools lack the resources to do anything with them within the walls of the school but outside of their classroom.  An “in-school suspension” would likely be a far better alternative in most cases.  However, it requires deploying someone to deal with those students full time and there are ever fewer schools willing or able to fund positions solely for that purpose.  Had the authors focused on this dilemma, they might at least have contributed to a broader, more meaningful discussion of the situation.

So why didn’t they?  “Realism,” perhaps?  The authors may very reasonably have figured that dedicating greater resources toward classroom-disrupting students is a pretty hard sell in this period of budget cutbacks. Academic comfort levels?  Poverty and discrimination are recognized areas of study, so we’ll stick with them?

The alternative, of course, is to step back to eggshell territory, where we silently agree not to go. We would have to revisit a discussion that once led to the idea of affirmative action – a time that seems so far away. We would need to consider the ways that this country’s history of slavery continues to affect the life situations of black America to this day, in ways that differ from even the discrimination and poverty experienced by many immigrant groups that came to this country voluntarily.

The situation is not easily discussed. And there’s no telling what conclusions people may draw from it. For some, there’s the fear that dwelling on the topic might even run the risk of appearing to suggest that some groups are inherently intellectually inferior or superior.  Academics are not the only ones who don’t know how to “frame” the discussion. All good reasons to back off, maybe. And yet it’s hard to see how keeping the discussion artificially small gets us anywhere in the long run.

Transportation Apartheid: A Chicago Story

On an ice-cold morning before dawn, Charles Powell shuffles down the stoop of his parents’ bungalow on 104th Place, in Roseland, on the Far South Side of Chicago. Powell walks north to 103rd Street, passing neat little bungalows and boarded-up houses. At 23, he’s dressed for a day at the office, black slacks and blue dress shirt. Life on the South Side of Chicago requires an early rise. Like most Chicagoans, Powell uses transit to get downtown. But while train lines connect the mostly white North Side of Chicago to the Loop, on the predominantly black South Side, the train abruptly ends at 95th Street. If the Red Line train ran as far as 103rd, Powell’s trip downtown would take just 30 minutes. Instead, he starts out on a bus and his 14-mile commute takes an hour, door-to-door.

At the bus stop on 103rd,  a small group of bundled-up people mill in the cold. Their breath hangs in the air like small bursts of steam. “You never really know when the 103rd bus is going to get there,” says Powell, who despite a college degree remains at his parents’ place on the South Side to help make ends meet. After a short wait, the 103 comes on time, and he steps aboard his shuttle to the Red Line.

The Red Line is Chicago’s main rail artery, connecting the North Side with the South Side and carrying a third of the El system’s 600,000 riders each day. A lot of Chicagoans, especially on the North Side, look at the map of Chicago’s elevated train system and assume that the city just ends at 95th Street, the southern terminus of the Red Line. Most white North Siders seldom go as far south as the White Sox stadium at 35th Street. The Chicago Transit Authority’s Pink, Blue and Green lines all reach the western city limits. Howard Street, at the northern end of the Red Line, is the boundary between Chicago and Evanston, and from there the Yellow and Purple lines even extend north into the suburbs. But 95th Street is not the southern limit of the city. Not even close. Chicago carries on for another 40 blocks, another five miles south to the Altgeld Gardens housing project, the most isolated neighborhood in Chicago, and one of the city’s most impoverished areas. Even before the recession, unemployment in Altgeld hovered around 33 percent. That isolation and that poverty are not coincidental. The first black president may have worked its streets, but the black Far South Side of Chicago remains cut off from the rest of the city in a transportation apartheid. Barack Obama’s former community organizing group, Developing Communities Project, is working to change that, pressuring the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) to unite Chicago from the north end to the south end with a single Red Line.

Americans took 10.7 billion trips aboard public transportation in 2008, the most since 1956, when President Eisenhower signed the Federal Highway Act. Transit agencies, once decimated by the rise of the automobile, have responded to increased demand by laying down tracks, even in cities never associated with inner-city rail, like Phoenix. New York is finally proceeding with the Second Avenue Subway. Chicago has four major El expansions under consideration, including the Red Line extension. Washington, D.C., has plans for a 37-mile network of surface-level electric streetcars, complementing its existing Metro subway system. The streetcars would connect low-income areas along H Street and Benning Road to the National Mall while white, affluent Georgetown would remain disconnected.

But Washington is the exception to the rule. Most other cities expand transit service in the opposite way in regards to race and class. The lower the income, and the greater the minority populations, the worse the service, says Robert Bullard, an urban sociologist at Clark Atlanta University. Latinos are three times more likely than whites to ride transit and blacks are six times more likely than whites to take a bus or train than drive. But it’s rare for these populations to see transit expanded in their neighborhoods. In the 1990s, Bullard witnessed first hand unequal service in Atlanta, where the black part of town got the oldest, dirtiest buses and the affluent areas where whites lived got rail extensions. Transit agencies typically reach out to “choice” riders with the cushiest buses and the best rail service, hoping to lure them from their cars.

As the Red Line extension went through the early planning stages, the CTA seemed to put equal weight behind an extension of the Yellow Line farther into the comfortably middle-class north suburb of Skokie, Ill. The Yellow Line has only 4,000 daily passengers — fewer than any single stop on the Red Line except one. But with a new parking garage at its terminus, the extended route could tap into the mostly white north suburbanites, eager to get to downtown Chicago without a car. When Chicago cut service in early 2010, it cut bus service over rail service by a ratio of two to one. Not only does the busiest bus line — on 79th Street — cut across Chicago’s mostly black and Latino South Side, but like Charles Powell’s Roseland bus, the 79 crosses areas where the CTA offers no rail option. As Bullard says, the people who’ll ride no matter what will take whatever is given them. “It’s like they have a captive audience.”

Countering this trend has required grassroots action. New York’s subway system heavily favors Manhattan over the outer boroughs. Harlem-based WE ACT is pushing for rapid bus lines to connect underserved portions of Queens, Brooklyn, and The Bronx with job centers in Manhattan. Transit activist James Burke said that short of  costly expansion of the city’s subway network, bus rapid transit is the most effective means of getting these transit-dependent communities to jobs.

Car-friendly Los Angeles unveiled its first publicly funded light rail line in 1990, connecting downtown with South Central, Watts, Compton, and Long Beach along the old Pacific Electric Railway. The former railway to Long Beach closed in 1961, and poor transit access was no small cause of the Watts riots four years later. But as the L.A. Metro began to expand rail service in the 1990s, activists at the Labor Community Strategy Center successfully sued Metro, arguing that rail was being funded at the expense of bus service, which better served minority populations. “[Los Angeles] was built around wheels,” said Francisca Porches of the strategy center. “The most effective way to get people around the city is by bus.” The courts forced Los Angeles Metro to spend more than $1 billion improving bus service, and due to the pressure of the strategy center’s Bus Riders Union, the city’s diesel bus fleet has all but been converted to cleaner natural gas. Metro’s spokesman, Marc Littman said rail service had revitalized Hollywood, but also boosted service in minority areas. “You need a good bus system, but you also need rail,” Littman said.

But nowhere is the transportation apartheid greater than Chicago’s South Side, said Bullard. “That’s pretty blatant. For that line not to be extended into the South Side is long overdue.” Organizers at Developing Communities Project aren’t interested in any more buses from the CTA. Even if Los Angeles is a city of rubber wheels, Chicago is not. The tracks of the Loop are the heart of the city and the eight arteries of the El its lifeblood. DCP’s organizers want more of what the North Side has. They want rail.

Chicago has worked hard to scrub itself from a Rust Belt economy in the 20 years since Mayor Richard M. Daley took office, re-emerging as a cosmopolitan lakeside metropolis ready to rival any city on the nation’s coasts. The prosperity has run up El lines that crisscross the North and West sides from the Loop as a new generation of Chicagoans looks to live near transit. But Chicago is still heavily segregated and like two cities molded together: a vibrant North Side conjoined to a mostly black South Side more akin to Detroit, marked by disinvestment and high unemployment. One reason may be access to frequent, rapid transit. Almost all of the North Side is walking distance to the El. On most of the South Side, you take a bus.

Charles Powell rides the 103 into the terminal at 95th Street, and the driver has to jockey for position to enter. So many buses unload into the station that they create their own traffic jam. There are 14 bus routes spread out in every direction southward from the station as if Chicago were a great oak tree and these were its roots. In addition to the 103, there’s the 111 and the 34, which carries passengers from South Michigan Avenue and Altgeld Gardens. There’s also the 95E, 95W, 100, 106, 108, 112, 119, 352, 353, 359 and 381, most of them full of passengers who clamor to unload in wave upon wave. About 25,000 people pass in and out of the turnstiles at 95th Street each day — more than any station outside the Loop, and these buses carry 57,000 people daily.

Hopping off the bus, Powell quickly makes his way to the train platform, through a sea of people, all of them black, who flood the station each morning. The South Side branch of the Red Line goes right up the middle of I-90/I-94, the Dan Ryan Expressway. The construction of the expressway in the late 1960s coincided with the steep decline of many South Side neighborhoods, as the wide sterile swath now cut through them. The Dan Ryan is 14 lanes wide, but that’s still not enough capacity to meet the demands of commuters moving north, one automobile at a time.

Powell and the carfuls of black passengers leave the Red Line under the Loop,  mixing with an equal amount of mostly white passengers arriving on the Red Line from the North Side. He’s well awake by the time he reaches his office tower at 7:15 a.m., but his eyes are tired. “I’m looking to get somewhere closer to the Loop because waking up at 5 o’clock hurts.”

When Barack Obama was the same age as Charles Powell, he came to the Far South Side of Chicago to work as a community organizer. He helped residents in Altgeld Gardens persuade an obstinate Chicago Housing Authority to remove asbestos as well as keep up with basic maintenance. The Rev. Alvin Love, a minister recruited by Obama to join Developing Communities Project (DCP) more than 20 years ago, said one of their early successes was to get Altgeld residents trained to remove the asbestos themselves. “He really understood the passion behind what was being addressed,” said Love.

After Obama left for Harvard, DCP came to focus more and more on transportation. Job skills don’t do much good if you can’t get easily from here to there. “When the El stops, development stops at that point. Everything below that El stop is invisible,” said Bullard. The neighborhoods of the Far South Side of Chicago have an unemployment rate that never seems to go below 15 percent, even in good times. At the same time, one in four households have no access to a car, the same figure as the Ninth Ward of New Orleans.

Altgeld Gardens in particular is isolated by design. The projects are hedged in by five rail lines, but only one bus picks up passengers in the Gardens, and its nervous drivers have been known to skip Altgeld after dark. Originally built for black veterans after World War II, Altgeld was close to South Side steel mills but still segregated from white South Side neighborhoods. The Gardens are arranged as a labyrinth of barracks-style row houses all sitting within “a toxic doughnut,” an island of residential space surrounded by abandoned steel mills, the Lake Calumet dump, sewage treatment facilities, a Ford plant, a Sherwin-Williams paint factory and the dirty Little Calumet River. Residents must travel miles by bus to buy groceries and some take their chances eating fish from the poisoned river.

An extension of the Red Line to Altgeld at 130th Street has been on the CTA drawing board since 1973. “The history of this project is not to do it; it’s to pass it on,” said Lou Turner, a public policy consultant with DCP. “We looked for city officials… [but] if it wasn’t going to be us, it didn’t look like there was going to be anybody to push it.”

In 2004, DCP led an advisory referendum in the two South Side wards served by the Red Line extension. The measure passed with 39,000 votes. “If we put together a strong enough coalition, we can outflank the aldermen, and it would not be in their interest to oppose us,” Turner said. DCP worked with the University of Illinois-Chicago to study the benefits of better transit on the Far South Side. The CTA wanted to continue the El down the freeway, but the community organizers argued that the Red Line should follow a freight railroad that runs through the middle of Roseland. The organizers hope the new Red Line will have transit-oriented development like on the North Side.

“I think if we don’t get the Red Line, it will reflect on the fairness of the city of Chicago,” Love said. “[The Red Line] will cut out what I call the South Side tax — that is, taking a bus to get up to 95th and then paying again to transfer to go north into the city. It will cut down on extra time. It will bring millions if not billions of dollars of economic development into one of the most underserved areas of the city.”

For most of the first half of the 20th Century, a streetcar ran down the Roseland blocks of South Michigan Avenue, and brick commercial buildings sprang up along the tracks. The electric streetcars were abandoned in favor of dirty, diesel buses in the 1950s. The steel mills left, the neighborhood flipped overnight from all-white to all-black and only a few businesses survived, amid hair salons, discount clothing stores and payday lenders. “People won’t come into an area to shop that has one store here, and one store there, and blighted businesses in between,” says Eddie Davis, the owner of 80-year-old Bass Furniture.

Roseland now doesn’t even have a grocery store, and a 2005 University of Illinois-Chicago study found $22 million leaks out of the neighborhood each year as residents go out of the area to buy food. Davis believes a Red Line stop down the street would increase foot traffic to his store as well as allow for new business, a belief now shared by local Chicago Alderman Anthony Beale, who said plans for a new discount Aldi grocery store at 115th and Michigan would be transit-oriented. “It was because of the efforts of the elected officials that this project is on the agenda,” Beale said. “People want to get this riled up. It’s gonna happen. It’s gonna get funded.”

The core members of DCP took their cause to Washington in 2005 and lobbied the Illinois congressional delegation. After the meeting with U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., Love asked the former executive director of DCP, Debra Strickland, when they would be meeting with U.S. Sen. Obama. “I believe she took advantage of my friendship,” Love recalls. “She told me, ‘We were hoping to meet him at 2, but we haven’t actually told him — we were hoping you would call him.’” Love telephoned Obama, and he was on the Senate floor at the time. Although keenly familiar with the Far South Side, this was the first Obama had heard about the push to extend the Red Line. “He left the Senate floor and came down and met with us. Not only did he not know about [the extension], he didn’t know we were coming.”

When President Bush signed a transportation bill that year, it included a line item from Sen. Obama to fund the preliminary engineering for the Red Line.

The federal New Starts program for new rail and rapid bus service received a $740 million boost when President Obama signed the National Recovery and Reinvestment Act a year ago, moving to accelerate funding for 11 projects in 10 cities, including the Second Avenue Subway in New York and the East L.A. Gold Line. The New Starts funding was but a fraction of the $8.4 billion salve the Recovery Act crucially awarded to desperate transit agencies fighting to stay solvent in the recession. Chicago’s transit repairs were so backlogged, trains could travel only 15 miles per hour in its Blue Line subway, which received $88 million for new tracks.  If “shovel-ready” money could not be used directly for operations, cities such as Portland, Oregon, were able to avoid further fare hikes by using the money to repair buses — normally an operational expense.

Even with the stimulus, most transit agencies are suffering just to keep the buses running. In February 2010, the CTA laid off nearly 1,100 employees and cut rail service 9 percent and bus service 18 percent. Charles Powell’s 103 bus saw the steepest cuts in Chicago — the daily run is now shorter by four hours, with buses now sometimes only coming every 20 minutes. In St. Louis, a November 2008 sales tax levy failed forcing its transit agency to cut service 44 percent, hitting blacks commuting from the inner-city to the suburbs especially hard. Russ Carnahan, a Congressman from St. Louis, has proposed changing the transit funding formula in the new transportation bill to allow 30 to 50 percent to be used for operations.

WE ACT and the Labor Community Strategy Center are working ahead of the new six-year transportation bill, organizing transit advocates nationwide to pressure Congress to emphasize transit funding over highways. Less than 20 percent of the most recent bill, which expired last fall, went for transit. A proposal by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) asks for transit funding of $123 billion, on top of the $50 billion marked for high-speed intercity rail in an early House draft. New Starts projects like the Red Line extension would receive $32 billion in the APTA proposal, up from $11 billion.

At the urging of the Obama administration and the Senate, the House has continued to put off its transportation bill, perhaps until March 2011. Instead, the president has been pushing Congress to pass a new job stimulus bill. The House version would pour $48 billion into infrastructure projects, but the version Senate finally passed was drastically pared down from that. “The jobs bill is no substitute for the six-year transit bill,” said Jim Berard, a spokesman for Rep. James Oberstar, D-Minn., the chair of the House transportation committee. The bill is held up because the Highway Trust Fund revenues fall short of expenses and the gasoline tax must be raised — a politically unpopular option in a recession and election year, Berard said. The new $500 billion measure dwarfs the last bill, which passed in 2003 at $286 billion. But that bill was inadequate even seven years ago. “We have really neglected our infrastructure for decades,” Berard said. “We’ve patched things together rather than did overhauls.” He said President Bush knocked $100 billion off the last transportation bill because he would not consider raising the gas tax, which now should be raised five to eight cents a year for the course of the bill, then indexed to inflation, according to a 2008 congressional report.

Oberstar’s draft would devote about $100 billion towards inner-city transit projects, which falls short of APTA’s proposal but still dedicates a greater amount and greater percentage of the transportation bill to transit than ever before, at 22 percent.

In Chicago, DCP won their latest victory in August 2010. The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning named the Red Line extension their number one transit expansion priority in a tentative release of their long-term plan. The CTA has begun an environmental review and the engineering process. If Chicago can get federal funding to build most of the six-mile, $1.1 billion transit line to Altgeld Gardens, operations could start in 2016, possibly in time for the end of President Obama’s second term.

The CTA’s plans currently call for the route to go to Altgeld, providing the Red Line with a new switching yard and a large parking garage at 130th Street to serve commuters from the south suburbs. But last summer the authority released an alternative that would end the route at 115th Street. If an extension is built, and it serves Roseland but not Altgeld, it’s hard to see how it would ever be extended a second time just to serve the projects. “Read my lips: We’re going to 130th,” said Alderman Beale.