Thank You, Jolanda Jones and the Houston Chronicle, for Doing to Our Children What the Segregationists Used to Do to Us
I grew up in a different America.
The schools were not equal. The expectations were not equal. If you were Black or Brown, people in authority often decided what your future should be before you ever opened a textbook. They rarely said, “Your child deserves less.” Instead, they said they were being realistic. They said they were placing students where they belonged. They said it was for our own good.
History remembers the separate schools, but it often forgets the separate expectations.
I thought we had learned.
Then I read about Houston ISD.
According to The Texas Observer, nearly 2,000 juniors at sixteen NES high schools were removed from Algebra II and placed into Algebraic Reasoning/Texas College Bridge. At some campuses, nearly seventy percent of the juniors were placed in the less demanding course. At Houston’s wealthier non-NES high schools, fewer than five percent were. Those NES schools serve predominantly Black and Latino communities.
Read that sentence again.
The children who lost the opportunity were not randomly selected from across Houston. They overwhelmingly came from the schools serving the children who have spent generations fighting for equal educational opportunity.
Someone will say this was done to help them.
That is what they always say.
Segregation was defended as being in everyone’s best interest. Tracking was defended as helping children learn at their own pace. Lower expectations were defended as being realistic. Every generation invents kinder language for an older injustice.
If these students were struggling, then give them tutors.
Give them longer school days.
Give them summer academies.
Give them smaller classes.
Give them the best mathematics teachers in Texas.
Do everything possible to help them climb the same mountain.
Don’t move the mountain.
Algebra II is not just another class. It is part of the bridge leading to college mathematics, engineering, science, and many careers that can change the course of a family’s future. A child removed from that path is not simply taking a different course. That child is being asked to compete later against students who continued climbing while he or she was sent to repeat material already learned.
Adults call that educational policy.
Children call it their future.
What makes this story so painful is not simply what HISD allegedly did. It is who stood beside it.
Many of us believed the state takeover would be questioned by people who understood the history of discrimination in Texas schools. We believed the institutions that had spent decades exposing inequality would be the first to ask whether Black and Brown children were once again being given something less.
Instead, many cheered.
They applauded the miracle before asking how the miracle was produced.
I have lived long enough to know that statistics can lie without a single number being false.
Raise the score by lowering the expectation.
Improve the rating by changing who takes the harder course.
Celebrate the adults.
Leave the children with the consequences.
That is not educational reform.
That is reputation management.
And history has seen it before.
The segregationists of my youth did not always keep us down by locking the schoolhouse door. Sometimes they simply gave us fewer opportunities, weaker preparation, and lower expectations. Then they pointed to the outcome as proof that we had never been capable of more.
Today the language is more sophisticated.
The methods are wrapped in accountability systems, college-readiness metrics, and strategic scheduling.
But if the result is that Black and Brown children receive a diminished educational pathway while others continue on the road to opportunity, then I do not care how modern the terminology sounds.
The injury is still the same.
History should have taught us to recognize it.
Instead, some of the very people who once promised to fight educational inequality now ask us to applaud it.
No.
I already lived through one generation telling Mexican children they should expect less.
I refuse to applaud another one for finding a more respectable way to say it.
https://www.texasobserver.org/the-houston-miracle-shell-game
