TRANSCRIPT:
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Luis Hernandez: Ten district and charter schools in New Bedford have been designated as segregated in a new report from the state education department’s Racial Imbalance Advisory Council. Segregation in schools is not new for New Bedford, but in the 1970s and 80s, there were concerted efforts to combat the problem. Professor Charles Glenn is a former Massachusetts state official who helped oversee [school] desegregation efforts in New Bedford and throughout the state between 1970 and 1991. Glenn is Professor Emeritus of Educational Leadership at Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development. He joins me now. Professor, I appreciate your time. Thanks so much.
Charles Glenn: It’s my pleasure.
Hernandez: Professor, in the 70s and 80s, you served as director of the Massachusetts Bureau of Equal Educational Opportunity. Briefly, tell us about your work in that role.
Glenn: It was a new unit in the state Department of Education created and I was the first director and the last director because they abolished it when I retired to go to Boston University in 1991. But during that period, I was responsible for strategizing urban education for racial discrimination issues, for sex equity, for bilingual education, and for other equity related issues.
Hernandez: How effective were the efforts in your time at integrating schools in Massachusetts, specifically New Bedford?
Glenn: Well, I think we were very effective in heightening the focus upon the interests of low-income and immigrant and minority students in New Bedford and other urban districts. It’s often portrayed as though our concern was getting numbers to come out right in relation to racial integration. But in fact, that was always simply a way to heighten the focus upon the schools where most Black and Latino and Cape Verdean and other students were concentrated. In fact, by the end of my 20 years in that job, about 20% of all the students in the state were attending schools that were covered by our plans, and in most cases involving her choice of racially integrated schools.
Hernandez: Did your efforts result in better outcomes for the students?
Glenn: I think so, yes. Indeed, we had a lot of evidence of that. I think in general, we were able to require districts to focus upon creating effective schools. The way we did that was by promoting plans to achieve racial integration through attracting students on a voluntary basis. Now, you can only attract students if the school has something good to offer. And so that’s why we focused on that in New Bedford and other districts, creating at Carney Academy and the Green School, which was one of the first two magnet schools in the state. Other schools, we had a focus on, “Let’s create really effective, attractive schools that will persuade parents to send their children voluntarily to achieve a racially integrated enrollment.”
Hernandez: Help us understand, what’s the impact on students when schools are segregated by race and poverty?
Glenn: Well, I have argued repeatedly to the New Bedford officials that if you did not have the students have early experiences with students who were different from them racially and culturally that it was very difficult to avoid conflict and tension when they got to the high school level. I argued that, for example, to the New Bedford mayor who was very reluctant to accept any plan that would bring together minority and white kids. This would’ve been 1971. The mayor of New Bedford wanted us to approve a plan that would achieve integration of these predominantly minority – that is Carney Academy and Green – schools by transferring into them the bilingual classes for immigrant kids. He argued that that would be good because the immigrant kids, because of being in a bilingual program, would be isolated. They wouldn’t be harmed by mixing with other students who came from families who weren’t committed to family values and so forth. In other words, he was making basically a racist argument and we totally rejected that. We said, no, that’s not at all supported by evidence or experience. Integration is a helpful thing when it’s done in the right way. Simply pushing kids together in order to achieve a particular numerical outcome is not what we were concerned about doing.
Hernandez: Professor, why do you think school segregation has persisted into the 21st century? I’m wondering, what can school districts like the one in New Bedford do to rectify this situation?
Glenn: Well, I don’t think it’s surprising given that the school-age population of the United States is increasingly minority. That isn’t a bad thing at all, but it does mean that to achieve particular numerical outcomes, it becomes more and more difficult. I think we need to use that as a reason to focus on being sure that those schools are highly effective with strong expectations, with strong school culture; all the things that we know make the school effective. I’ve become convinced that employing parent choice – as magnet schools do, as charter schools do – is a way to ensure that schools are effective because otherwise they won’t be able to attract students and they’ll have to shut down.
Hernandez: Professor, as we confront segregation today, what lessons can we take from the integration efforts that you made back in the 70s and 80s?
Glenn: I think what we learned in the 70s was that simply assigning kids to schools on the basis of their race was not effective, but that when we then moved on from that to a strategy of creating schools that would be attractive to white and Black and Latino and Cape Verdean parents, that impact led to schools becoming educationally effective and, as in New Bedford, implementing such plans without conflict as occurred in New Bedford in the late 70s.
Hernandez: The department that you oversaw to help integrate Massachusetts schools was dissolved in 1991. Was that a mistake?
Glenn: Yes, I think it was. I think it’s unfortunate. Once I left and they abolished the unit and abolished my position, nobody was minding the store. Now and then reports could come out saying that schools were racially imbalanced or racially identifiable or whatever, but that’s quite different from having an on-the-ground strategy of working with superintendents and principals to create school districts within which choice works to achieve racial integration and educational improvement.
Hernandez: I’ve been speaking with Professor Charles Glenn, a former Massachusetts state official who helped oversee the state’s [school] desegregation efforts from 1970 to 1991. He’s a Professor Emeritus of Educational Leadership at Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development. Professor, I really appreciate the time today. Thank you so much for the insight.
Glenn: My pleasure.
