Slate: HRC's Civil Rights Work and Her Policy Agenda

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Why Hasn’t Hillary Clinton’s Civil Rights Work Influenced Her Policy Agenda?



It shaped her views on racial inequality, but it hasn’t made a mark on her presidential campaign.



By Jamelle Bouie


In 1972, a young Hillary Rodham—working for Marian Wright Edelman’s Washington Research Project (later the Children’s Defense Fund)—drove into Dothan, Alabama to investigate school segregation.


“The future Mrs. Clinton,” writes Amy Chozick for the New York Times,” had been sent “to Alabama to help prove that the Nixon administration was not enforcing the legal ban on granting tax-exempt status to so-called segregation academies, the estimated 200 private academies that sprang up in the South to cater to white families after a 1969 Supreme Court decision forced public schools to integrate.”




It was a formative experience for the then-law student, who continued her work for Edelman after finishing school, before moving to Arkansas with Bill Clinton. And, as Chozick points out, it’s a recurring note in her rhetoric today. It informed her response to Black Lives Matter activists earlier this year, as well as her public remarks on issues of racial inequality. “The truth is equality, opportunity, civil rights in America are still far from where they need to be,” said Clinton in a speech near Ferguson, Missouri this summer. “Our schools are still segregated, in fact, more segregated than they were in the 1960s.”




But there’s a disconnect. For as much as this changed Hillary Clinton—for as much as it’s influenced her present campaign for president—it hasn’t influenced her policy agenda.




The past 20 years have witnessed a major retreat from desegregation efforts. Lawmakers have backed away from pro-integration policy while courts have hobbled or even stopped enforcing desegregation orders. The result is that, once again, school segregation is the norm in America. Thirty-nine percent of black students attend schools that are more than 90 percent minority up from 34 percent in 1991, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Just 28 percent of black students attend schools where more than one-third of their peers are white. Fifty-nine percent of black students attend schools where a plurality (at least 43 percent) of their fellow students are low-income, and in struggling cities like Detroit, the typical black student is in a deeply impoverished, hyper-segregated schools with few if any white students.




There’s no indication that the Clinton campaign has any plans or even interest in reversing the trend toward resegregation.



Overall, the average white student goes to a school that’s 73 percent white, while the average black student goes to one that’s 49 percent black and the average Latino student attends one that’s 57 percent Latino (to that point, Latino students are arguably the most segregated in the nation).




And this segregation comes with attendant advantages for white students—who, in the aggregate, attend the most resourced schools—and attendant disadvantages for black Americans and other students of color. In a 2012 report, the left-leaning Center for American Progress found that for every 10 point increase in the share of minorities at a school, per-pupil spending decreases $75.




If you could compensate for segregation with more resources this wouldn’t be a crisis. But this approach—“separate but equal” in everything but name—doesn’t work. The only thing that truly works to improve schools for all students, notes the New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones for This American Life, is desegregation.




Which brings us back to Clinton. Integration is personally important to her, but it hasn’t made a mark on her agenda. There’s no indication that the Clinton campaign has any plans or even interest in reversing the trend toward resegregation. In fairness, many of the details of education policy happen on the state and local level, and in the absence of new law, the federal government has limited authority and ability to influence the factors that determine school composition. With that said, the federal government isn’t bereft of tools to incentivize integration. Right now, for instance, the Obama administration is working to encourage integration in housing, which has a direct impact on increasing diversity in public schools.




More broadly, high-profile presidential candidates have the ability to set and influence agendas for their party. John Edwards’ advocacy in 2008 pushed health care reform to center stage in the Democratic primary; Donald Trump has turned the Republican primary into an arms race on immigration restriction; if she wanted, Clinton could make school integration an issue for her campaign, and by extension, an issue for the national Democratic Party.




The challenge—the chief reason no national Democrat, much less Clinton, will openly pursue integration—is that it could deepen the party’s problem with white voters, from the blue collar workers who are a declining share of the Democratic electorate to the college-educated whites who are key to any national victory. Rural or urban, liberal or conservative, neither school nor housing integration is popular with white voters, full stop. And any Democrat that makes school or housing integration a priority risks losing critical voters.




Which leaves us where we are: With Democrats that voice rhetorical commitments to school and housing integration but avoid all but the most marginal policies, working—instead—to try to humanize “separate but equal.”



www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/12/hillary_clinton_s_civil_rights_work_hasn_t_influenced_her_policy_agenda.html

[ESF]

OK. look, I think the Democrats are doing a shitty job on a lot of issues relating to race inequality. But at the same time, this article is weird.

You have state laws and constitutions that forbid the use of race in educational and housing decisions, which have been held up by the Supreme Court. The result of those laws has contributed to segregation, and there's nothing the president can do to make them disappear. So I'm not sure what exactly this writer thinks the feds can do?

Not to mention, when feds do get involved, it hasn't always been good. We had some short-sighted federal programs designed to increase minority home ownership, but the result was that banks jacked up interest rates and foreclosed more aggressively on those homes.

I'd like to see a lot more from Hillary Clinton, and the entire Democratic party. But this article is just sloppy journalism. Don't present "Why isn't the president fixing this thing?" complaints as if they are things that are largely or entirely in the control of the president to fix. Instead, present some actual ideas and a discussion of the challenges faced so that people understand the obstacles and can contribute to the other parts of the process that can contribute to its fix (like showing up for midterms and paying attention to state races).

[downtoearth]

Dec 30, 2015 9:43:50 GMT -5 CheeringCharm said:

Why Hasn’t Hillary Clinton’s Civil Rights Work Influenced Her Policy Agenda?




Which brings us back to Clinton. Integration is personally important to her, but it hasn’t made a mark on her agenda. There’s no indication that the Clinton campaign has any plans or even interest in reversing the trend toward resegregation. In fairness, many of the details of education policy happen on the state and local level, and in the absence of new law, the federal government has limited authority and ability to influence the factors that determine school composition. With that said, the federal government isn’t bereft of tools to incentivize integration. Right now, for instance, the Obama administration is working to encourage integration in housing, which has a direct impact on increasing diversity in public schools.




www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/12/hillary_clinton_s_civil_rights_work_hasn_t_influenced_her_policy_agenda.html

I'd like to speak to this part - not on behalf of HRC, but from the point of view of what I've been learning.  Ever since This American Life put out their two-part podcast on current desegregation programs, I have been reading all that I can on this.  It seems like the simplist idea - integrate kids early and white kids do great and black and Hispanic kids do even better, but the execution is shoddy, and messy, and rife with biases.  Plus, noboby wants to "test an educational theory" on their own kid, so there is a HUGE element of selfishness.

I actually just read a report last week from one of the leaders in new desegregation program development who works at either Harvards or UCLA's Civil Rights Projects (Gary someone, I'll have to look it up) - it illustrated that integration isn't as simple as a policy by a president or pulling money from states for education if you don't like how they spend it or b/c they don't desegregate, it's wrapped in all of our social issues - racism, poverty, gentrification, housing costs/prices, growth plans for urban areas, school choice, the state/federal testing of schools/students, state appropriation of money to charter or vouchers for non-public schools, early childhood education, etc.

This would be a great thing to start working toward, but it's as big as reforming health care and will be met with as much opposition.  Not that we shouldn't do it, and I would love if HRC said it was one of her main platforms, but until the primaries are over, I don't think we'll hear a strong stance on it b/c it is mired in all our other social problems.