Resources / Ripples & Wipeouts

Recently I began working with a burgeoning civic group in my community to shed light on the opportunities that diversity brings.  It began with reaching out to the adults in the community to bridge the gap between ethnic, political and religious groups. 

As part of my research, I read about the work of William Tobin, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Duke University and a consulting attorney for the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina.  He’s interested in starting a much-needed public discussion about the need for diversity in our public schools in order to better prepare young people to live in what will be a majority, non-white country by 2050.  At issue is not just how people of different colors can get along, but the need to be exposed, in a very constructive way, to diversity of thought and approaches to problem solving.  For the last few decades, schools have been focused squarely on the skills of “readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmatic” with high-stakes tests being the sole determinant of learning, but not necessarily of achieving success in post-secondary education.

For years there’s been a disconnect between the mission of many post-secondary schools claiming to seek a diverse student-body and the goal of secondary schools, which want to keep graduation numbers, SAT scores and college acceptance numbers high.  Why shouldn’t a goal of secondary schools also be to seek a diverse student body?  Aren’t our neighborhoods divided primarily because parents of means seek to have their children attend the ‘best’ schools?  And aren’t the ‘best’ schools thought to be in predominantly white, affluent neighborhoods? 

Consider the implications of the following exchange between a reporter for the New York Times and Scott E. Page, a professor of complex systems, political science, and economics at the University of Michigan, which took place in 2008:

Q. In your book, you posit that organizations made up of different types of people are more productive than homogenous ones. Why do you say that?

A. Because diverse groups of people bring to organizations more and different ways of seeing a problem and, thus, faster/better ways of solving it.  (Read the whole article here.)

It would make a lot of sense then, to seek diversity well before post-secondary education. 

Ultimately, the goal for Professor Tobin is that diversity, like the SAT, be considered capital in the acceptance process; not the ethnicity of the student, but the diverse environment from which this student came.  This is an intriguing concept, to say the least.

Take my diverse community of Port Chester.  Our high school is majority Hispanic, while Blind Brook high school in the neighboring community of Rye Brook has a white majority.  While there is still a fair representation of whites, blacks and others in the Port Chester school, the Rye Brook high school is predominantly white with scant numbers of Hispanics and blacks.  Therefore, in Tobin’s theory, the Port Chester high school should be considered a prime candidate school from which colleges and universities would want to draw students.  However, because Port Chester does not have the suite of honors and AP classes, plus soaring SAT scores in its favor, our students are not sought after even though they may be better prepared to thrive in a diverse college or university.

Although its numbers show diversity, the Port Chester High School student body does not necessarily move in diverse groups.  Students tend to self-segregate.  This is not a unique phenomenon to PCHS.  It seems plain that having a diverse student body is not enough.  We must create vehicles in which students work in teams that are truly diverse.  This brings us back around to Professor Tobin, who has begun doing this work in schools in North Carolina.  Certainly, Port Chester could benefit from it as could many school districts around the country.  And this could potentially be the first of many, many steps toward the ultimate goal of generating diversity capital in this ever-changing and evolving saga that is equal access to higher education in the United States.

I find it fitting to write about diversity in the month of May, as it was in this month 55 years ago that the Supreme Court decided Brown v Board of Education.  It was argued that the concept of ‘separate, but equal’ is inherently unequal.  In that era, the idea was to give black children the opportunity to the same quality education as their white counterparts.  The legal team then may not have thought about the need for access to a diversity of thought and approaches to problem solving, but the idea promoted by Tobin and Page is the logical next step.

-- Joan Grangenois-Thomas