To Save Democracy, Integrate Our Schools

Americans are worried about the future of our democracy. Recent polls show that anywhere from more than half to three quarters of us have real concerns about a slide into autocracy. 

It’s a sentiment I hear echoed frequently as I speak with people about the state of our public schools. It’s also why I recently found myself reading about “U-Turns,” which is what some experts call it when a country slides toward autocracy but then makes a U-Turn back toward democracy. I’ve learned that (1) roughly half of all “episodes” of autocracy globally have ended in democratic U-Turns; (2) today, the odds are better: when we look at slides into autocracy that ended in just the last thirty years, 73% U-Turned back into democracy; and (3) in places that start as democracies, the whole U-Turn process, from start to finish, takes an average of 10 years. 

If we are at the beginning of a decade-long U-Turn right now in the United States, my daughters will be roughly 18 when we come out of it. Their generation will be coming of age while simultaneously starting to rebuild democracy. In the years that follow, they will have to grapple anew with what “We the people” means, and do the work of building (or re-building) institutions, norms, and systems that reflect democratic values and beliefs. 

In the meantime, where will they develop their understanding of who “we” are as a country? In school, of course. Roughly 90% of children aged 5-17 go to school (for comparison, only 55% of kids play organized sports, and only 34% of teenagers go to church weekly or more). Undoubtedly, children develop a deep understanding of community from their places of worship, their networks of friends and family, and their local gathering spots. But nothing can compare to schools when it comes to the sheer number of hours spent with people outside of your family. Time spent in community.

Today, schools are as segregated as they were in the 1970s, and heading in the wrong direction. 

States are working hard to make our schools better at a lot of important things, including, for example, how we teach reading and how we teach math. But they are ignoring something equally important: how separated our children are from one another. Today, schools are as segregated as they were in the 1970s, and heading in the wrong direction. 

In our increasingly diverse country, it matters – a lot – that diversifying schools increases interracial trust as well as interracial friendships, weaving a sense of “we” throughout a larger community. School integration causes positive, permanent changes in mindset that can improve social cohesion, trust, and the health of our democracy as we fight for its very existence.

“Oh, you have a Black friend?” has become an easy joke in racial justice circles, and for good reason. But in truth, studies show having friends of different races actually does deepen and change how we all understand the world. It expands our understanding of who “we” are in America. And it doesn’t just change how we think, it changes what we do — how likely we are to show up for each other across lines of difference.

Americans understand this dynamic instinctively. In a recent poll commissioned by the organization I lead, Brown’s Promise, 74% of voters agreed with the statement that “we could heal our country’s divisions and make our democracy stronger if our future leaders could learn as students to work with and relate to people from different racial, ethnic, cultural, and economic backgrounds.”

Longstanding research shows that school segregation, on the other hand, is a significant problem for social cohesion, critical in any stable democracy. School segregation — even more than housing segregation — leads to prejudice. Prejudice, in turn, reduces the value that white Americans, in particular, assign to democracy. Indeed, white Americans with greater levels of prejudice are more likely to dismiss the value of separation of powers and support military rule. We don’t have to look very hard to see this playing out today.

Many of us are grasping for a quick way to reverse this descent into authoritarianism. But history teaches that we are in a multi-year struggle for democracy in America: more like 10 years than 10 months. Our odds are still good, and we can’t lose sight of that; we have to believe democracy (imperfect as it has always been) can prevail if we are going to keep fighting. But if we want to make this successful U-Turn, we have to show up with long term solutions that actually work. 

One of the most promising is an old one — the integration of American schools so that my daughters, together with your children, can learn a shared sense of who “we the people” are, and can use that intuition and understanding to guide them as they lead the rebuilding of our democracy. 

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Ary Amerikaner is co-founder and executive director of Brown’s Promise. She previously served as Deputy Assistant Secretary at the U.S. Department of Education under President Obama and Chief of Staff at the Maryland State Department of Education