Chicago's Board of Education is preparing to open its first high school for gay and lesbian students in either 2009 or 2010. The school will provide openings for a maximum of 600 students. Admission will be awarded by lottery from a pool of applicants. Community opinion to date appears to support opening such a school.
The idea of an all-gay school seems analogous to already existing African-American academies and all-girl schools, schools often opened under charter school arrangements. I can see the same benefits in all three cases. I also have the same reservations.
The Chicago school board cites the primary reason for opening such a school to be the high absentee and dropout rate among gay students, because of the hostility, bullying, and violence that they experience, or at least fear. Removal of those factors would make study and learning easier for them. Similarly, studies have shown that in some circumstances, girls and blacks are more self-confident and assertive in voluntarily-segregated environments. Blacks have the opportunity to develop confidence through participation in black studies programs, and girls may do significantly better in math and science when they are not worrying about how boys perceive them when they show interest and aptitude in such subjects.
My reservations about all such programs, especially for gays and blacks, arise from the fact that we don't live in a segregated society. In Brown v. Board of Education, as we recall, the Supreme Court found that segregated schools, at least for African-Americans, were inherently unequal. Unless handled very carefully, separate schools can lead to ghettoization, where students learn to be self-confident within their narrow peer group, but do not learn the social and behavioral skills, and the competiveness, necessary to assimilate and interact successfully with the broader society that they'll confront after graduation.
(Also, of course, a very large proportion of gay high school students feel comfortable attending high school with their straight peers -- or at least as comfortable as it's possible for anyone to be in high school -- but these are not the ones who would apply to a segregated school in any case.)
A less important consideration, especially considering the small relative population planned for such segregated schools -- but still a point to be considered -- is that the majority population learns to get along with minority groups through familiarity. An all white school does not prepare white majority students to work and live beside blacks in college and beyond. In the same way, homophobia, to a large extent, is a fear of the unknown. Gay high school students have won increasing acceptance and assimilation within the last generation, simply because of their increased visibility and prominence in the school population, at all social and leadership levels. This acceptance by others during their student years will carry forward into their peer group's adult lives.
In any event, the Chicago school is a worthwhile experiment by a well-intentioned school board. Herding all gay and lesbian students into separate schools would be -- as it would be with girls, blacks, Jews, or red-haired students -- a horrendous idea with serious civil rights implications. But schools tailored to help a certain limited number of students who are having a particularly difficult time "fitting in" during their adolescent years may be an experiment worth trying.
The results and consequences should be carefully monitored, as I suspect they will be.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Separate but equal?
Posted by Rainier96 at 3:21 PM
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8 comments:
Honestly, I don't think setting gay students apart from others could possibly help them. They've got to learn to live with the way they're treated in high school, because it's going to follow them for the rest of their lives. Besides, I think society is making huge progress in terms of acceptance of gays, especially in my generation; so this is simply not a good time to suddenly make all the gays disappear from "regular" high schools, because it is their increasing prominence on high school campuses that is causing a great deal of said progress.
Besides, segregating them only reinforces the notion that homosexuality is a primary personality trait that makes one different from everyone else - an absurd notion, and one that most gay people unfortunately seem to believe. That sort of separation into distinct groups based on things like race, gender, and sexual orientation is what we all have to get past if we want things to truly get better.
I agree completely with virtually everything you say.
But obviously the Chicago Board of Education sees a need for such a school, and I was leaning over backward to understand the rationale.
Just from browsing the internet, it's clear, anecdotally, that there is a small subset of the entire gay high school age population that is unable to find tolerance, let alone acceptance, from classmates. These are the ones that the school board notes are dropping out of school, or failing because of spotty attendance, and they are the ones the board is trying to reach.
Considering the size of the public school population in Chicago, 600 students is a drop in the bucket compared to the total number of students presumed to be gay. Obviously, the group that the board is trying to reach have personality problems -- or at least unusually poor judgment -- that cause them to be persecuted by their classmates. One problem I see is that 600 kids with adaptive problems will carry those same problems with them even into an all-gay environment, creating a horrible teaching environment. But not as difficult, obviously, as teaching, for example, autistic kids.
But at least, they may be able to get a high school education, which is what they are not getting at present. As I implied in my post, let's see how it works out, and reconsider the entire matter after we have five or ten years of empirical results.
PS -- I'm not sure you're right that most gays consider homosexuality a primary personality trait.
If most gays didn't consider it to be a primary personality trait, there would be no such thing as a gay community.
If an interest in guns wasn't a primary personality trait, there'd be no such thing as the NRA?
Maybe we're not thinking of the same thing when we say "primary personality trait."
No, we're thinking of separate things when we say "gay community". I'm not talking about political advocacy groups for gay interests. I'm talking about the sub-society that has been built around nothing but homosexual tendencies. Gay pride parades, for instance.
Gotcha. I see your point.
I still see a problem in logic with what you said, but your overall point is valid. (Conceding gracefully is not one of my strong points.) :)
Hi Tawny! Actually, I think we all three probably agree. In general, assimilation is good and segregation is bad, and in general kids have to learn for themselves how to get along. But some kids are having such a rough time that it may be a good idea to take them temporarily out of their toxic environment, and give them a chance to settle down and get back on their feet.
That's true if they are gay or black or talk with a funny accent or wear weird clothes. Or just get picked on for unknown reasons, like the boy in Arkansas I wrote about last fall.
LOL about the L.A. movie biz -- hey, let's not be encouraging stereotypes. :-)
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