RICHARD REEVES:
It's like an X-Ray that exposes class fracture when schools get involved and when you think about kind of integration.
Take this elementary school in New York City's affluent Brooklyn Heights neighborhood. P.S. 8 is predominantly white, with test scores considerably above average.
When the city's education department rezoned the area two years ago to ease overcrowding in P.S. 8 and assigned children to nearby P.S. 307, some P.S. 8 parents rebelled. P.S. 307 had served predominantly low-income, minority students with lower test scores.
It's not that anyone sat down and said look let's do some devilish scheme Let's let's find a way to rig the system and design tax and education housing like in this way. But it is the result of the interaction of those different kinds of systems which many of us benefit from, and candidly we'll support those sorts of exclusionary mechanisms, because it's in our short term immediate self-interest to do that.
In the end, the Brooklyn Heights school rezoning went through. But Reeves says the class gap in education continues right on through college.
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