(NewsNation) — A high school in Evanston, Illinois, implemented a program back in 2019 that let students segregate by race in order to address learning gaps.
The program has gained popularity and has even expanded.
Advocates for the program say it can help make students feel more comfortable in the classroom, which increases their chances of doing better in school.
This year at Evanston Township High School, nearly 200 Black and Latino students signed up for core classes, like math and writing, within the program. Those students will attend classes with students of the same race.
The so-called affinity classes are taught by a teacher of color, intended to help Black and Latino students enroll in advanced curriculum.
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The school district’s superintendent, Marcus Cambell, told The Evanstonian — the high school’s student newspaper — that the goal was to provide “a different, more familiar setting to kids who feel really anxious about being in AP classes.”
While federal anti-discrimination laws ban public schools from mandatory segregation, education lawyers said the voluntary options for students don’t apply.
Plus, Evanston isn’t the first to try this. Schools in Minnesota, California and Washington state also offer race-specific elective classes.
Civil rights attorney Robert Patillo argued the program in Evanston is healthy and enriching for students, making learning feel more comfortable.
“You have to be able to balance both the educational aspects of it with the social educational aspects, and bringing more children together, and not trying to separate them out, specifically not preaching division and superiority or inferiority that we all often have seen previously,” Patillo said. “We’re all equal. We’re all the same. We’re just learning in different ways, and that does not make us different.”
However, not everyone agrees with Patillo’s assessment.
Nationwide, fewer Black and Latino students enroll in Advanced Placement courses than white students, often scoring lower on standardized tests.
The director of the National Education Policy Center, Kevin Welner, believes the segregated classes in high schools are simply a short-term solution to the racial inequalities he says minorities face in society as a whole.
“The school district seems to be trying to respond to the resulting harm of larger inequities in the community, in the state, in society,” Welner said. “But applying a Band-Aid in the form of these voluntarily segregated affinity classes is unfortunate.”
The Evanston High School isn’t the only school across the U.S. implementing similar programs. Other school districts around the nation will be closely watching what Evanston does and what the impact is on the students, the test scores and the districts.