Separate But Equal? Segregated Schools and the Fragmentation of Civic Narrative.

What can de facto segregated, urban schools do to help the overwhelmingly poor and minority students who attend them become civically engaged and politically empowered? To what extent does an effective civic education in these schools need to take into account these students? life experiences, readings of history, and interpretation of current events? If these do turn out to be significant, what does this imply about the construction of American citizenship more generally? These are the questions that motivate this essay. After providing anecdotal motivation from my own eighth grade classroom for the above questions, I give more formal data in section 1 to show why we should be concerned about civic engagement among young people living in de facto segregated, poor, minority, and immigrant communities. I define the characteristics of good citizenship and argue that there is a ?civic achievement gap? between citizens who are poor, minority, and immigrants, on the one hand, and middle-class, white, and native-born citizens on the other. I then demonstrate in section 2 why de facto segregated schools are both necessary and opportune as sites to address and attempt to remediate the civic achievement gap. In section 3, I focus on curricular reform within history and social studies as one means of narrowing the attitudinal civic achievement gap in particular. I argue that de facto segregated schools and communities should help students construct empowering civic narratives that are grounded in and responsive to their own lived experiences. Section 4 gives two examples of such civic narratives?one based in African Americans? struggle for justice and equality, and the other based in younger generations? obligations attendant on their ancestors? history of sacrifice. This means that both civic education in particular, and conceptions of American citizenship more broadly, must become personalized and particularized: a move that contradicts current taste for standardization and uniformity, and a problem that I address briefly in section 5 at the end of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]