School integration is best solution to inequality, event keynote speaker says

America’s most vulnerable children are being isolated through unequal educational opportunities, and investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones says we’re ignoring the only real answer: integration.

The New York Times Magazine reporter, who focuses on racial injustice, will discuss the issue of school segregation and how journalists cover it during her keynote address at a Macon event Monday.

“We keep attempting to fix the problem without using the solution that research says is the best solution,” Hannah-Jones said. “If we really are going to be framing the conversations about school equity, then integration has to be at the center of that conversation.”

The community is invited to “Race and Schools: Macon is Not Alone” at 6:30 p.m. in the Mercer University Medical School auditorium. The day’s program will also include a panel discussion with education reporters and editors, moderated by Telegraph Editorial Page Editor Charles Richardson.

The event is the centennial celebration of the life of journalist Jack Tarver. It’s the third public forum in the “race and schools” project from Mercer University’s Center for Collaborative Journalism, The Telegraph and Georgia Public Broadcasting. A January article by the Center for Collaborative Journalism reported how the racial concentration of Bibb County public schools has increased dramatically over the past two decades.

“Jack Tarver was instrumental in supporting Ralph McGill’s Pulitzer-winning fight against segregation in the pages of the Atlanta Constitution,” said Tim Regan-Porter, director of the Center for Collaborative Journalism. “For the anniversary of his 100th birthday, we worked with Mercer University’s Tarver Library to bring journalists from across the country to talk about the de facto resegregation of many American schools. I think it’s important that we hear why this issue matters, what it looks like in other communities and what efforts some schools are making to address this divide.”

Panelists are Trisha Powell Crain, education reporter for Alabama Media Group; Jane Hammond, education reporter for Daily Press in Newport News in Virginia; Cynthia Liu, CEO of the K-12 News Network in Los Angeles; Christopher Quinn, education editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; and Amber Walker, kindergarten through 12th-grade education reporter for The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin.

Hannah-Jones said her passion for reporting on racial injustice grew out of her job as a journalist.

“I was covering education, and I was seeing the result of classrooms in schools of segregation,” she said. “As a human being, going into these schools and seeing what the isolation was doing to these children really gave me a sense of urgency.”

Data show the longer children stay in segregated schools, the further they fall behind, she said. There is a moral obligation to break down walls of segregation, and Hannah-Jones hopes her keynote speech will be a sort of “pep talk” for journalists — and the community.

“We can either choose to eliminate inequality or we can maintain it,” she said.

This story was originally published March 9, 2017 at 3:27 PM with the headline "School integration is best solution to inequality, event keynote speaker says."