Last week, the Journal Sentinel did a story on the increase in integration in the Brown Deer school system. The story was a classic example of how a newspaper goes from day to day reporting without connecting the dots between different stories. Indeed, in this case, even the dots within that one story weren’t quite connected.
For years, the media has reported gloom-and-doom reports by academics about the “resegregation” of school systems. Gary Orfield, now at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, has for two decades been telling America – and Milwaukee – how rotten we’re doing.
But here’s a simple question: How could the nation – and Milwaukee – be undergoing a process of becoming more segregated when the percentage of minorities in the country keeps going up? Sheer math tells you more integration would likely be occurring.
And, in many ways, that is exactly what’s happening. From 1994 to 2006, the percent of white students nationally attending schools that were at least 95 percent white dropped from 34 percent to 21 percent. In general, schools are getting more integrated, and Wisconsin had the fifth-largest decline in whites going to nearly all-white schools – a pretty positive trend.
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“But here’s a simple question: How could the nation – and Milwaukee – be undergoing a process of becoming more segregated when the percentage of minorities in the country keeps going up? Sheer math tells you more integration would likely be occurring.”
Murphy’s understanding of “sheer math” remains at the level somewhere in the lower elementary grades. Let’s just use the simple probability idea of counting.
Let’s keep things simple and non-racial.
Say you have 100 fruits: 10 apples and 90 oranges, and let’s distribute them randomly into 10 groups of 10.
The expectation (average, mean) is that each group of 10 will contain 1 apple, and 9 oranges, but being randomly assigned, the likelihood that all 10 apples will be in the same group is vanishingly small.
The probability that we draw 10 apples in a row to form the segregated group of apples is (10/100) * (9/99) * (8/98) * … (1/91) = 1/17,310,309,456,440.
What is the probability that we chose a group of ten oranges?
(90/100) * (89/99) * (88/98) * … * (81/91) = 520,058,680,173/1,573,664,496,040 (about 1/3).
So there is a strong likelihood that apples will be “integrated” with oranges, and a very strong likelihood that oranges will be highly “segregated” from apples.
So what’s the problem, Murphy?