Separate. Equal?

Neighborhood schools are great unless your neighborhood is the ghetto, in which case the sensible parent is putting her child on the first big yellow bus to the safer, happier place where white people live, where there's money and hope.

In a nutshell, that's what the city's entire black leadership has been trying to explain to the white establishment since the debate over the Metro school rezoning plan exploded into the headlines this summer like something out of the Sixties. Predictably—since when have white people listened to black people in this city?—the point seems to have been lost, even though there's decades of social science proving the common sense of it.

To illustrate, here's an anecdote, one of those it-would-be-funny-if-it-weren't-so-sad stories. Teachers take fourth-graders on a field trip to Nashville's jail to frighten them away from drugs and guns. But who's afraid? The kids are smiling and waving to their relatives behind bars.

"It was not scary to them," one stunned teacher says. "It was familiar."

True story. As told to Vanderbilt University researchers. It makes it easier to understand why, when educators discuss what poor African American children need to succeed in life, no one mentions neighborhood schools.

Forty years of studies, beginning with the famous Coleman Report in 1966, have shown that sending a lot of poor kids to school in the same place is a really bad idea. It's a central issue in education—how to teach poor urban children—and in all the research there's no more consistent conclusion than this: In schools where poverty is concentrated, students learn less. All the problems these children face—poor health, hunger, drugs, gangs and violence, and a culture that scorns education—it's all just too overwhelming for schools.

Poor children learn more in middle-class settings, the research shows. That happens, as the Coleman Report states, "not from racial composition per se but from the better educational background and higher educational aspirations that are, on average, found among whites." Blacks not only learn more with whites, studies show, but they gain entrée to white social networks and jobs later in life. It's a way out.

For more than 1,300 poor children in Nashville, the school rezoning plan would close that door of opportunity, according to the city's black leaders. Under the plan, beginning next school year (unless opponents succeed in stopping it), those students no longer will be bused 40 minutes to the upscale neighborhoods of Hillwood, but will go instead closer to home in the Pearl-Cohn cluster of schools in predominately black North Nashville.

The black enrollment at Hillwood High, located next to a country club and luxury dream homes, will drop immediately from roughly 50 percent to 25 percent. Pearl-Cohn's eight schools, already heavily black and poor, will become that much more so. In all but two schools, more than 90 percent of the students will be African American. Overall, nearly 90 percent will be poor enough to receive federally subsidized school lunches.

Already in Nashville, the black-white educational achievement gap is yawning, with more than double the percentage of elementary- and middle-school blacks failing to perform at their grade levels in math and reading, just to name two subjects. Black leaders are convinced the rezoning plan will exacerbate that.

Jerry Maynard—a Pentecostal preacher and, as an at-large Metro Council member, the city's highest-ranking African American elected official—has been the most outspoken.

"We are dooming these children to failure," he says. "Study after study shows that any positive benefit derived from going to a neighborhood school is totally wiped out by issues of poverty. We've been screaming this at the top of our lungs."

To try to placate blacks, the school board promises to spend $6 million a year to add an array of social services to Pearl-Cohn schools and to pay teachers more. There are a couple of obvious thorns on this olive branch: (1) No one can guarantee the funding. The city had to dip into reserve accounts to pay for schools this year, and any future tax increase will be hard to come by, requiring voter approval under a new Metro Charter amendment. (2) And even if more money is spent in these schools, it probably won't help students learn more.

The latter point comes from research by the aforementioned Vanderbilt education professors. From 2002 through 2004, Claire Smrekar and Ellen Goldring studied schools in poor Nashville neighborhoods that already had been given extra money for the same things promised Pearl-Cohn—nurses, guidance counselors and smaller class sizes. Their research paints a devastating picture of the effects of poverty on Nashville children.

In one elementary school, identified only by the pseudonym Olive by the researchers to encourage parents and teachers to speak freely, all the students lived in two adjacent housing projects extending side-by-side, four blocks northward. In a single year alone, 576 serious crimes—murders, rapes, robberies, car thefts—were committed there. More than 70 percent of the children were from single-parent households.

Only about one in five families owned a car, and the median income was $11,349. Out of 1,300 residents over the age of 25, only 31 had a college degree. The population was 92 percent black.