WHEN ERIC WITHERSPOON became superintendent of Evanston Township High School near Chicago in 2006, he walked into a math class where all the students were black. “A young man leaned over to me and said, ‘This is the dummy class.’” The kids at Evanston who took honors classes were primarily white; those in the less demanding classes were minority—a pattern repeated, still, almost 60 years after integration, across the nation. All of the Evanston kids had been tracked into their classes based on how they’d performed on a test they took in eighth grade. Last September, for the ... Read More
