A ‘Struggle’ to Show When Model of Integration Falls Apart

It wasn’t supposed to happen in Shaker Heights--long a national model of successful integration.

But two years ago the affluent suburb of Cleveland was rocked when the Shaker Heights High newspaper, the Shakerite, reported a serious gap between the scholastic achievement of white and African American students. According to a school board study, 82% of the state’s African American teenagers failed at least one portion of the ninth-grade proficiency test and 84% had received a D or F grade in at least one subject after fifth grade.

As soon as he heard, documentarian Stuart Math, who is a graduate of Shaker Heights High, knew he wanted to find a way to tell the story.

Incorporating video footage shot by two students who captured angry parent-student-teacher meetings as they unfolded in the days following the release of the report, Math constructed “Shaker Heights: The Struggle for Integration,” airing tonight on KCET.

Math examines the impact this particular event had on the community and cast that against the history of integration in the town.

For 30 years, Shaker Heights successfully avoided the problems many cities faced when schools and neighborhoods were integrated. Through a grass-roots effort, the community stopped the flood of whites leaving the town in the ‘60s as African American families began moving in. And the fully integrated Shaker Heights school system had earned the reputation as being one of the nation’s best.

So what went wrong?

Airing on Los Angeles’ PBS affiliate, the documentary tries to answer that question. Ultimately, what Math found was a problem that wasn’t unique to Shaker Heights, he said.

“The achievement gap between black and white students is a national problem,” he said. “When you talk to educators, they say there is no solution right now. There are a lot of conclusions, but there is no one answer.”

Math acknowledged the film wouldn’t have been as dramatic without the footage shot by two students--one black, one white--from his video workshop at the high school. The cameras kept rolling as the community meetings dissolved into shouting matches and tempers flared.

“I think the program would have been much more of an essay if they weren’t there at the right time and able to shoot this stuff,” said Math, whose other work includes the documentary “River of Steel” about the building of New York’s first successful subway line.

Although Shaker Heights has worked actively on integration issues, in the student footage there is little intermingling between the races. Drawing on both his own experiences attending the school and what he found making the documentary, Math believes that a racial divide is more perception than reality. “It depends on how you look at it,” he said.

Math interviewed a black male upperclassman who explained he could have lunch with his white friends in the cafeteria without being hassled by his black friends. “I can eat lunch with my white friends and nobody says anything,” he said. “I can eat lunch with whomever I chose.”

Nevertheless, it is telling that in Math’s documentary much of the discussion, and the interaction between students, in particular, seems to split along racial lines.

That, according to Math, is simply part of the complicated and often contradictory aspects of integration. Math said he has found that, beginning in junior high, kids start separating into peer groups.

“When you get a community that is racially diverse,” he said, “those cliques break along racial lines.

“It’s like any community,” he added. “What do people expect integration is going to look like, and what do they expect diversity is going to look like in schools or communities? It’s a question each community has to answer for themselves.”

In Shaker Heights, the report served to mobilize a community, which thought it had solved the problem, to find new ways to attack the achievement gap.

“There are community groups which are forming,” Math said. “The school has expanded their minority achievement program. I think it has brought the level of discussions much more to the foreground.”

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* “Shaker Heights: The Struggle for Integration” airs tonight at 10 on KCET.