>> hi, i'm lisa fletcher, and you're in "the stream." yachts and mansions and low income how's, we explore how a dangerous divide across connecticut has in many ways returned to the era of segregated schools. our dij tat producer, rajahad ali is here, and bringing all of number feedback. why when you think of segregation, you think of brown versus board obrownv. board of .

>> this is happening meow, and to make another literally analysis, charles dickens, many say this is a tail of two connecticuts. and it's time to rid ourselves of the mason-dixon line: >> when you think of wide economic disparities in racially segregated schools, you probably think of the south a few decades ago, not modish connecticut. but it's home to many inequities. less than half of the students attend integrated schools, better performing schools where minorities make up less than 75%

of the population, and towns 20 something miles apart, the annual household income jumps from 42,000 to $124,000. and so what explains the divide? how can people get better access to quality education? we're joined by mayoral candidate from bridgeport, connecticut, and chef versus o'neil, that was a landmark suit that challenged inequality in the schools. a parent of three hartford students, and rothstein, from the economic policy institute, his work focuses on economic equality and race and education. thank you all for being here. so elizabeth, 17 other families joined you back in 1989 as partners in a lawsuit for the right for kids in your town of hartford, to all join other kids

in surrounding suburban districts. and what was going on at the time that you felt that such bold action was needed? >> i was invited to a meeting in 1989 where i learned one startling statistic, and that was in 1989, 74% of children in the 8th grade in hartford schools needed assistance with remedial reading. that was to say that 74% of children in the 8th grade could not read. so to me, that's a systemic number. that's a system number. it doesn't mean that 74% of the children are failing. it means that the system was failing 74% of our student population, so i joined in this movement, which is still an ongoing case. we are negotiating chef 3 now, april 26th will be 25 years into this advocaciest.

>> so yeny. you are the parent of three kids in the same school district, 24 years later, did chef versus o'neil solve the problem? >> i wouldn't say that it does solve the problem completely. it works in some ways, and in some it doesn't. i think we're more segregated now than we were ever before because now is classes that we're talking about, we're not just talking about white versus black or hispanic whatever. we're talking about children that lives in the neighborhood school that can attend their neighborhood school because they continue because of a lot of what they call magnet, and it really affects the percentage of our children in the city of hartford. >> is that a result of the chef case or just a series of attempted solutions some. >> well, i don't think when

elizabeth started this thing we were talking about, you know, some have and some don't. she wanted everyone to have equal education. but i think it has become now one of those things that from your top politician taking it and twisted it in the other form. our superintendent comes in and they turn it the way they want it, and now you have schools, we used to have programs in all of the schools that have kids with all forms of different activities, and specials, and now they're turning into schools to labels, and we call it labels. they put labels and buildings without any real substance in it. >> that's not right. >> but the way i'm looking at it and the way a lot of us are

looking at it, the magnet schools. >> we're going to get to magnet schools and obviously, elizabeth disagrees, but you have winners and lose,ers losers in chef. >> the problem with chef, those schools in hartford and around the country are segregated with a concentrated disadvantage of children who come to schools because in the neighbors, the neighborhoods are segregated. hartford is a segregated community. and it's surrounded by suburbs predominantly white. it was created in a century by federal action and policy. it didn't happen by accident. when the chef case was first filed, the attorneys had in the

complaint, they charged that the cities had segregated the neighborhood in which the students were being educated. and that's the reason the schools were segregated. they dropped that part of the complaint because they thought it was a tougher case to prove. and then when the decision came down, they said well, if anybody provided evidence that the state and federal governments had created the segregation, i would have issued a much more expansive ruling. >> richard, i'm going to put more expansive feedback in here:

jeff, i'm going to go to you with this. >> no, no, no. >> let me get jeff in first. is this worth celebrating and is this meaningful changing in. >> cow repeat the question? >> connecticut announced that it has gone from 11% to 42% in the last five years. is this what you call meaningful change? is this something to be hopeful about? >> i don't necessarily think that it means that much in terms of a better education. >> really? >> i don't. i think that what really matters, in terms of providing better education to children in connecticut and everywhere else in the country and the world for that matter is a larger share of the budget that's available for

application to services for people in general, in particular, education in regard to government provided services. >> here's the problem. we have to stop taking a fatalistic view. you sound like the titanic movie rerun every day of my life. i'm 62 years old and i've seen the titanic in my life every single day. what you're saying is the children who are being served and being helped, they don't count? of course they count. you know, are you saying that because we can't save them all, we should let them all drown? >> what i was saying is that it isn't desegregation per se that's going to result in a

better education and better opportunities, better life opportunities as an end result for children. what really counts is the quality of the education. which you can have a high quality education in an integrated school or a non-integrated school. i think that segregation is a symptom of the poverty, the oppressive poverty that denies our children the educational opportunities that lead to better life. >> and i disagree with you. [ talking at the same time ] >> you have concentrated -- children with reading experiences before they come to school, not having primary preventive healthcare, and unstable housing, and you put children like that in a

single school, no matter how good the education is, you're not going to get the achievement out of them that you would get in a middle-class school. it's true that the children have disadvantages, that educational programs can improve. but if they're dispersed in schools where not every child has those disadvantages, they have a much better chance to succeed. >> so many layers of this, when we come back, we're going to look at why the wealth gap is dangerously connected to education for tens of thousands of kids. but first, raj has a way that you can interact with our show during our show. check it out. >> tv is no longer one way with the screen app. disagree with one of our guests? great, tell us. get exclusive content and receive quizzes and gap information, interact with other users in realtime. you can be our third cohost.

vote and tweet and we'll use them on-air. drive the discussions on live tv. this literally puts you in the control room. go to aljazeera.com.

>> there's a lot of crime here, there's a lot of dysfunction. there's guns, there's drugs, there's drive by shootings. not 15 miles down i-95, one greenwich is one of the wealthiest communities in the united states. it would be fair to say this is how the other half lives here. this is a good deal more than 50% more affluent than bridgeport. >> that was a video on inequality in fairfield county, connecticut, which is between

greenwich village and fair port, which some consider run down. how different is it from bridge fort to greenwich, which is less than 20mize? >> the differences are stark and obvious and describable in terms of night and day. bridgeport is -- there are positive to my community, my city, and i don't want to badmouth my city in any way. it's full of wonderful people with wonderful aspirations, very productive and intelligent people. >> but the stark realities in differences between the two. >> absolutely, we have been marginalized. and we suffer from the increasingly negative effects of poverty. it really, it just doesn't get

better, it keeps getting worse. >> richard, it's really easy to see how that, how poverty can affect life, but talk about specifically how that is the trigger to our conversation on segregation. >> as i was indicating before, i saw the segment that you just showed of a community where there's a lot of violence, disorderly and graffiti. if a couple of children walk to school through a community like that, with much more serious problems than the rest of the children in their class, a teacher can pay special attention to those children and deal with it. if every child in the class is walking through the school in a community like that, and every child is in poor health because they don't have adequate healthcare in the community, no teacher, no matter how good she

is, can get the academics across to the children who aren't dealing with those stresses, so the only way to succeed with the children this you're talking about, is to enable them to attend schools where every child is not suffering the same things that they are. so segregation, and the advantages that children have are inextricably connected. >> one of the problems that the community is talking about:

tell us how housing and equality this, and also education equality in connecticut. >> so let's look first at hartford, connecticut. 51% of the property owned by the state, hospitals and schools and all of the universities and stuff like that. the state has not funded the pilot that they're supposed to be paying the city. so now our burden is put on the homeowners, or the small business people, and the tax is high, and people always are looking at, we're paying more and we're getting less. we're losing all of the people that make a big salary, and we're left with people who make just 20, 30, or say $40,000 a year, stuff like that. and we expect to fund our schools with that. so yes, it does put a burden on

us, and we have to fund public safety, fire, and all of those things that we have to do with that money, and plus, we cannot underfund education. we have to make sure that we fund the education that is required. so it does put a big burden on or community. and all we talked about, the crime in the neighborhood and stuff like that, that's caused from the lack of education. and as a matter of fact, just recently, we hired a mischief that's doing a great job of bringing people together and cutting down the crime rate. so our crime rate is really going down. it's a matter of the haves and the have notes. it's important for all of our children to be educated. i heard someone talking about we need to get our children to suburbia town, but if we all go to the city. >> you're about jumping out of

your seat there. >> i'm about to have a heart attack over here because people need to understand the context in which we live. we live in the united states of america. an institutionally racist state. it is not happenstance that urban cities, where poor black and brown people live, and are segregated by zoning laws, and housing patternerns, transportation infrastructure. this is not all happenstance. this happened on purpose, so when we look at -- >> so it's acceptable. is that what you're saying? >> i'm not saying that it's acceptable. i'm saying that we need to pay attention to why it's there, hyacinth. and quit trying to pretend that we live somewhere else. >> elizabeth, are you saying that this is intentional

marginalization, as if it's intentional segregation? >> if i could say something, yes, it is intentional segregation. for example, through most of the 20th century, the federal housing administration funded suburban development with the explicit condition that no homes be sold to african-americans. >> bingo. >> public housing authorities in the federal and the state governments, purposely placed hawsing for low-income people to be concentrated in one place. this was it certainly purposeful. the whole history of how the federal and the state governments created racial segregation on purpose has largely been frontal boundary. it was once well-known, but we need to be reminded of it to understand how this came about. >> so not only how it came about, richard, but i can glean that this is not an exclusive issue to you connecticut. >> no, this is true throughout

the country. all of the suburban developments that you're familiar with. panorama city in los angeles, all of these suburban developments were funded with the explicit condition that no homes be sold to african-americans, and no homes could be resoled to african-americans. this is not a unique connecticut problem. you find the same concentration of minority poverty in cleveland and detroit and baltimore and los angeles, and the san francisco bay area, in seattle and portland, chicago. throughout the country, the safely federal policies were played out and created a purposeful segregated society. >> so richard, andre echoes that sentiment:

>> connecticut moves in the right direction on its own as can the rest of the country, or is a major policy shift needed to get us there? first your thoughts, and after the break, a few more stories we're following.

>> welcome back, we're talking about segregation and inequality in connecticut schools. and we asked what they thought it might take to get it back on track. >> the community is smart and impassioned and they care and give solutions: we have a great video comment. >> unfortunately, the way we paid historically for education made place-based discrimination and that happened in the united states. a way to combat that is to give

place-based scholarships and initiatives for lower income communities. >> jeff, you heard the community. and what are tangible solutions for connecticut to achieve desegregation? >> what we have to do is reestablish upward mobility for all segments of society, particularly poor people and middle class people. i think that segregation, albeit deliberate historically in this country is also a symptom of poverty. and poverty seems to be, i should say rather, economic progress and prosperity seems to be the great equalizer in this country. again, it could reflect deliberate political actions, and it could reflect a society's intentional treatments of people of various races and ethnicities.

but it seems that once people begin to accumulate wealth. and once they begin to have economic power, a lot of the segregation seems to disappear. and it begets progress, and it remied yates the segregation that would seem to be at the core of the problem. >> hyacinth is this about moving kids around or building quality schools in the community, so people put down roots, and there's community buy-in? >> yes, those are all good things. all kids should be funded equally. it's not fair that the kid in hartford doesn't have magnet

schools. it's almost saying that equality should be equal for everyone in the same rate. it's totally different. they have all of the resources to address all of the issues. they're not dealing with kids with special needs. >> that's not true. >> elizabeth. >> trying to make it sound different. >> elizabeth, we have about 30 seconds left. and i want to give you the last word. >> america needs to invest in human capital. what we have, the biggest block block of our potential is our people. if we don't invest in giving people education and the ability to find meaningful work, and in the ability to provide for their families, then we will all -- america as a whole will decline, will continue to decline. >> thanks to all of our guests.

elizabeth, hyacinth. i'll see you online. >> good evening, everyone. welcome to aljazeera america. i'm john seigenthaler in new york. >> interpreter: it was an unconstitutional coup, an armed seizure of power. >> president putin seems to have a different set of lawyers, and a different set of interpretations. >> fighting words in the crisis in ukraine. russia said it will use force if necessary to defend its interests, and the u.s. says russia needs to back down. showing support. the secretary of state on a mission to ukraine