We can talk about lots of complicated economic and sociological forces that have fed the problems of school segregation in this country, but the root causes are pretty simple–historically, we have a whole lot of white folks who don’t want their children to go to school with the children of black folks, and they have been creative about finding ways to avoid it.
When Brown v. Board of education forced desegregation, communities all across the South responded with segregation academies, private schools where only certain children were welcome. While we’ve long known about these schools, a new website called Academy Stories has launched, featuring first persons stories from people who attended those schools. The site has only a handful of stories at the moment, but each one is worth the read, a story of what the years of desegregation looked like to students. In some cases, the move to a private academy was masked by language about quality and being “pioneers.” Some were more direct. Writes one:
Others might cloak their racism in talk about providing “quality education” or “upholding our traditions,” but my father voiced his prejudices for all to hear.
There was also, of course, white flight. White families exited areas in search of neighborhoods that came with whiter neighbors, and whiter schools, taking their children and their money with them.
In recent years, another approach has appeared–the splinter district. These occur when a community aims to secede from their current district; these new districts frequently adopt a new border that corresponds to racial and/or economic borders–a sort of school district gerrymandering. It’s white flight, without the actual flight.
At least two studies in the last year have provided data on this splintering, and the picture is not pretty. EdBuild, a group that is aligned with education reformers, issued the report “Fractured: The Breakdown of America’s School Districts.” It comes complete with a map that shows the location of 128 attempts to secede. (The cluster in Maine is a different phenomenon, the result of a state attempt to force massive consolidation of districts; later administrations reversed that policy, and districts rushed to return to their original form.) EdBuild found that thirty states have processes in place to facilitate school district secession.
A study released by AERA in September found that this kind of school secession in the South had increased the level of segregation. The study looked at East Baton Rouge (LA), Shelby County (TN) and five counties in Alabama; it found that secession is “eroding what has historically been one of the cornerstones of school desegregation in the South: the one-county, one-school-system jurisdiction.” In East Baton Rouge, an October 12 vote was held on the formation of the City of St. George, a wealthier, whiter enclave within the larger city. Supporters argued that they just wanted local control, particularly of their tax dollars, but a separate school district is part of the deal. The measure passed the vote, and though the process would take several years to complete, it will leave the rest of the parish that much poorer.
St. George will become an “island district,” completely surrounded by the larger district. Sometimes island districts are wealthier than the surrounding districts, though in some areas, they may be isolated pockets of poverty. They are not strictly a southern phenomenon; such fractured districts can be found in states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania. Ohio also saw a new wrinkle this year when the tiny village of Hunting Valley (pop. 700), the state’s wealthiest community, briefly won a state tax law that excused them from paying $3 million in taxes to the area school district.
Why is there an apparent rise in such shenanigans? In 2017, Emmanuel Felton at Hechinger Reports suggested that the federal government has simply stopped monitoring and enforcing desegregation orders. Betsy DeVos has been regularly criticized for undercutting the effectiveness of the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights. That falls in line with her hearing appearance in which she could not offer a single example of discrimination that would trigger a federal intervention.
We should not pretend that putting a stop to the fracturing of school districts would be a cure-all. In 2015, reporters outlined in painful detail how the school district of Pinellas County, Florida, had systematically segregated and underfunded five elementary schools, turning them into the worst in the state. We know that tracking and gifted programs can often be used to create segregation within a school. More recently, the documentary series “America To Me” has shown that even in a diverse and integrated school, racial issues abound. Nor do charter schools show any promise in solving the issue of segregation.
History tells us that white folks who want to keep their children separate can be creative and determined about doing so. Meanwhile, the white school age population has decreased steadily, leaving whites a majority minority in U.S. schools. Allowing the continued fracturing of school districts with widespread gerrymandering and the erection of a hundred little walls are not productive ways to deal with the new reality.
The truth of the matter is unavoidable. The deep seeded feelings that are the root cause of de-facto white flight cannot be legislated or bussed away. Changing those attitudes is more than a heavy lift. And as my old psych professor suggested when having these same discussions back in the 70s, the "fix" will probably require hundreds of years of cultural evolution.
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