School Desegregation Research Roundup: Secession in Memphis-Shelby County, and the meaning of local control

The Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity is pleased to feature the School Desegregation News Roundup: periodic updates and reflections on educational desegregation and related issues, provided by Peter Piazza, an education policy researcher based in Massachusetts. Updates are crossposted on his site, available here.  

This post is about a great piece of recent research on school resegregation. I want to talk about the content of the article itself as well as the value, more generally, of research that relies on interviews and media analysis to understand the current moment with regards to race and schooling. I think this kind of research can tell us a lot about how things have changed, how things have stayed the same, and about how we might make progress in the future.

Research that measures school resegregation numerically or statistically has made its way deep into public discussion. Many - even mainstream - media outlets cite research findings that schools in some parts of the country are as segregated as they were in the 1960s, for example. And that’s great. 

Meanwhile, research that’s more qualitative (e.g., interviews and observations) is yet to approach this kind of impact. (See this piece for a much better, more holistic definition of qualitative research than I have the space for here.)  While statistical/quantitative studies can be relatively straightforward, it can be harder to describe the purpose of qualitative research for those who aren’t already on board. Qualitative research doesn’t “measure” as much as it documents lived experience or illuminates important aspects of the cultural context around the numbers. That can be harder to put into a quick headline. Perhaps as a result, it’s less common to find discussion of qualitative research in this field, which brings me to the specific piece I want to review here.

The article -- The Disintegration of Memphis-Shelby County, Tennessee -- looks at an extremely important (and currently unfolding) issue: school district secession. It was published in one of the most highly regarded education research journals by three very well-known researchers in this field - Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, Sarah Diem, and Erica Frankenberg.

The background on Memphis-Shelby County is complicated, but here’s the most important thing to know: school district boundaries changed three times in three consecutive years. In 2012, Memphis City Schools and Shelby County Schools were two separate districts. Then, they merged to one large district in 2013. And, then, in 2014, the district splintered, as six small towns seceded to form their own districts. As in many other places, the seceding towns were whiter and wealthier than the district they left behind. There’s more detail in the article itself as well as here, here, and here for those who want to read more.

The article focuses on the 2014 secessions and asks: how did this happen? How did political figures justify the decision to secede? The researchers interviewed people who were involved in the decision or who were affected by it, including members of the county’s transition planning commission as well as school board members, school administrators, other education researchers and activists.

The main rationale? Local control. This is maybe not surprising, but striking nonetheless: “Every white political leader representing the new municipal districts mentioned local control of public schools as the central rationale for secession.”

Their findings dig into the concept of local control, identifying the reasons that it has so much salience. Here are just a few selected findings:

• They argue that the 2013 merger with Memphis aroused in white suburban leaders a kind of “resentment and fear related to resources, political power, and increased racial contact.” Part of this was that suburban leaders did not want to share resources or political decision making with city leaders. In the article, for example, one white leader is quoted as saying “we’re the ones that have the resources and therefore we have to bail the city out. We’re always having to bail the city out.”  
• Black leaders were more likely than white leaders to say that the secessions were motivated by race. In the words of one of the black leaders who was interviewed as part of the study: “A statement like, I don’t want the people who run the Memphis City Schools to be running my schools isn’t the same as I don’t want black people running my schools, but it is the same.” 

In discussing the relevance of their findings, the authors connect the themes in the Memphis-Shelby County case to larger issues in school district secession. Here are perhaps two of the most salient topics:

• Colorblind language. The authors observe that “local control, in short, became a favorable way to discuss the preservation and accumulation of resource advantages that mapped on to existing racial cleavages.” Of course, we saw exactly the same thing last week, in a North Carolina law that allows white towns essentially to secede (or, really, to wall themselves off) from Charlotte city schools. And we see similar language used all the time by Secretary DeVos.
• Education as an individualized benefit. Importantly, the authors locate the local control argument “within a larger structure of reconceptualizing education as an individual good that allows individuals seeking local control for their communities to make decisions that impact many other communities beyond their own.” So here’s another important theme that we see over and over again in school resegregation: the idea that quality education is a limited resource that must be approached - by parents, lawmakers, etc. - as zero-sum competition. As an alternative, the authors note that “the Brown decision laid out broad social goals for public education, including its fundamental importance for democracy and citizenship.”

These are just samples. There’s much more in the piece, including race-conscious research and policy recommendations that I don't have the space to summarize here. One of the authors also took to Twitter to summarize the piece. In all, it's new research that thoroughly demonstrates that arguments about local control are really arguments about race -- that the boundaries of what counts as “local” are racialized (e.g., not “the city”) and that the feeling of needing “control” itself is racialized (e.g., control over the continued accumulation of resources for white communities, or control over access to what is viewed as a limited, individualized, competitive resource). 

To advance policy, you have to make an argument of some kind, and it’s no longer acceptable to make an argument for secession that is explicitly about race. So instead, secession advocates have to use coded language. This research defines that coded language in detail and provides the insight necessary not only to puncture holes in today’s prevailing arguments but to promote better arguments - and specific policy strategies - for a race-conscious approach to public education. I hope this will catch on in the public discussion as much as startling statistics about how far we’ve regressed already have.  

School Desegregation News Roundup: HB514 and Resegregation in North Carolina

The Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity is pleased to feature the School Desegregation News Roundup: periodic updates and reflections on educational desegregation and related issues, provided by Peter Piazza, an education policy researcher based in Massachusetts. Updates are crossposted on his site, available here.  

In the last update, I wrote about a promising school integration lawsuit in New Jersey. This week, the news is not as good: On Wednesday, North Carolina passed a law – #HB514 – that will allow 4 majority white suburbs of Charlotte to secede from the countywide Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system. Although secession efforts have been common across the country recently, this one is unique for at least two reasons.

First, other places have sought to secede by splintering smaller public school districts off from a larger/more diverse district (e.g., Gardendale, AL, Memphis-Shelby County, TN). However, the NC law uses charter schools as the vehicle for secession. It authorizes charters specifically in 4 suburbs, allows them to limit enrollment in these schools to municipal residents. The graph below shows the suburbs and their racial compositions.

(CMS schools are on the left and the 4 suburbs are on the right; credit: Justin Parmenter)

Second, one barrier to secession via charter school is that there are more restrictions on the use of property tax revenue for things like school building construction. But the NC bill takes care of that by including a provision that allows town governments to indeed use public funds for charter schools the way they would for traditional public schools. Previously, only county governments or the state had the power to spend money this way.

However, proponents of the bill claim that it has nothing to do with race:

“How is this an issue of race?” I’ll attempt to answer the question by taking a broad look at the history of segregation, integration and then re-segregation in Charlotte and its schools.

To start, we have to look way back at the turn of the century, because events then still resonate today.

This great piece in the Atlantic notes that segregation in Charlotte (as in so many other places) had to be invented. Between the end of the Civil War and 1899 (when NC passed its first Jim Crow law), “black and white people lived next to each other in Southern cities, creating what the historian Tom Hanchett describes as a ‘salt-and-pepper’ pattern.” Wealthy political elites were concerned about a growing political alliance between low-income blacks and whites, so they encouraged residential segregation as a way to, well, divide them.

We see similar efforts if we zoom ahead to NC’s resistance to Brown v. Board. In the immediate aftermath of Brown, NC voters overwhelmingly supported the Pearsall Plan, which “allowed districts to shutter schools that became integrated, and provided state-funded vouchers to allow white students to flee integrated schools.”

But 1969 ushered in a new and uniquely successful era of school integration in Charlotte. That year, the Pearsall Plan was declared unconstitutional in Godwin v. Johnson County Board of Education. And, famously, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, a federal district court approved busing as a remedy for school segregation. Swann was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1971, and Charlotte quickly became a model for integration across the country. Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools began busing on September 9, 1970, with 525 buses across the countywide school district. It was enormously successful:

• During this time, many NC cities and towns merged forming countywide school districts. This article cites a NC-based policy analyst who reflects that “In North Carolina, consolidation was the way forward on integration,” adding that “there was no other way.”
• By the 1980’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg become one of the most racially integrated school districts in America.
• A Charlotte Observer editorial wrote that Charlotte’s “proudest achievement of the past 20 years is not the city’s impressive new skyline or its strong, growing economy. Its proudest achievement is its fully integrated schools.”
• And, being from Boston, I found this particularly touching– after the virulent response to busing in Boston, students from CMS “invited students from Boston to come down South, to see that integration could be done peacefully, to the benefit of all students.”

Nearly 30 years after busing began in Charlotte, school integration received a devastating blow. A white parent filed suit against the city, claiming that his daughter had been denied admission to a local magnet school because of her race. In that case – Capacchione v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg – a federal judge ruled that the segregated “dual system” in the Swann case was no longer in existence. In a haunting piece of foreboding, the deciding judge wrote that “racial imbalances existing in schools today are no longer vestiges of the dual system; and that it is unlikely that the school board will return to an intentionally-segregative system.” That decision was later upheld in an appeals court. Busing ended, and resegregation accelerated rapidly. A recent report found that Charlotte-Mecklenburg is by far the most racially segregated district in the state. To achieve racial balance today, more than half of the students in CMS would have to be reassigned to different schools.

The effects have been stark. There are a lot of resources for those who want to dig into the data. Here are a few points that I found most compelling:

• In a study of America’s 50 largest cities, Charlotte ranked 49th in economic mobility for poor children. A separate study, published by Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools, found the same, noting that “If you are born poor in Charlotte, you are likely to stay that way.” These reports look at income, but of course race and income are highly correlated. 
• And we shouldn’t lose sight of how school segregation ripples through virtually all aspects of social life. This fantastic piece by Clint Smith connects school segregation to the police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott and the protests that followed his death. Smith notes “In Charlotte, the chances of black males coming into contact with the criminal-justice system increased with the resegregation of their high schools.” There’s a lot in his piece that can’t be summarized her -- I highly recommend a full read.

As you know, the story does not end here. In 2017, NC lawmakers took aim at consolidated districts. Last year, the legislature passed a bill (despite considerable Democratic dissent) that authorized a committee to decide whether consolidated districts should be allowed to splinter. That committee had its first meeting in February of 2018, initiating a process that, in part, led to Wednesday’s enactment of HB514.

It is significant that the bill seeks to break up countywide districts. As noted earlier, consolidation was viewed as the only way to pursue integration. Indeed, counties that splintered before HB514 have become more segregated afterwards.

And it is also significant that the bill uses charters as the vehicle for secession. As noted here by Jeff Bryant, “In North Carolina, there’s little doubt parents use charters to segregate.” And, more specifically, as avenues for wealthy, white students to leave traditional public schools. When charter schools were originally approved in North Carolina, they were required to “reasonably reflect the racial and ethnic composition” of their home district. However, in 2013, the bar was lowered to require only that charter schools “make efforts” to reflect the demographic makeup of their communities. Duke University recently looked at charter schools in North Carolina, and the results are pretty straightforward:

• Over the last 15 years, the proportion of white students in NC public schools has decreased, while the proportion of white students in NC charter schools has increased.
• In traditional public schools, only 30% of students attend schools that are “highly segregated.” Meanwhile, at NC charter schools, more than 2/3rds of students attend “highly segregated” schools. This article has a map of the demographic breakdown of Charlotte schools in 2015.

I just don’t see how this bill could be separated from the history here. After Brown, there were pitched debates about things like school district boundaries and the use of public funds (at the time, it was vouchers) to finance white flight. Although the specific policy mechanisms are different, the debate today still centers around similar core issues. However, proponents want us to believe that HB514 is somehow disconnected from the history outlined above, claiming that the law is about things like local control or choice -- definitely not about race. Could anyone believe this?

It brings me back to this quote from Clint Smith’s piece, referenced above. What he says is relevant not only for major stories like HB514, but for all the many and much smaller ways that we choose to ignore race in education policy and practice: 

When we operate as if the past is irrelevant, and propose ostensibly race-neutral policies in a deeply racialized world, we inevitably create social institutions that perpetuate that social stratification.

School Desegregation News Roundup: Spotlight on New Jersey

The Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity is pleased to feature the School Desegregation News Roundup: periodic updates and reflections on educational desegregation and related issues, provided by Peter Piazza, an education policy researcher based in Massachusetts. Updates are crossposted on his site, available here.  

There was major news out of New Jersey last week: civil rights groups filed a lawsuit against the state for laws that codify school segregation. This post is a very quick summary of the case for and then an attempt to put the lawsuit in the larger context of the decades-long push and pull for racial justice in New Jersey public schools.

A brief summary: New Jersey is the 6th most segregated state for Black students and 7th for Latinx students. In response, the Latino Action Network and the New Jersey NAACP filed suit on the 64th anniversary of Brown last week. The suit is specifically focused on state laws that (a) require students to live in the town where they attend school (for traditional public schools) and (b) require that charter schools give preference to students who live in their home districts. The plaintiffs argue that residency requirements (or, for charters, preferences) essentially guarantee schools will be segregated, given housing segregation across New Jersey’s many small towns. If these laws are struck down, the state’s ed commissioner and governor would have three months to come up with remedies. Plaintiffs have considerable reason for hope: New Jersey’s constitution actually prohibits segregation of any person “in the public schools, because of religious principles, race, color, ancestry or national origin.” And New Jersey courts have also ruled against so-called de facto segregation, which is much harder to legally challenge at the federal level.

For a more detailed summary, I recommend checking out the always-great Ed Law Prof Blog. With this suit, New Jersey joins a similar case in Minnesota as civil rights advocates pursue integration through state courts amidst an inhospitable federal environment (one that will likely be made worse by judicial nominees who refuse to endorse Brown and who just recently moved closer to Senate confirmation).

In the past, New Jersey courts have been at the forefront of educational equity. Famously, the Abbott v. Burke case ordered significant funding increases to under-resourced school districts across the state. There were many iterations and re-litigations of Abbott (outlined nicely here), but its initial decision came in 1988. Between Abbott and this new case, you can see a microcosm of the larger struggle for educational/racial justice.

Some of this struggle was the subject of a great discussion of this on a recent episode of the Have You Heard podcast. The main takeaways from that discussion:

• A new book by Domingo Morel, called Takeover, uncovers an interesting historical symmetry in New Jersey ed policy: that the state’s takeover of Newark public schools (one of the earliest takeovers in any state) directly followed the state supreme court’s initial ruling in Abbott. 
• Morel’s book aims to understand why certain schools were taken over, while others were not. On the Have You Heard podcast, Morel argues that “if you don’t have plaintiffs winning court cases [for school funding] during this period, 1980-2000, you essentially don’t have any takeover laws.” In other words, once money was directed towards schools that serve Black students in Newark, state politicians implemented new policies to take control of that money away from Black local leaders. 
•  This didn’t just happen in New Jersey. The podcast notes that, during the time period explored by Morel, 18 states won cases for school funding and 14 of those passed state takeover laws, including my home state of Massachusetts. The four states that didn’t were among the whitest states in the country. 
•  New Jersey and other states around the country also either had existing laws or created new laws that essentially blocked Black and Latinx from attending schools in other districts that were getting adequate funding, and which were not subject to state takeover. (These are the same policies that are the target of the current lawsuit.) In New Jersey and elsewhere, this persisted for decades while segregation increased, until new plaintiffs come along to secure access to adequately resourced schools for Black and Latinx students.

For me, it all illustrates a decades-long push and pull: all the work that goes into keeping non-white students in under-resourced schools and keeping white students in majority-white spaces. And, then all the complex legal activity and (frankly) bravery required to push back against that work. Here’s hoping for some success - it is long-deserved and it never should have been this complicated in the first place. I’ll post updates.