Separate and unequal: Addressing segregation in our nation’s schools

According to a 2012 report from the Civil Rights Project, 80 percent of Latino students and 74 percent of black students now attend schools where the majority of students are not white. This phenomenon, known as intense segregation, flies in the face of landmark decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education, and is tied to worse academic outcomes for students of color.

In a new paper published in the American Journal of Education, Dr. Genevieve Siegel-Hawley examines the role school district boundaries and desegregation policies play in achieving fully integrated schools.

Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, Dr. Siegel-Hawley compares the policies and outcomes of four Southern metro areas from 1990 through 2010. She uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) maps to demonstrate patterns of enrollment over the twenty-year period. Since GIS maps are influenced by the changing demographics of students, an index of dissimilarity is included. This index represents the percentage of students in a given racial group that would need to switch schools for the district to achieve the racial distribution that one would expect if school assignment was random.

Dr. Siegel-Hawley looks at patterns of segregation over time in four metropolitan areas: Louisville-Jefferson County in Kentucky, Richmond-Henrico-Chesterfield in Virginia, Charlotte-Mecklenburg County in North Carolina, and Chattanooga-Hamilton County in Tennessee. Both GIS mapping and the dissimilarity index indicate that the most balanced distributions of student populations occurred in areas such as Louisville-Jefferson County, where the city and suburban districts merged and the district implemented comprehensive desegregation policies.

The notion of tackling segregation in the nation’s schools with desegregation policies is not a new one. Yet policy tools have been limited by cases such as Milliken v. Bradley, which halted the forced incorporation of suburbs into Detroit’s school districts as part of the city’s desegregation plan. The court argued that evidence of intentional discrimination was needed to coerce the incorporation of the suburbs. The burden of proving intentional discrimination places limits on policy makers, but districts have explored a variety of voluntary desegregation strategies.

For example, magnet schools, which place emphases on particular disciplines, are traditionally placed in racially isolated areas and given exemptions to the limitations of standard attendance zone boundaries. The hope of policy makers is that these specialized programs will draw students from other areas, increasing the diversity of the school. Research on the ability of such programs to disrupt the link between housing and school segregation has been mixed.

Another option employs controlled choice plans, in which families rank school preferences, but final assignment is left to the district. The plans allow districts to create a more diverse learning environment by looking at the demographic makeup of neighborhoods when assigning students. Many researchers conclude that such policies are more successful than magnets in creating integrated schools.

More research is needed regarding the efficacy of desegregation policies. A major limitation of this study is its inability to provide evidence of a causal link between particular policies and the resulting distribution of students. Specifically, this study’s methodology does not allow for examination of the counterfactual in each region: Given the evidence presented, it cannot be determined what would have happened to the racial composition of schools in the absence of various policy interventions. There is no way to isolate the impact of these policies from broader economic and social trends that likely influenced outcomes.

Nevertheless, the history of policies that aim to increase racial diversity in schools ought to be of interest to anyone concerned with the segregation of schools and its connection to the achievement gap. Dr. Siegel-Hawley’s research is a promising step toward further discussion about desegregating the nation’s schools.

Article Source: Genevieve Seigel-Hawley, “Mitigating Milliken? School District Boundary Lines and Desegregation Policy in Four Southern Metropolitan Areas, 1990–2010,” American Journal of Education, Vol. 120, No. 3  (May 2014): 391-433.

Feature Photo: cc/(Kamera KIZI)