Escape From Los Angeles

Abstract

In 1960, Los Angeles was still a decidedly white city. By 1980, it no longer was. What happened in Los Angeles was not uncommon elsewhere, as white residents fled city centers in the latter half of the twentieth century to pursue visions of the suburban good life. Whites abandoned central cities, and as a consequence, the school systems of those urban areas began to reflect their populations—struggling, under-resourced, and non-white. But in Los Angeles, this phenomenon seems to have happened in reverse. Whites with school-age children fled the public school system at even greater rates than those at which they left the city, and at much greater rates than other white residents. Driving families out of Los Angeles public schools was the specter of school desegregation, which threatened to bring populations associated with violence and low academic performance into neighborhood schools. The threat desegregation posed to public schools caused parents to choose private schools, if they could, and reevaluate the quality of life in Los Angeles, if needed. Their subsequent out-migration brought about the schools they feared and forever changed the face of the city they left.