Court-ordered Desegregation Plan Research Articles

The role of noncontiguous attendance zones in shaping school populations: A case study of Tucson, Arizona and Fort Bend, Texas

Noncontiguous school attendance zone boundaries (AZBs) have a unique, relatively uncommon shape that assign two or more non-adjacent residential areas to the same school. Given their ability to shape school enrollments by taking advantage of residential sorting, noncontiguous AZBs have historically been linked to explicit efforts to both segregate and desegregate schools. In this paper, we use a novel, longitudinal dataset of AZBs and descriptive quantitative and geospatial methods to understand how the relationship between noncontiguous zones, school diversity, and neighborhood demographics changed from 1990-2020 in two southwestern school districts—Tucson Unified School District, Arizona and Fort Bend Independent School District, Texas. Each district has a unique legal history and demographic context that informs their use of noncontiguous AZBs. We find noncontiguous AZBs are more strongly associated with racially diverse schools and are more likely to bring together neighborhoods with different compositions in Tucson compared to Fort Bend. However, the association between Tucson’s noncontiguous AZBs and racially diverse schools has waned since 1990, as the district has negotiated the end of its court-ordered desegregation plan. Our findings provide insight into when and how noncontiguous AZBs can effectively contribute to ethnoracially diverse schools.

“Revolutions Happen through Young People!”

From the late 1960s through the early 1970s, thousands of black high school students in Boston protested their educational marginalization by staging school boycotts, forming student organizations, and leading demonstrations. They demanded dramatic changes in the content and delivery of education in the Boston Public Schools (BPS). They called for a “culturally relevant education” that valued black culture, to be mentored by black educators, and for collaboration between school and community. Through these arguments for the value of black culture, students rejected characterizations of their racial heritage as inadequate—in a time when theories of cultural inferiority were widespread. Black youth were key players in a decades-long movement led by black Bostonians for educational justice in the BPS. This story challenges a dominant narrative of desegregation and civil rights in Boston, which focuses on busing, white resistance, and court-ordered desegregation. This narrative portrays black Bostonians as apathetic to racial politics and blindly following court-ordered desegregation plans. The story of the black student movement highlights the vital political work performed by black youth in civil rights protest. The erasure of black youth activism from the historical record strengthens stereotypes of black urban teens as apathetic, dangerous, and culturally depraved, which served as a justification for the criminalization of black youth. Their demands for black studies courses, black educators, and the revision of student dress and disciplinary codes forced educators and city leaders to grapple with changing understandings of quality education within the nation’s diverse urban public school systems.

Race, Genomics, and Philosophy of Science

Race, Genomics, and Philosophy of Science

Race, Genomics, and Philosophy of Science

Race, Genomics, and Philosophy of Science

The End of Court-Ordered Desegregation

In response to three Supreme Court rulings in the early 1990s, numerous court-ordered desegregation plans have been terminated. Using a unique dataset and an event study research design, this paper explores the impact of these terminations. The results suggest that termination produces a moderate increase in racial segregation. Outside of the south, dismissal also increases the rate at which black students drop out of school and attend private school. In the south, in contrast, there is no change in the school attendance patterns of blacks. Finally, evidence is presented that whites re-enter dismissed districts in large numbers in the south. (JEL H75, I21, I28, J15, K10)

School Desegregation and Urban Change: Evidence from City Boundaries

I examine changes in the city-suburban housing price gap in metropolitan areas with and without court-ordered desegregation plans over the 1970s, narrowing my comparison to housing units on opposite sides of district boundaries. Desegregation of public schools in central cities reduced the demand for urban residence, leading urban housing prices and rents to decline by 6 percent relative to neighboring suburbs. Aversion to integration was due both to changes in peer composition and to student reassignment to nonneighborhood schools. The associated reduction in the urban tax base imposed a fiscal externality on remaining urban residents.

Little Rock and the History of the Civil Rights Movement

28 Historically Speaking September/October 2007 Little Rock at 50: a roundtable THE 50THANNIlTiRSARY OF THE UTTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS, school desegregation crisis is a reminder of the complicated nature of social change in the 20th century. AfterArkansas Governor Orval Faubus blocked nine black studentsfrom entering Little Rock's CentralHigh Schoolin September, President'Dwight Eisenhower ordered in the 101stAirborne toprotect the students. On September 25, 1957, the Little Rock Nine became thefirst black students to enroll at the school. The matterwas hardly settled, though. OneyearlaterFaubus issuedapublicstatement: "Acting under thepowers and responsibilities imposed upon me by these laws, I have ordered closed the senior high schools of Little Rock. " Historically Speaking has askedthree scholars of the civilrights movementto reflect on the legacy of Little Rock. John Kirk assesses historical literature, while Sara Bullard and Richard King shed light on the contemporary relevance of the crisis. Little Rock and the History of the Civil Rights Movement John A. Kirk Histories of the civil rights movement have changed dramatically since the 1970s, when they were virtually synonymous with biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr. A shift in focus from national to local, state, and regional levels has provided an understanding of the extent and range of black grassroots activism in the South and, more recendy, in other regions of the United States as well. This has expanded the chronology of the movement beyond King's leadership as historians have charted the impact of the New Deal, the Second World War, and the Cold War on those local struggles . The emphasis is now beginning to switch from the movement's origins to its legacies, in what historian Jacquelyn Hall describes as the "long civil rights movement." As well as changing our knowledge of the chronology of the movement, this scholarship has vasdy expanded its purview to encompass a much broader range of themes and topics. Since it would be impossible to do full justice to the complexities and nuances of movement literature in such a short space, one key episode—the 1 957 Litde Rock crisis—illuminates how such writings have shaped civil rights history and how they may continue to do so in die future. On September 2, 1957, Governor Orval E. Faubus drew national and international attention to Little Rock, Arkansas, when he called out the state's National Guard to prevent the implementation of a court-ordered desegregation plan at Central High School. In defying die local courts and, ultimately, die U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision, Faubus direcdy challenged the authority of the federal government John T. Bledsoe's photograph of Governor Orval Faubus speaking at a rally protesting the admission of the Little Rock Nine to Central High School, August 20, 1959. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-U9-2919-25]. as no other elected southern politician had since the Civil War. Over the following weeks negotiations took place between the White House and die governor 's mansion that finally led to the wididrawal of state troops. However, when nine black students attempted to attend classes on September 23, an unruly white mob caused so much disruption that school officials withdrew them from Central High for their own safety. The scenes of violence finally prompted President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send federal troops to Litde Rock to secure the students' safe passage into die school. On September 25, the nine finally completed their first day of classes under armed guard. Early accounts presented Governor Faubus as a racist demagogue. Later analyses, notably journalist Roy Reed's biography, gave a more rounded portrait of a man who was the son of a socialist and, in his early career, a political liberal on most issues. As with other southern politicians, Fabus based his decisions on pragmatic concerns about winning elections rather than any deep-seated desire to defend white supremacy. The chief architect of public school policy was the city's superintendent of schools, Vigil T. Blossom. In 1955 Blossom drew up one of the earliest plans for compliance with Brown that provided for some, albeit very closely guarded and controlled integration in city schools. Some have claimed that in...

Post Brown vs. the Board of Education: The Effects of the End of Court-Ordered Desegregation

In the early 1990s, nearly forty years after Brown v. the Board of Education, three Supreme Court decisions dramatically altered the legal environment for court-ordered desegregation. Lower courts have released numerous school districts from their desegregation plans as a result. Over the same period racial segregation increased in public schools across the country -- a phenomenon which has been termed resegregation. Using a unique dataset, this paper finds that dismissal of a court-ordered desegregation plan results in a gradual, moderate increase in racial segregation and an increase in black dropout rates and black private school attendance. The increased dropout rates and private school attendance are experienced only by districts located outside of the South Census region. There is no evidence of an effect on white student along any dimension.

Post Brown vs. the Board of Education: The Effects of the End of Court-Ordered Desegregation

In the early 1990s, nearly forty years after Brown v. the Board of Education, three Supreme Court decisions dramaically altered the legal environment for court-ordered desegregation. Lower courts have released numerous school districts from their desegregation plans as a result. Over the same period racial segregation increased in public schools across the country -- a phenomenon which has been termed resegregation. Using a unique dataset, this paper finds that dismissal of a court-ordered desegregation plan results in a gradual, moderate increase in racial segregation and an increase in black dropout rates and black private school attendance. The increased dropout rates and private school attendance are experienced only by districts located outside of the South Census region. There is no evidence of an effect on white student dropout rates or private school attendance rates.

Court-Ordered Desegregation

This paper uses a new methodology to assess the effects of court-ordered desegregation plans on segregation and white enrollment. I then assess what characteristics of districts are predictive of having more or less white flight when desegregation plans are implemented. I exploit the wide variation in the timing of implementation of desegregation plans to identify their effects. I find strong evidence that segregation fell when districts implemented desegregation plans; plans were also associated with significant white enrollment losses that offset about one-third of the within-district reductions in segregation. White flight was particularly severe in districts with more public school districts in the same metropolitan area.

Killing Brown Softly: The Subtle Undermining of Effective Desegregation in Freeman v. Pitts

Uncertainty continues to surround the issue of what steps a racially segregated school district must take to comply with the Equal Protection Clause of Fourteenth Amendment, as interpreted by Brown v. Board of Education. The Supreme Court's recent decision in Freeman v. Pitts expanded district courts' discretion in releasing school districts from court-ordered desegregation plans, allowing courts to withdraw supervision incrementally from individual areas of school district operations. In this note, Bradley Joondeph argues that such incremental withdrawal of supervision allows school districts to take measures that have a resegregatory effect on areas in which compliance has been achieved, and may therefore undermine the ultimate goal of court-ordered desegregation plans: eliminating the racial identifiability of formerly segregated schools. Mr. Joondeph suggests the Court instead should have endorsed an alternative system of prophylactic supervision that would maintain court supervision over all areas of school operations until each area has been successfully desegregated.

Do We Need to Desegregate all of Our Black Schools?

The basic purpose of this article is to examine several fundamental assumptions about the saliency of desegregation and to briefly discuss Milwaukee's African-American Immersion Schools as a viable strategy for providing a quality educational opportunity for Black students. The article focuses first on the court-ordered desegregation plan implemented in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Available data is summarized that demonstrate that Black students continue to earn lower grades and test scores and higher suspension rates than their White counterparts, in spite of 15 years of desegregation. In contrast, in predominantly Black schools, African-American students' achievement levels seem to surpass their peers in desegregated settings. Therefore, the article asks the question, "Do we need to desegregate all of our Black schools?" A culture-based education model, the African-American Immersion School, is described and proposed as an alternative educational setting in which instructional strategies complement the culture and learning styles of Black children; one that has at its foundation a realistic historical and political analysis of African-Americans in our society. Given the limitations of desegregation as evidenced by the Milwaukee plan, this article promotes culture-based education as an alternative strategy to improve urban schools.

The Community and School Desegregation: The Search for Housing Market Effects

This paper attempts to measure the effect of a court-ordered desegregation plan on three aspects of the housing market in Dallas County, Texas. The indicators include sale price, number of sales, and proportion of home sales financed by conventional mortgages. Monthly data from 1969 to 1979 are analyzed using Box-Jenkins time series models. After best fit models are determined, various intervention terms are introduced into the models to assess the impact of both a 1975 Circuit Court Order and a 1976 District Court Order. The analysis suggests neither order had a measurable effect on the housing market in Dallas.