Desegregation Policy Research Articles

BOOK/MEDIA REVIEWS

Educational Delusions?: Why Choice Can Deepen Inequality and How to Make Schools Fair, by Gary Orfield and Erica Frankenberg. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013, 330 pp., $29.95, paperback.What would you do if your child's accessibility to quality education hinged upon your income level? Educational Delusions, appropriately entitled, speaks to this dilemma and to many misconceptions that exist within the American educational system. The key message that the book postulates is that educational equality must prevail and choice, if properly implemented and monitored, is one viable solution. In addition, authors Orfield and Frankenberg inform us that includes the creation of charter and magnet schools, choice-based desegregation plans, transfer rights, and voucher programs (p. 3). There is relevancy and the urgency in balancing opportunities for fair and appropriate education. The authors unpack the value of school choice with empirical evidence that exposes systematic inequalities while at the same time offering viable solutions to end the educational polarization in America.Although the contextual density of the first chapter makes it difficult to read, re-read clarified the authors' base for choice. Furthermore, in true redemptive form, the authors managed to reactivate our interest in this popular subject. This provocative issue of is dear to the hearts of countless parents because our children's future and the quality of the life that resides within the educational opportunities available to them today.The book begins with historical perspective of and clarifies vital link to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s as well as the development and transition of options since. Then, in explicit detail, Educational Delusions recounts the lack of progress made toward the goal of the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, its intent to desegregate schools, and its relevancy to the legislative journey of choice. The authors also point out the Supreme Court's gradual shift away from desegregation policies, which significantly reduced the effectiveness of the Integration Theory of the 60s and 70s explained by Treisman and Gelade (1980). The Integration Theory, as modified theory of choice, the root of inequality ... in social and economic stratification, whereas the current popular Market Theory, which gives parents options, sees government regulation as a barrier to opportunity and presumes race conscious polices are not needed (pp. 28, 42, 55). Concerned, the authors argue how since its early development continues to perpetuate inequality in educational resources through housing and zoning regulations, leading to the condition known as White flight. This re-segregation occurs at numerous districts nationwide, especially in poverty-stricken regions with substantial Black populations.In examining the progression of choice-from vouchers that emerged prior to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to the magnet schools of the 70s, to the charter schools of today-the book illustrates how educational shifts aligned with endured for more than one-half century. Today, the legislative momentum for the Market Theory approach to education is the result of the Supreme Court's 1990s de-emphasis on race-conscious policies. The authors purport that despite the fact that there is no significant academic advantage over public schools, charter schools continue to flourish as the popular choice. …

Structural Dimensions of Roma School Desegregation Policies in Central and Eastern Europe

Scrutiny of the socio-economic exclusion of the Roma in Central and Eastern Europe has brought attention to the widespread practice of school segregation of Romani children who are automatically placed in classes for the mentally disabled or shunted into separate and inferior schools and classrooms. It is now widely recognised that such practices adversely affect the educational development of Romani children, which in turn dramatically constrains their possibilities to succeed in adult life. Thus far the legislative changes and political commitments to desegregation and integration measures have delivered limited outputs and outcomes. While national programmes face implementation challenges at the local level, the grassroots initiatives are rarely mainstreamed into wider policy strategies. At the end of the day the status quo is preserved. Given that little analytical effort has been made to explain the causes of desegregation failure, this article aims to address the void. It argues that the narrow desegregation aims prevents creation of comprehensive approaches sensitive to structural dimensions of segregation and discrimination. It builds on the policy design theory in order to capture the impact of discourse and policy content on the implementation outputs.

‘Losing an arm’: schooling as a site of black suffering

Drawing on data from a historical-ethnographic study of the cultural politics of school desegregation in Seattle, USA, the author explores suffering as a recurring theme in the narratives of four black leaders, educators and activists involved in the struggle for black educational opportunity in that city during the post-Civil Rights Era. As these black subjects reflect on the historical trajectory of racial desegregation policies and practices, they offer us a unique view of the confluence of racial melancholia, a heavy, deeply-felt awareness of the history and persistence of racial disregard and subjugation, and school malaise, a form of what Pierre Bourdieu has called la petite misère, or ordinary suffering. The author’s analysis of these narratives highlights how these school and community leaders reflect on the meaning of black suffering in schools, what they understand as the source of that suffering, and how they imagine that suffering might be alleviated. The article concludes with recommendations for research at the nexus of race, education and social suffering.

Decomposing School Resegregation

Today’s typical minority student attends school with fewer whites than his counterpart in 1970. This apparent resegregation of U.S. schools has sparked outrage and debate. Some blame a rollback of desegregation policies designed to distribute students more evenly among schools; others blame the changing racial composition of the student population. This study clarifies the link between distributive processes of segregation, population change, and school racial composition by framing school segregation as a mode of social closure. I use a novel decomposition approach to determine the relative contributions of distributive processes and compositional change in the apparent resegregation of schools from 1993 to 2010. For the most part, compositional changes are to blame for the declining presence of whites in minorities’ schools. During this period, whites and minorities actually became more evenly distributed across schools, helping increase minority students’ exposure to whites. Further decompositions reveal the continued success of district-level desegregation efforts, but the greatest barrier to progress appears to be the uneven distribution of students between school districts in the same area. These findings call for new research and new policies to address contemporary school segregation.

City Lines, County Lines, Color Lines: The Relationship between School and Housing Segregation in Four Southern Metro Areas

Background/ContextAt the close of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the intersection of race, geography and opportunity is increasingly referred to as spatial racism. School quality and resources, municipal services, employment opportunities, accessibility of transportation, exposure to pollution, and tax rates all vary dramatically across a network of invisible boundary lines that carve up U.S. metro areas into racially and socioeconomically distinctive spaces.Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of StudyThis analysis explores how district boundary lines and school desegregation policy have impacted metropolitan school and housing integration levels over the past two decades.SettingThe study focuses specifically on the South, where the most comprehensive desegregation strategies were pursued. Based on varying experiences with city-suburban school district mergers, four metros—Richmond, Virginia; Charlotte-Mecklenburg County, North Carolina; Louisville-Jefferson County, Kentucky; and Chattanooga-Hamilton County, Tennessee— were identified for study between the years 1990 and 2010. This time period encompassed a rising trend of unitary status for school districts, the serious resegregation of students, and growing demographic complexity across the country.Research DesignThis is a quantitative analysis of school and housing segregation trends that relies upon Geographic Information Systems (GIS) maps to depict spatial patterns of isolation. School enrollment and segregation trends are derived from the National Center for Educational Statistics’ Common Core of Data. Housing patterns describing the distribution and segregation of persons by race and poverty status are explored using block group-level information from the U.S. Census Bureau's decennial census. Segregation is measured using the Index of Dissimilarity (D).Findings/ResultsEfforts to overcome the divisive nature of district boundary lines, in conjunction with comprehensive school desegregation policy, were related to unambiguous progress in combating both school and housing segregation. This central finding suggests that, in some ways, school policy can become housing policy.Conclusions/RecommendationsHow we provide equal educational opportunity to an increasingly diverse population of students is one of the principal concerns facing the country today. As a nation, however, we are currently allowing a labyrinthine system of school-district boundary lines to dictate the geographic distribution of learning opportunities. This study provides concrete examples of metros implementing a more regional approach to educational equity. It recommends that other metro area consider taking similar steps to subvert the segregating power of school-district boundaries.

The Life and Death of Desegregation Policy in Wake County Public School System and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools

The state of North Carolina is one of few states in the South in which two large districts committed to desegregating schools in the early 1970s. However, the state’s two largest districts, Charlotte-Mecklenberg Schools (CMS) and Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) have experienced ups and downs in their policy commitment to desegregated schools. This article utilizes a cross-case policy analysis to examine levels of segregation in CMS and WCPSS over a 10-year period. In addition, the authors examine school finance data to determine whether district spending and local and federal contributions have an effect on student outcomes in CMS and WCPSS. The authors also compare district outcomes against the backdrop of student assignment policy within each district. Findings indicate that despite spending mechanisms, both districts have become more segregated over time and that the achievement gap has narrowed between the districts’ students.

Education policy and school segregation of migrant students in Catalonia: the politics of non-decision-making

This article shows how the Catalan government has not developed an agenda to tackle school segregation despite the growing number of migrant pupils who arrived over the course of the last decade. Education policy has explicitly disregarded the possibilities of improving the regulatory framework for tackling segregation; it has exercised insufficient control over the effective application of education regulations on the balanced schooling of pupils with specific educational needs; and it has taken decisions on education policy which have even accentuated school segregation. This article provides empirical evidence on the characteristics of school segregation in Catalonia and on the education policies developed by the Catalan government in the domain of the schooling of migrant pupils. The study illustrates how the absence of an explicit school desegregation policy is an example of the politics of non-decision-making and a case which clearly manifests the need to overcome behavioural analysis in policy decision-making.

Decreased births among black female adolescents following school desegregation

Although the socioeconomic impact of school desegregation in the U.S. has been well documented, little is known about the health consequences of this policy. The purpose of this study was to quantify the associations between school desegregation and adolescent births among black and white females. We compared the change in prevalence of adolescent births in areas that implemented school desegregation plans in the 1970s with areas that implemented school desegregation plans in other decades, using difference-in-difference methods with 1970 and 1980 Census microdata. School desegregation policy in the U.S. in the 1970s was associated with a significant reduction of 3.2 percentage points in the prevalence of births among black female adolescents between 1970 and 1980. This association was specific to black female adolescents and was not observed among white adolescents.

The New Suburban History edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue

The New Suburban History edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue

A Cultural Political Economy of School Desegregation in Seattle

Background/ContextSchool desegregation has been variably conceptualized as a remedy for racial injustice, a means toward urban (economic) revitalization, an opportunity to celebrate human diversity, and an attempt to more equally distribute educational resources. At the center of the debate over the years is the extent to which school desegregation is a matter of class or race, of redistribution or recognition. A cultural political economy of school desegregation begins with a rejection of the popular notion that desegregation is simply, or even primarily, about race. It also eschews the idea that what is needed is a “corrective” interjection of social class and economic justice. In proposing neither a racial nor an economic solution, cultural political economy sheds doubt on the very proposition of a “racial” or “economic” analysis, politics, or remedy and helps us more powerfully explain how the cultural and material force of race and class breathes as one through the historical-political trajectory of school desegregation.Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of StudyThis article is based on findings from a larger historical-ethnographic research project intended to explicate the cultural-ideological and structural context(s) within which Seattle's Black leaders, educators, and activists made sense of the relationship between school desegregation and the lives and liberation of Black people in the post-civil-rights era. Here, the author uses cultural political economy as an analytical framework to elucidate the relationship(s) between cultural productions such as the construction of rights, justice, and racial progress, and political-economic formations such as the (ab)use of the state and market by certain classes—in this case, middle-class and affluent White Seattleites—to preserve their own privilege through the implementation of social and educational policies that serve to reproduce material inequities.SettingThe study setting is Seattle, Washington.Population/ParticipantsBlack leaders, educators, and activists who participated in the school desegregation struggle in the city of Seattle from the mid-1970s through 2007.Research DesignThis study employed semistructured ethnographic interviews, content analysis, and historical/archival analysis.Conclusion/RecommendationsThe trajectory of school desegregation politics in Seattle, culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, reveals a long and systematic political effort to delegitimize and dismantle justice-oriented redistribution of educational resources along racial lines. Cultural political economy provides an analytical framework that contributes to our theoretical understanding of the interimbrication of culture and political economy in education politics and policy-making. The author argues that understanding the interimbrication of class and race in the politics of school desegregation allows us to more clearly theorize how school desegregation policies are undermined in ways that reproduce material and cultural relations of power. Ultimately, critical researchers, educators, and youth and community activists must develop political strategies to shift the very relations of power highlighted in the Seattle case.

A Critical Look at Choice Options as Solutions to Milwaukee's Schooling Inequities

Background/Context The lack of court-ordered support for race-based policies that maintain and create integrated schools has forced communities of color to seek other avenues to obtain equitable education, such as school choice. Individual states and the federal government, as seen in grant provisions through the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, are encouraging the expansion of choice at the very time that options for increasing student diversity, particularly racial diversity, are being narrowed by the courts. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study The article uses critical race theory to examine the outcomes of specific school reforms, based on market theory models of school choice, that were designed to alleviate schooling inequities in urban districts. Setting The context of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, serves as a microcosm of urban districts that have embraced school choice to create more equitable schooling options. Milwaukee, like most metropolitan areas, has a history of court-ordered desegregation that served as a temporary solution to racially segregated schools. Given the federal and district court turn from supporting race-based desegregation policies in schools, Milwaukee and other metropolitan districts are looking for new models to serve students of color in their districts and cities. Research Design This article is a conceptual paper that incorporates data from a variety of sources to support the authors’ conclusions. Data Collection and Analysis Data for this project were taken from the U.S. Census Bureau, documents from newly created small high schools, such as Web sites and curriculum designs; current newspaper articles discussing issues of small high schools; archival newspaper articles documenting the creation of the 1990 choice and charter programs; professional experiences as a member of the Bill and Melinda Gates institutional selection and small-school team support system; and an empirical study that documents teachers’ attempts to provide curriculum and instruction in newly created small schools. Conclusions/Recommendations In combination, these data sources tell the story of market theory reforms that will continue to struggle to meet reformists’ goals to serve all Milwaukee populations so long as policy makers and the courts continue to deny the irrefutable power that race and class exercise in parental choice in U.S. urban schools.

Predictors of African American and European American adolescents' endorsement of race-conscious social policies.

To examine the predictors of adolescents' evaluations of affirmative action and school desegregation policies, African American and European American students (ns = 94 and 116, respectively; aged 14 to 17 years) attending a racially diverse high school in the Midwestern United States completed measures of (a) implicit racial attitudes, (b) knowledge about historical racism, and (c) perceptions of and attributions for racial disparities. The following day, adolescents learned about either a proposed affirmative action policy (n = 101) or a school desegregation policy (n = 109) and completed measures of their attitudes toward the policy. Results indicated racial differences in policy support and in the factors predicting policy support. Theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.

Moving From Separate, to Equal, to Equitable Schooling: Revisiting School Desegregation Policies

For over a century after the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, researchers have been grappling with how to effectively implement educational reform policies to provide students with an equal education in American schools. This literature review examines previous school desegregation cases and school desegregation plans to investigate how schools have been unsuccessful in fully implementing desegregation plans. The paper discusses the role that social and political factors played in prohibiting schools from fully desegregating in the South. It ends with some suggestions on moving from equal to equitable schooling inside and outside of the Southern region of the United States.

Mixed Feelings About Mixed Schools: Superintendents on the Complex Legacy of School Desegregation

Purpose: This article considers the perspectives of superintendents who attended all-Black segregated schools and examines how their lived experiences informed their views on desegregation policy, programs, and practices. Research Design: This empirical, qualitative study used critical race theory as a methodological and analytical framework for collecting and interpreting participant narratives acquired through in-depth, semistructured interviews and autobiographical and biographical documents and artifacts. Findings: Study findings are presented as counterstories to (a) the inferior all-Black school, (b) equal education, access, and opportunity, and (c) integration, diversity, and inclusion, with implications for the perceived viability of school desegregation in the post- Brown era. Collectively, they reflect what one participant described as “mixed feelings” about school desegregation. Conclusions: The article concludes with implications for educational policy and practice to include support for racial literacy in educational leadership and policy and recommendations for promoting a proper education no matter the school context, separate or mixed.

“The Other Side of the Milliken Coin”: The Promise and Pitfalls of Metropolitan School Desegregation

This article explores the efforts of school desegregation proponents as they forwarded a metropolitan challenge to discrimination in school and housing policies that explained the concentration of black students in Wilmington, Delaware and white students in the surrounding suburbs.Their efforts proved successful in securing the nation’s first court-mandated interdistrict, metropolitan desegregation remedy. This black political insurgency was accompanied, however, by a concomitant white backlash to a two-way busing program that was designed to overcome the racial divide. White opponents mobilized to exert a profoundly conservative influence on the outcomes of school desegregation policies and managed to shape the outcomes of reforms that demanded the dismantling of predominately black educational institutions and transferred the burdens of reform, in terms of both years and distances bused, onto black students. In this way, this article concludes that opponents of reform established themselves as indispensable, if counterproductive, figures in the Long Civil Rights Movement.

A Structural Model of Segregation in Social Networks

In this paper, I develop and estimate a dynamic model of strategic network formation with heterogeneous agents. While existing models have multiple equilibria, I prove the existence of a unique stationary equilibrium, which characterizes the likelihood of observing a specific network in the data. As a consequence, the structural parameters can be estimated using only one observation of the network at a single point in time. The estimation is challenging because the exact evaluation of the likelihood is computationally infeasible. To circumvent this problem, I propose a Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm that avoids direct evaluation of the likelihood. This method drastically reduces the computational burden of estimating the posterior distribution and allows inference in high dimensional models. I present an application to the study of segregation in school friendship networks, using data from Add Health containing the actual social networks of students in a representative sample of US schools. My results suggest that for white students, the value of a same-race friend decreases with the fraction of whites in the school. The opposite is true for African American students. The model is used to study how different desegregation policies may affect the structure of the network in equilibrium. I find an inverted u-shaped relationship between the fraction of students belonging to a racial group and the expected equilibrium segregation levels. These results suggest that desegregation programs may decrease the degree of interracial interaction within schools.

Overcoming The Apartheid Legacy In Cape Town Schools*

ABSTRACT. Restructuring apartheid geographies of racial stratification and spatial segregation poses formidable challenges, not least in education. Increasing intraracial inequality also underscores the importance of widening access and opportunity. Although South African education is not constrained by the highly localized control found in the United States and the United Kingdom, school allocation policies and parental choices create geographies that intersect with those of race and residence. Spatial variations critically influence both the impacts of postapartheid policies and the patterns of school desegregation. In this article we explore the spatial impact of inequality, desegregation, and state policies in relation to fourteen secondary schools in Cape Town, distinguishing outcomes that reflect inherited inequalities and current policies from outcomes that reflect individual school strategies. Capital funding is insufficient to change inherited inequalities, and differential fees and fund‐raising capacities perpetuate inequalities in operational resources. Sharing resources, taxing fee income, and a measure of provincial control over feeder areas could reduce inequalities.

Housing policy and the ethnic mix in Helsinki, Finland: perceptions of city officials and Somali immigrants

Helsinki provides an interesting case for the comparison of European mixing policies, as it has a relatively short history as a city of immigration. In contrast to prevailing desegregation policies of many other European countries, mixing policies in Helsinki are more of a preventive nature. In this article, we aim to examine how these policies are constructed and what kinds of reasons and explanations are given for the official policy goals and their implementation. Interviews with Somali immigrants are used as empirical evidence to confront policy assumptions and to get more insight into the factors causing ethnic residential segregation in Helsinki. The study shows that the local policies have been largely influenced by international debates on ethnic segregation, and therefore they have lacked an adequate understanding of the causes and effects of segregation in the local context. While the policy goals of ethnic mixing have been rather precise, tools for implementation have also been lacking. The case of Somalis illustrates that processes of residential segregation are more complex and dynamic than what is pictured in policy documents.

Combating residential segregation of ethnic minorities in European cities

This introduction paper to the special issue on combating residential segregation provides an overview of desegregation policies in European countries. Housing diversification is the main desegregation measure in most countries, while housing allocation measures are also implemented in several European cities to disperse ethnic minorities. A comparison of the five countries covered in this special issue (UK, Finland, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands) reveals that each of them is characterised by a huge gap between an ambitious anti-segregation policy rhetoric and the limited effectiveness of desegregation policies. Housing policies have a limited effect on ethnic concentration, not only because they often contradict each other, but also because they fail to address the main causes of segregation.

School Ethnic Composition and Students' Integration Outside and Inside Schools in Belgium

To advance social integration, policy makers strive for the educational desegregation of immigrant students in Flemish schools. Given the lack of empirical research supporting this policy, this article examines the association between the ethnic composition of schools and native and immigrant students' interethnic friendships, social participation, and sense of belonging in school. Blau's structural theory offers the theoretical rationale for these associations and the coherence of the three indicators. Multilevel analyses of data from a 2004–05 survey of 11,872 students, 1,324 of whom were immigrant students, in a sample of 85 Flemish secondary schools demonstrate that school ethnic composition is associated with interethnic friendships and social participation for native students, but not for immigrant students, whereas socioeconomic status is decisive for immigrant students' interethnic friendships. Neither immigrants' nor natives' sense of belonging in school is associated with ethnic composition. Hence, while the findings do not provide support for either school segregation or desegregation policies aimed at improving the social integration of immigrant students, mixing schools appears to have a positive influence on the social integration of Flemish youths. The consequences of these findings for future research and social policy are discussed in the conclusions.