The report, released this month by the education reform nonprofit Available to All, builds off The new report found overlaps and similarities among dozens of redlining maps from 1938 with school attendance zones in New York City, Long Island, Westchester County as well as upstate cities, such as Albany, Buffalo and Niagara Falls.��

The report also identified New York as “one of many states where a parent can be arrested and criminally charged for using an incorrect address to get their child into a high-quality school,” with one such incident occurring as recently as .��

The state’s laws and regulations make it “one of the strictest systems of residential assignment in the country,” the report said, adding it limits a to take advantage of — a practice that allows students to attend public schools outside their assigned district.

“There’s this paradox of New York, where it’s run by progressive politicians, it’s a very democratic state,” said Tim DeRoche, founder of Available to All, “but it’s the most segregated.”

Across the United States it’s common for sections of the same town or city, neighborhoods and streets to have communities that look vastly different from one another because of historical government-led housing segregation.

Redlining, the practice of drawing boundaries around neighborhoods based on race and denying mortgage assistance to areas considered “hazardous” or “undesirable” typically housing people of color, was more than 50 years ago. Despite this, many public services, including , still perpetuate inequitable access to resources and opportunity based on housing.

While school districts themselves are drawn through legislative processes, districts are often given autonomy when drawing attendance zones for schools. Both boundaries, the report said, “carry on the legacy of redlining in New York.”

“Public schools must be ‘,’ and … if you look at the system we have across the country, you can see that we are falling so far short of that — and the primary reason for that is that we assign kids to schools based on their address,” DeRoche said. 

The report used Public School 19 and Public School 16 as examples. Both schools are in the north Bronx’s school District 11 and are located about a mile from one another — a 20-minute walk — but serve contrasting populations.

The Bronx

Attendance zone boundaries for P.S. 19 “mirror, almost perfectly, the area deemed to be ‘desirable’ by the racist redlining map drawn by federal government bureaucrats in 1938,” the report said. Whereas P.S. 16’s boundaries fell directly in a declining area, according to the 1938 map.

The remnants of redlining are echoed in both schools’ data — where P.S. 19 educates a population that is 43% Black and Latino and two-thirds low income, with 62% reading proficiency. That compares to P.S 16’s 88% Black and Latino student body, 95% of whom are low income with grade level reading just over 30%.

Schools like P.S. 19 “become almost quasi-private schools,” DeRoche said.

There were many examples across the New York City Public Schools system, as well as several upstate school districts.

Manhattan

Queens

“It’s really hard to find a place [in New York] that’s not segregated or a school district that’s not experiencing either racial segregation or some sense of class segregation,” said Kris DeFilippis, a former assistant superintendent in the New York City Department of Education, who is now a clinical professor at New York University. “Not much has changed. … Wherever those lines were drawn [in the 1930s], it has largely stayed the same, unless there’s been a movement toward gentrification.”

In Albany, New York’s capital, New Scotland Elementary School was zoned over neighborhoods identified as desirable in 1938. The school serves a student population that is less than half Black or brown (41%) and low-income (47%) with reading scores near 60%.��

Just about two miles away at Giffen Memorial Elementary School, more than three-quarters of students are Black and Hispanic (84%) and qualify for free and reduced priced lunch (84%). Less than a quarter of students at Giffen Memorial read on grade level (21%).

Much of Giffen Memorial’s attendance zone lines up with 1938 redlining declining areas.

Albany

“You wouldn’t see these massive gaps [in demographics and student achievement] between two schools two miles away … if those two schools were truly open to kids,” DeRoche said. “The government has to be enforcing that in some way. How are they enforcing it? Well, they’re enforcing it with these maps. The kids on the wrong side of the line aren’t eligible to go to the public school that’s a mile [or two] from their home.”

In upstate New York, while there’s access to charter and magnet schools, school choice within a district is limited among traditional public schools. Students are generally required to go to the school in their attendance zone, “unless there are exceeding circumstances,” DeFilippis said, “but that is rare, it just doesn’t happen.”

In New York City, “it’s a bit different,” DeFilippis continued. Students typically attend a local elementary school before choice options open up in middle and high school grades across the metropolitan area  – creating its own challenges and limitations when it comes to admission to later grades.

“There’s almost like a false narrative that in New York City students can go where they want,” DeFilippis said, “but it’s not entirely accurate.”

For a student, traveling across the city to attend a school that works best for them can be difficult and it may also be challenging to get into competitive schools because they “haven’t had the same experiences at the lower grades that their peers have had,” DeFillipis said. So, ultimately, the current setup, “does not lead to equitable outcomes for Black and brown students, or low-income students, at all.”

The report recommended possible solutions for lawmakers to consider, such as decriminalizing address sharing, requiring every public school to reserve at least 15% of seats for students who live outside the zone and allowing students to enroll in any public school within a three-mile radius of the child’s home.

The underlying principle, DeRoche said, is to “just decrease the link between where you live and which schools you’re allowed to attend.”

“These policies have been bad, not just for educational opportunity, but I think they’ve affected urban development and I think they’ve affected how our cities work and don’t work,” DeRoche said.

Colorado school districts should revise their school attendance zones at least every four years with a “civil rights focus.” State lawmakers should increase funding to transport students to and from school. And attorneys, advocates, and community organizations should embrace the right to sue over school assignments that increase racial segregation.

Those are among the recommendations in a new report from the Colorado Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “” concludes that the way Colorado draws school attendance boundaries and assigns students to schools mirrors segregated housing patterns and results in low-income families having less access to high-quality schools.

“This segregation fuels a widespread belief that schools serving predominantly white and affluent students are inherently better than those serving predominantly students of color or low-income families,” said.

from local and national and have . While some local school officials, such as the Denver school board, , the federal Trump administration that could trigger civil rights investigations.

The Colorado Advisory Committee is a 10-person group of bipartisan appointed volunteers. Each state has an advisory committee that produces reports on civil rights issues ranging from housing discrimination to voting rights to the use of excessive force by police officers.

In its latest report, the Colorado committee found that “thousands — perhaps tens of thousands — of Colorado students are likely to be assigned to schools in violation” of a federal law that says assigning a student to a school outside their neighborhood is unlawful “if it has segregating effects.”

The committee’s recommended solutions attempt to balance strong support for neighborhood schools with allowing families to choose the best school for their child. School choice, or the ability for a student to apply to attend any public school, .

The committee advocated for what it called “controlled choice,” which it said could mean that popular schools reserve seats for students who live outside the neighborhood or that schools give priority admission to non-neighborhood students who live the closest.

To produce its report, the committee held hearings in 2023 to gather input from national experts including university professors, the author of a book on school attendance zones, and representatives from think tanks across the political spectrum.

The committee also convened a group of 10 local experts including Brenda Dickhoner from the conservative advocacy organization Ready Colorado; Kathy Gebhardt, who was then a member of the Boulder Valley school board and now sits on the State Board of Education; former Aurora Public Schools superintendent Rico Munn; and Nicholas Martinez, a former teacher who heads the education reform organization Transform Education Now.

The committee’s other recommendations include:

• The civil rights divisions of the federal education and justice departments should review options for enforcing “the permissible and impermissible use of race in drawing attendance boundaries and setting school assignment policies.”
• Colorado lawmakers should correct “the systemic racial and ethnic disparities” caused by the state’s school transportation system, which does not require school districts to provide transportation to students who use school choice.
• State lawmakers should improve Colorado’s school choice system, including by adopting a uniform school enrollment window statewide and providing families with more information about schools’ discipline policies, class sizes, and other factors.
• Colorado school districts should revise their school attendance zones and student assignment policies at least every four years and “consider racial and ethnic integration as part of the rezoning process.”

“Redrawing school boundaries every few years can help prevent segregation from becoming entrenched while still allowing students to maintain a sense of stability in their educational environment,” the committee’s policy brief said.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Black Americans face a pivotal decision: continue fighting to reform systems that were never designed for us, or strategically build power within new frameworks to ensure equitable representation. The eyes of Texas, and the nation, are watching closely, because the forces at work here could soon be in everyone’s backyard.

When I ran for a seat on the Keller Independent School District Board of Education in 2023, I did so with a sense of urgency. The current board – which is all white in a district where half the students come from communities of color –  had made it clear they were intent on pushing a far-right agenda, banning books, targeting LGBTQ students, and undermining diversity initiatives.

Now the board is leading the charge to split the district in two, putting the fight for representation at the heart of these issues.

The push to break up Keller ISD, a 34,000-student district north of Fort Worth, is not about improving educational outcomes or addressing financial concerns. It is a modern evolution of white flight into white power preservation. In past decades, our nation saw white families leave diverse areas for more homogenous suburban communities. Today, as America becomes a majority-minority nation, this strategy has evolved. It is no longer just about physically leaving diverse spaces but about creating new structures that consolidate power. 

The proposed breakup of Keller ISD seeks to concentrate the power of white families within a smaller, predominantly white district while leaving behind a more diverse and potentially under-resourced counterpart.

If the split happens, the new Keller ISD would be 68.4% white – compared to now – while the newly formed Alliance ISD would be 43.8% white, with significantly higher Black and Latino populations. This restructuring is not just about demographics, it ties directly into the financial viability of both districts.

Proponents of the split claim it would improve financial management, but these claims are suspect. Texas public schools are already underfunded due to the state’s education formula, and school vouchers would divert even more resources. A financial analysis by the Moak Casey consulting firm indicates revenue distribution would largely remain the same, meaning the financial justification for the split is questionable.

The creation of two separate administrations – each requiring its own superintendent, financial officers, and support staff – would likely increase overall costs rather than reduce them. This raises concerns about whether the split is truly about financial sustainability or about consolidating power in Keller ISD while leaving Alliance ISD to struggle with fewer resources, given lower property values and limited possibilities for commercial development within its proposed boundaries.

At the same time, splitting Keller ISD in half would offer opportunities for Black and Latino communities to have a voice in the new district’s governance. 

As a Black attorney who ran for the school board, I view this moment through both a personal and legal lens. Despite earning 41.8% of the vote in my 2023 campaign, I failed to win a seat in a district that allows all voters to vote for all board positions. At-large voting has long diluted the political power of communities of color. Legal challenges, such as Texas’ Lewisville ISD’s Voting Rights Act , and landmark cases like have exposed the discriminatory impact and led to reforms.

This is why the fight for fair representation in Keller ISD is part of a national struggle. As Gen Z prepares to make up the majority of voters in the 2028 presidential election, we are witnessing backlash from those who fear losing control. The proposed breakup of Keller ISD is a reaction to this inevitable change, a last-ditch effort to hold onto power in an evolving country.

Viewed through that lens, my community should fight the district split. If these tactics of white power preservation go unchecked, they will be replicated elsewhere, further entrenching inequality in our education system and beyond. This is why the Voting Rights Act remains as crucial today as it was in 1965. 

At the same time, Black Americans have long fought for inclusion within systems designed to exclude us. Today’s fight goes beyond inclusion, it is about empowerment and reform. Why should we fight to stay in districts deliberately designed to deny us fair representation, especially when it comes to our children’s education? Shouldn’t we recognize that our survival and advancement depend on securing power for ourselves? This is about ensuring that Black communities have access to meaningful representation and decision-making.

Achieving fair representation requires a two-pronged approach. First, we must push districts like Keller ISD to replace discriminatory at-large elections with member-specific districts that ensure diverse communities have a direct voice in governance. This is true regardless of whether the district splits.

Second, we must recognize opportunities to reshape power dynamics – leveraging policies that attempt to isolate communities of color to instead create new districts where Black and progressive leaders can thrive.

This approach is even more critical given the current state of our judiciary. We are no longer dealing with the same Supreme Court that delivered Brown v. Board of Education. Instead, we face a judiciary that is disregarding precedent and seemingly moving toward a framework more aligned with the segregation allowed in Plessy v. Ferguson. 

In this legal climate, Black Americans cannot afford to rely solely on the courts to protect voting rights and representation.  We must proactively fight for structural reforms that ensure equitable political power and inclusive governance – and champion policies that dismantle exclusionary voting structures and build systems that reflect the full diversity of our communities.

One thing is clear from the stories that populate this year’s list: Many of America’s schools are still grappling with the academic struggles that followed the pandemic – as well as the end of federal relief funds, which expired this fall. Student enrollments have yet to recover and many districts are facing – or will soon face – tough decisions about closures.

Meanwhile, some educators are testing innovative ways of teaching math, reading and science, hoping to gain back some of the academic ground lost since the COVID shutdowns. Technology is also playing a pivotal role in this post-pandemic world, with communities weighing the impact of cellphones and artificial intelligence on student learning and mental health.

November’s election – which featured debates over school choice, Christianity in public schools and the fate of the Department of Education – also made headlines here at ����Ӱ��. And, as calls for cracking down on immigration grew even louder, we dug deep into the hurdles facing immigrant students and schools. 

Here’s a roundup of our most memorable and impactful stories of the year:

Exclusive: Thousands of Schools at Risk of Closing Due to Enrollment Loss

By Linda Jacobson

Long before districts close schools, enrollment loss takes a toll on staff and families, from combined classes to the loss of afterschool programs. This exclusive analysis by Linda Jacobson, based on Brookings Institution research, found that more than 4,400 schools lost at least one-fifth of their students during the pandemic — more than double the number during the pre-COVID period. The detailed look shows how the crisis is playing out at the school level and which districts face tough decisions about closures and cuts. 

Unwelcome to America’: Hundreds of U.S. High Schools Wrongfully Refused Entry to Older, Immigrant Student

By Jo Napolitano

����Ӱ��’s 16-month-long undercover investigation of school enrollment practices for older immigrant students revealed rampant refusals of teens who had a legal right to attend, shutting a door critical to success in America. Senior reporter Jo Napolitano called 630 high schools in every state and D.C. to test whether they would enroll a 19-year-old Venezuelan newcomer who had limited English language skills and whose education was interrupted after ninth grade. “Hector Guerrero” was turned down more than 300 times, including 204 denials in the 35 states and D.C., where high school attendance goes up to at least age 20. ����Ӱ��’s investigation revealed pervasive hostility and suspicion toward these students in a particularly xenophobic era and a deeply arbitrary process determining their access to K-12 education.

Interactive: Which School Districts Do the Best Job of Teaching Kids to Read?

By Chad Aldeman

It’s not news that low-income fourth graders are years behind their higher-income peers in reading. But poverty is not destiny, and some schools and districts hugely outperform expectations. Working with Eamonn Fitzmaurice, ����Ӱ��’s art and technology director, contributor Chad Aldeman set out to find districts that are beating the odds and successfully teaching kids to read. From Steubenville City, Ohio, to Worcester County, Maryland, and across the country, click on their interactive map to find the highfliers in your state. 

Whistleblower: L.A. Schools’ Chatbot Misused Student Data as Tech Company Crumbled

by Mark Keierleber

In early June, a former top software engineer at ed tech startup, AllHere, warned Los Angeles district officials and others about student data privacy risks associated with the company’s AI chatbot “Ed.” The LA Unified School District had agreed to pay AllHere $6 million for the chatbot and the spring rollout of Ed was highly publicized, with L.A. schools chief Alberto Carvalho calling the chatbot’s student knowledge powers “unprecedented in American public education.” But, as Mark Keierleber reported, red flags soon began to emerge. The company financially imploded and its founder Joanna Smith-Griffin left the company. In November, federal prosecutors indicted her, accusing of defrauding investors of $10 million.

America’s Most Popular Autism Therapy May Not Work — and May Cause Serious Harms

by Beth Hawkins

Today, a child’s new autism diagnosis is frequently followed by a referral to a variation of an intervention called applied behavior analysis, or ABA, and four decades of pressure from parents and advocates has created a sprawling treatment industry. Yet, even as providers and lobbyists jockey to strengthen ABA’s dominance, autistic adults and researchers increasingly say there’s alarmingly little proof it’s effective — and mounting evidence it’s traumatizing. In an exclusive investigation, Beth Hawkins spoke with families, teachers and scholars about the growing controversy surrounding autism’s “gold standard” treatment. 

A Cautionary AI Tale: Why IBM’s Dazzling Watson Supercomputer Made a Lousy Tutor

by Greg Toppo

In 2011, IBM’s Watson supercomputer crushed Jeopardy! champions, raising hopes that it could help create a powerful tutoring system that would rival human teachers. But the visionary at the head of the effort watched as the project fizzled, the victim of AI’s inability to hold students’ attention. As new educational AI contenders like Khanmigo emerge, what lessons can they learn from the past? ����Ӱ��’s Greg Toppo took a look at how IBM’s failed effort tempers today’s shiny AI promises.

State-by-State, How Segregation Legally Continues 7 Decades Post Brown v. Board

by Marianna McMurdock

Seventy years after the Supreme Court outlawed separating public school children by race, Marianna McMurdock sought to answer a pivotal question: How are some of the most coveted public schools in the U.S. able to legally exclude all but the most privileged families? Last spring, she spoke with researchers at the nonprofits Available to All and Bellwether, which published a report that examined the troubling laws, loopholes and trends that are undermining the legacy of Brown v. Board in each state. The researchers called for urgent legal reform to offset the impact that one’s home address has on enrollment, particularly as many districts have started considering closures.

Being ‘Bad at Math’ Is a Pervasive Concept. Can it Be Banished From Schools?

by Jo Napolitano

Are you bad at math? If you are, it’s likely that self-fulfilling seed got planted early. Many math education leaders are trying to uproot that thinking, arguing that any student can master the subject with the right accommodations and tutoring. Changing the bad-at-math mindset in U.S. schools, however, will not be easy, others warn. “We use math as a means to sort kids by who gets to be at the top and who gets to be at the bottom,” one math equity advocate told Jo Napolitano. 

Hope Rises in Pine Bluff: Saving Schools in America’s Fastest-Shrinking City

by ����Ӱ�� Staff

Pine Bluff, Arkansas, earned the unwelcome distinction in the 2020 census of being America’s fastest-shrinking city, losing over 12% of its population in one decade. Amid this exodus of families, students and taxpayers, its school district had to navigate school closures, budget pressures and a state takeover. Throughout last winter, members of ����Ӱ��’s newsroom embedded in Pine Bluff to report on the region’s trajectory. Here are some of the powerful stories they came back with: 

Kids, Screen Time & Despair: An Expert in the Economics of Happiness Echoes Psychologists’ Warnings About Tech

By Kevin Mahnken

A prominent economist has joined the growing chorus of experts warning against the dangers posed to youth mental health by screens and social media, reported Kevin Mahnken. New papers released by Dartmouth College professor Danny Blanchflower, a leading expert in the burgeoning field of happiness economics, suggest that the huge increase in screen time over the last decade has made the young more likely to despair than the middle-aged. 

Why Is a Grading System Touted as More Accurate, Equitable So Hard to Implement?

By Amanda Geduld

As educators push for more transparency in grading policies post-pandemic, some are turning to standards-based grading. When done correctly, it separates academic mastery from behavior and more accurately reflects what students know. But misunderstandings of the model, a lack of proper training, and a rush to adopt it often leads to messy implementation. Associate professor Laura Link told Amanda Geduld that as schools look to fix learning gaps, “standards-based grading is one that seems like it can be a quickly adopted effort. But it could backfire — and does backfire — very easily.”

Texas Seeks to Inject Bible Stories into Elementary School Reading Program

by Linda Jacobson

Last May, a sweeping redesign of Texas’ elementary school curriculum that used Bible stories to teach reading was unveiled. At the time, state education Commissioner Mike Morath described the changes as a shift toward a “classical model of education.” But the revisions raised questions about potential religious indoctrination and bias. Nevertheless, in November, the Texas Board of Education approved the new curriculum in a close vote. Linda Jacobson followed the story closely.

The Political War Over the Department of Education Is Only Beginning

By Kevin Mahnken 

Fresh from their November victories, Republicans are already working to help President-elect Donald Trump achieve his promise of abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. But research suggests that, while perceptions of the agency are mixed, the public is unlikely to back a sweeping course of elimination. “Saying you’ll get rid of it reads generically as being anti-education,” one political scientist told Kevin Mahnken. “That strikes me as a very heavy albatross to hang around your neck come the midterms.” 

18 Years, $2 Billion: Inside New Orleans’ Biggest School Recovery Effort in History

By Beth Hawkins

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed 110 New Orleans schools. Displaced families could not return until there were classrooms to welcome their kids, but no one had ever tried to rebuild an entire school system. While many of the buildings were moldering even before the storm, federal funds couldn’t be used to build something better. Some of the schools had landmark status and were of great historical significance. Eighteen years and $2 billion later, Beth Hawkins took a look at seven schools that illustrate how the district accomplished the task.

As Ryan Walters’ Right-Wing Star Rose, Critics Say Oklahoma Ed Dept. Fell Apart

By Linda Jacobson

Oklahoma state education chief Republican Ryan Walters has acted as a one-man publicity machine, a performance that’s earned him venomous foes and ardent fans who follow him with a near-religious fervor. But one casualty of his approach might be a functioning state education bureaucracy. Even Republican lawmakers have grown impatient, calling for a probe into how Walters handles state and federal funds. As Rep. Tammy West, a GOP incumbent running for re-election, told reporter Linda Jacobson, “Regardless of party, citizens want transparency, accountability and communication.”

AI ‘Companions’ Are Patient, Funny, Upbeat — and Probably Rewiring Kids Brains

By Greg Toppo

A college student relies on ChatGPT to help him make life decisions, including whether to break up with his girlfriend. Is this a future we feel good about? While AI bots and companions like ChatGPT, Replika and Snapchat’s MyAI, can offer support, comfort and advice, experts are beginning to warn of potential risks. ����Ӱ��’s Greg Toppo talks to researchers and policy experts about what we should be doing to help make them safer.

Indiana Looks to Swiss Experts to Create Thousands of Student Apprenticeships

By Patrick O’Donnell

Indiana officials have turned to experts at the Swiss version of MIT for help in becoming a national career training leader by making apprenticeships available to thousands of high school students across the state. Indiana is the latest state to work with ETH Zurich — where Albert Einstein once studied — to develop ways to break down barriers between educators and businesses so that career training can be a large part of a reinvented high school experience, reported Patrick O’Donnell. 

Investigation: Nearly 1,000 Native Children Died in Federal Boarding Schools

By Marianna McMurdock 

Nearly 1,000 Native American children died while forced to attend government-affiliated boarding schools, according to a report published last summer by the Interior Department. The children are buried in 74 unmarked and marked graves, reported Marianna McMurdock, as tribes assess repatriation of remains. Nearly 19,000 children were estimated to be kidnapped, often at gunpoint, and enrolled in the schools with the aim of assimilation. “We [were] never called by our name, we were all called by our numbers,” said one survivor. 

The Nation’s Biggest Charter School System Is Under Fire in Los Angeles

By Ben Chapman 

The nation’s largest experiment with charter schools is no longer growing. These days, Los Angeles charter operators say they are just trying to survive. With tough new policies governing co-locations, falling enrollment, and a hostile district school board, charter leaders say they’ve never faced stronger headwinds, reported Ben Chapman. With enrollment plummeting across the district, some charter networks have recently announced closures while others have stopped submitting proposals for new campuses. “Now, particularly in L.A., our focus is not on growing,” said Joanna Belcher, chief impact officer for KIPP SoCal. 

Florida Students Seize on Parental Rights to Stop Educators from Hitting Kids

By Mark Keierleber 

Late last year, Florida senior Brooklynn Daniels was called to the principal’s office and spanked with a wooden paddle “that was thick like a chapter book.” Like in many enclaves that dot the Florida panhandle, Liberty County permits corporal punishment as a form of student discipline. But her flogging, the honors student said, went much further: She alleged sexual assault and filed a police report, reported Mark Keierleber. Daniels joined a student-led movement to change Florida law that has latched onto the GOP-led parental rights movement. 

Interactive: See How Student Achievement Gaps Are Growing in Your State

By Chad Aldeman

In 2012, then-President Barack Obama freed states from the accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind in exchange for reforms related to standards, assessments and teacher evaluations. That relaxing of school and district accountability pressures corresponded with a decline in student performance across the country that is still being felt — achievement gaps are growing across subjects and all across the country. To illustrate these alarming discrepancies, contributor Chad Aldeman and Eamonn Fitzmaurice, ����Ӱ��’s art and technology director, created an interactive tool that enables you to see what’s happening with student performance in your state.

Left Powerless: Non-English–Speaking Parents Denied Vital Translation Services

by Amanda Geduld

Flouting federal laws, K-12 public schools routinely fail to provide qualified interpreters to non-English-speaking families. Parents must instead rely on Google translate, their own kid or a bilingual staff member who isn’t a trained interpreter for issues as simple as their child’s absence for a day or as complex and intimidating as a special education meeting or a school disciplinary hearing. The problem is pervasive and vastly underreported, experts told Amanda Geduld. School leaders say they are trying their best, but lack the money and staffing to meet the need. 

Failed West Virginia Microschool Fuels State Probe and Some Soul-Searching

By Linda Jacobson

The West Virginia treasurer’s investigation into a microschool, funded with education savings accounts, offers a glimpse into an emerging market that has mushroomed since the pandemic. When the program shut down after a few months, parents were left demanding their money back and scrambling to find other arrangements for their children. The example, experts say, shows that it takes more than good intentions to provide a quality education program. As one parent told Linda Jacobson, “I should have seen the red flags.”

In the Rush to Covid Recovery, Did We Forget About Our Youngest Learners?

by Lauren Camera

The country’s youngest elementary school students suffered steep academic setbacks in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic – just like students in older grades. But new research shows that they aren’t catching back up to pre-pandemic levels in reading and math the way older students are. And when it comes to math, many are falling even further behind. “We were shocked when we first saw the data,” Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates, told Lauren Camera.

– Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, dissenting opinion in Milliken v. Bradley, July 25, 1974

This year, Americans marked the 70th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which ended legal segregation of public schools. It’s one of the Supreme Court’s most famous rulings and certainly its best-known education-related case. In many ways, though, Milliken v. Bradley — decided 50 years ago, in July 1974 — has more to teach about the current state of American education and what it would take to truly realize Brown’s promise of integrated schools and equal educational opportunity for all.

If Brown was the green light for school integration in America, Milliken — which addressed the question of whether the federal courts could require regional integration plans across district lines — became something of a flashing red. In overruling the cross-district remedies that lower courts deemed essential for true integration in metropolitan Detroit, the Supreme Court significantly limited the ability of the federal courts to order predominantly white suburban districts to integrate with predominantly black urban ones.

As Marshall sadly predicted, schools today are than they were when he wrote his dissent, with most of that segregation occurring between school districts rather than within them. Indeed, a whopping of the intense school segregation in the Detroit area stems from demographic differences between neighboring or nearby districts — a direct legacy of Milliken.

But the decision did not prevent states from adjusting district lines or taking other steps to promote cross-district integration. That’s exactly what they should do now.

The organization I co-founded, �����Ƿɲ�’s Promise, has developed laying out concrete strategies for state leaders, advocates, policymakers and practitioners. States could, for example, transform school funding formulas to allocate resources according to a school’s needs rather than local property values. Or they could create interdistrict transfer programs and public magnet schools, like those that have fostered diverse classrooms in Hartford, Connecticut. States could also require districts to create plans for promoting integrated, well-funded schools within districts and schools, and systematically track their progress toward meeting those goals.

Achieving this sort of state policy change should not require litigation, but history teaches that legal action is necessary for forcing integration in American schools. Several active lawsuits offer a promising roadmap. Students, families and organizations in Minnesota, New Jersey and New York have filed lawsuits arguing that their states have a duty under their state constitutions to address segregation in their public schools. In Minnesota, for example, the state Supreme Court’s most recent ruling in the ongoing Cruz-Guzman school desegregation case underscored the state’s responsibility to address educational inequalities caused by segregation without requiring proof that the state intentionally promoted it. In New Jersey, the Latino Action Network’s school desegregation lawsuit has , seeking remedies after a judge . And an appellate court recently for a suit challenging segregation in New York City public schools to proceed.

These legal challenges are complemented by growing momentum in research, advocacy and community organizing around the country. In New York, is turning to youth leaders to light the way toward integrated, equitable schools. Earlier this year, New America released an innovative, that allows educators, policymakers and advocates to explore how district lines separate students from resources, opportunity and each other. And leading researchers at Stanford and USC recently published eye-opening new about the state of segregation in American public schools.

That research paints a bleak picture of a public school system that has, for decades now, been trending back toward segregation. Indeed, as legal scholar Martha Minow has noted, “.” But that does not have to be the end of the story. A new generation of students, educators, advocates and judges now have the chance to author a new chapter.

Before Brown, in the 17 states that had segregated school systems, . Even in the face of systemic inequities, Black teachers held kids to high expectations, and Black communities came together to schools that helped move young people into greater opportunity. But in the aftermath of the decision, tens of thousands of Black teachers and school leaders of the field due to resistance of some white people to integration. This had a profound impact on who was teaching students, and a detrimental economic effect on the tenuous, emerging Black middle class.

For several years after Brown, young Black people who wanted to become educators — including Marc’s mother — were still denied entry into postsecondary teaching programs in the South, solely because they were Black. Sybil Haydel Morial did go on to earn her master’s degree in education, at Boston University in 1955.

It’s long past time to ensure that the nation’s schoolchildren have the chance to learn from diverse, effective educators.

Today, just and are people of color, and in , students do not have a single teacher of color. Yet, are people of color. Moreover, the proportion of adults aged 25 to 64 who are teachers is nearly for white adults (3%) than adults of color (1.1%). 

Given the depth of the around the country, it’s just common sense to build stronger pipelines to bring thousands of talented, diverse educators into the classroom.  

But solving teacher shortages is not the only reason that educator diversity matters. Research shows that benefit from having educators of color. And , in particular, achieve at higher levels and are less likely to be suspended or drop out of school.  

We know firsthand the powerful effect diverse educators can have on the trajectory of a young person’s life. Tequilla grew up in poverty in rural Arkansas and lived with her grandparents, who were sharecroppers. They didn’t have indoor plumbing until she was 12 years old. She credits early and continued access to effective educators, many of whom looked like her, as a central reason for her climb to Yale and now CEO of TNTP.  

At a time when13-year-olds are recording the and racial wealth gaps are widening, the nation needs to leverage as many strategies as possible to get real results for kids. Curriculum matters a great deal to student success, but it takes diverse, skilled educators to bring even the best academic programming to life. 

It’s clear to us both that the traditional pathway to teaching is not meeting the demand. State and education leaders must embrace new and alternate pathways to teaching that are more attractive to the nation’s increasingly diverse talent pool. According to TNTP’s report , traditional teacher preparation programs are far less diverse than the public school student population. In some programs, participants are more than 90% white. 

Encouragingly, many states and districts are starting to adopt alternative certification programs and “grow your own” programs to provide more accessible and affordable pathways into the classroom for diverse teachers, including high school students, classroom assistants and paraprofessionals.  

We know that the best recruitment strategy is a strong retention strategy. To better retain all educators, including teachers of color, the nation must ultimately rethink the industrial-era model that has dominated public education for the last century. 

Seventy years post-Brown, it’s clear that doing nothing is not an option. That’s why we applaud efforts like the , a coalition of which TNTP is a part, that has an ambitious goal of dramatically expanding and diversifying the educator workforce.   

After all, the nation is at an inflection point. There aren’t enough effective, diverse teachers. But there’s also an incredible opportunity ahead. The nation can draw on evidence-based strategies to diversify the educator workforce. Doing so will benefit students today and have a profound economic impact for families and communities of color in years to come.  

Our hope is that the nation does not waste any more time. Now is the moment to see the full promise and potential of Brown v. Board of Education through the finish line. 

Soon after she had gone to jail for trying to get her children a better education, Kelley Williams-Bolar’s teenage daughter Jada confronted her mother with an accusation that will stick with her forever. 

“You’re not there for me,” said Jada, now 26. Like the rest of her family, Jada still struggles with her mother’s 2011 felony conviction for sending Jada and her sister Kayla to a suburban school outside Akron, Ohio, using their grandfather’s address.

By the time Jada stood firmly in front of her, Williams-Bolger had spent nine days in jail, overwhelmed by how a felony could upend their lives, jeopardizing future housing and employment opportunities. She started to defend herself, then went silent. She knew Jada was right.

“But you know, it was my mind that wasn’t there. It wasn’t there for years,” conceded Williams-Bolar, a longtime educator and child care provider. “…Honestly, it destroyed me. It was a lot to deal with. I wasn’t the same mom for my daughters.”

Years after their prosecutions and forced removal from districts, families across the country like Williams-Bolar’s are still paying the price, economically and emotionally, after being prosecuted for acting in the best interest of their children. 

In Pennsylvania, one family ultimately owed over $10,000 for tuition and amassed legal fees into the six figures for keeping their child enrolled in a suburban school after moving out of the district three months before the end of the school year. In Connecticut, Tanya McDowell, whose family was experiencing homelessness, used her babysitter’s address to enroll her five year old in a Norwalk school. She was convicted on larceny and unrelated drug charges, serving . 

Outside of the legal ramifications, many families still struggle with depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress, their family relationships and work suffering as a result. Their children have felt at times like they had lost their parents and interest in school. 

Now seven decades after the Supreme Court outlawed sorting children by race and promised quality education for all in the landmark Brown v. Board decision, experts are beating the drum that continuing to exclude children from quality schools based on their home addresses perpetuates segregation. Advocates have also called for an end to the practice of prosecuting parents who, knowingly or unknowingly, disregard zone lines when enrolling their children.

Williams-Bolar’s daughters were zoned for Akron Public Schools, 15 minutes but seemingly a world apart from Copley-Fairlawn, the predominantly white suburban district where her father lived and often cared for her daughters. Visiting Copley’s schools, she saw acres of land, science fairs, a sprawling greenhouse, and a full computer room. Akron’s schools at the time had rapidly decaying infrastructure. Styrofoam cups filled with dirt were the plants in her daughters’ science classes. 

Night and day, she said. She just couldn’t have anticipated what the cost of enrolling her kids in Copley would be. 

Months later, her trial began. Intense scrutiny on the case made their family recipients of unwanted, international attention. A school district contractor showed up to their front door, looking inside their refrigerator, closets, bathrooms, counting each toothbrush. Teachers and students at her daughters’ school made snide remarks about their mother’s jail time. They’d catch neighbors’ side eyed, judgemental gazes. 

White men started driving slowly by their home at any time of day, never speaking, only staring. This would happen about a dozen separate times. 

Williams-Bolar sometimes stayed in her room crying for days, not knowing how much time was passing. Her depression lingered well after . 

Three years on probation also meant the family couldn’t travel to see relatives in the south. She was also barred from visiting her father in prison for months. Though his involvement with her school enrollment case was dropped, soon after the state convicted him on fraud charges related to government benefits. Williams-Bolar maintains the case against her father would not have been pursued without the unprecedented spotlight on her family. 

“Once you get in the lion’s den, they’re not just gonna let you go,” she said. 

He served 11 months in prison, and died in its hospital one month before release. 

“He loved going out barbecuing in the front yard. He loved all his grand babies coming over, always listening to music,” said Kayla, now 30. “I mean, the greatest grandpa a girl could ever ask for. Damn near like a father to me, and I’d do anything to have him back. But here we are.”

Investigations in and recently confirmed districts still regularly confront families suspected of living outside of their boundaries. Today, their methods are usually less public, with districts hiring private investigators or threatening prosecution to get families to disenroll their children. The thousands known to be kicked out of their schools for address sharing are disproportionately Black and brown. 

In at least 24 states, parents can face criminal prosecution, fines and jail sentences for address sharing. Only one, Connecticut, has decriminalized the common practice. 

To reduce the scale of the issue and promote integration, districts could adopt county boundaries, encompassing more diversity and better reflecting work-life patterns, rather than neighborhood lines that mirror racist housing segregation. But they often “lack the political will,” to do so; quality schools remain scarce by design, said civil rights lawyer Erika Wilson. 

And though Williams-Bolar knows a friend was similarly confronted by the district who believed her family lived outside the boundary, they never prosecuted her or asked her to remove her two children. The friend was related to a prominent leader in the NAACP. Williams-Bolar later met a former Copley student who alleged he lived in Akron, too, and that the school knew at the time, but let him stay because he was an athlete. 

“I think it’s common at these, these selective schools. The problem is it’s very, very selectively enforced,” said Tim DeRoche, author, researcher and founder of Available to All, a watchdog organization. 

‘I remember my wife losing her hair’

Around the same time Williams-Bolar was navigating her trial, just one state over, six year old Fiorella Garcia pleaded with the governor of Pennsylvania to drop charges against her parents. Crying, she said she didn’t want to go into foster care. 

In 2012, her parents Hamlet and Olesia Garcia faced up to seven years in prison, felony convictions, and losing custody of their daughter. The suburban Lower Moreland Township School District alleged Fiorella lived outside of its zone, in Philadelphia. Fiorella and Olesia lived temporarily with her grandparents in Lower Moreland, but failed to notify the district that they had moved out. 

In records reviewed by ����Ӱ��, the Garcias repeatedly offered to pay the district the cost for Fiorella to finish the school year in Lower Moreland so as to not interrupt her schooling. Their requests were denied. 

Their mug shots headlined local news the night they were arrested, alongside headlines that alluded to tax fraud. Olesia, who owned a private insurance company, risked losing her license and business. Their address made its way into coverage, and soon after, their car was vandalized.  

“This has never got off my head … I remember my wife losing her hair,” Hamlet Garcia said, trying to hold back tears. Losing so much sleep, he tried medication and experienced chest pains, which he attributes to the stress. 

Their tide only changed after leaving their public defender, who wanted them to settle for a guilty plea. The Garcias incurred close to $100,000 in debt to instead hire a high profile law team from Florida, money they say would have gone toward their daughters’ college education or family vacations. 

Ultimately, all . The family paid $10,752 “tuition” to the district and a $100 fine. 

In the decade that has followed, Garcia has devoted most of his time to learning education law, organizing for school choice and Republican political campaigns, feeling betrayed by the Democrats he felt were responsible. Fiorella, now 17, is about to graduate from high school. 

Telling her story and becoming a parent advocate has been Williams-Bolar’s “medicine.” She feels she’s a part of changing education policy to expand access to quality schools and “leave a legacy for my dad because he didn’t deserve none of that. He didn’t deserve to die in jail.” 

Today she works at one of Akron Public Schools’ high schools as a paraprofessional: the superintendent refused to fire her after the ordeal.

“Honestly,” said Kayla, who’s also considering going back to school to be an educator, “I’m still trying to heal.” 

Family members and NAACP President Derrick Johnson spoke of the violent threats endured for years following the decision, which outlawed separating children into schools by their race. 

President Joe Biden met with the delegation of two original plaintiffs, about 20 descendants and NAACP leadership “critical in fighting for these and other hard-won freedoms for Black Americans,” according to a White House official. 

Several family members reiterated the struggle to make good on �����Ƿɲ�’s promise of quality education for all is far from over. 

“We have a lot of work to do,” said Cheryl Brown Henderson, youngest daughter of namesake plaintiff Oliver Brown, just after leaving the Oval Office. “… We’re still fighting the battle over whose children we invest in.”

In the private meeting, family members said they urged the President to continue that fight and support HBCUs. President Biden thanked them for taking on the risks required to push back on Jim Crow and segregation, including risking “your life, your livelihood, your home,” said Brown Henderson.

At least one litigating family’s home was burned to the ground in South Carolina. Many others lost jobs, compounding the challenges Black families faced in trying to build economic wealth less than a century after the fall of slavery. 

One descendant urged the President to consider a national holiday commemorating the landmark court decision so that its significance and history would not be lost.

“We have yet to fulfill the promise of Brown,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson, adding that teaching “adequate” history is being threatened in multiple states. Last month, the organization for its “anti-indoctrination” law and alleged discrimination against Advanced Placement African American Studies courses.

“So the fight continues,” Johnson said. “It is a political fight. It is a legal fight. It is a moral fight, to ensure that we have a future that’s reflective of the demographics of this country today and not the demographics of 1950.” 

Earlier this week, scholars at Stanford University and University of Southern California unveiled troubling research that school segregation steadily increased in the last three decades. Experts say there’s an urgent need to reform how students are sorted into schools – four states require, and nearly all allow, districts to enforce attendance zones, which often mirror racist housing or sundown town boundaries from nearly a century ago. 

Family members called out the press’s failure to accurately document challenges to �����Ƿɲ�’s implementation and racial educational inequities being played out in schools today. They also voiced criticism for the administration’s military and war spending in comparison to education priorities. This week and late last month signed a for aid to Ukraine, Taiwan and other countries. 

“The truth about education in America? Are the kids from the Indian reservations … in West Virginia, or my mother’s hometown in South Carolina [getting quality education]? I say no. Tell me I’m wrong,” said Nathaniel Briggs, son of the namesake plaintiff in . “We’ll spend millions of dollars to buy an airplane and a bomb, but not on education.” 

Thursday’s event was the first of several NAACP and White House engagements commemorating the anniversary. Tomorrow, seven decades to the day since the court issued the Brown decision, the President will share remarks at the African American Smithsonian. 

The trend is unsurprising to lawyers and researchers familiar with the challenges of �����Ƿɲ�’s implementation, who’ve sounded the alarm that the widespread practice of tying school assignment to childrens’ home addresses has  perpetuated segregation.

But one civil rights and education law expert maintains a sense of optimism, offering new ideas for how courts and state legislatures can take on integration efforts.

“There’s a whole lot that they could do if they wanted to,” said University of North Carolina law professor Erika Wilson, “but often states lack the political will.” 

For years, Wilson, who teaches on and explores the intersections of race in education, has tracked how segregation has persisted. Across the country, modern school district boundaries mirror the boundaries of , where violence and threat of bodily harm against Black families maintained all-white areas. Modern day school district lines today are legally allowed to mirror the historically racist boundaries. 

Among other recommendations, she argues courts can and should take districts’ historical context into consideration when determining whether lines are discriminatory and infringing on student rights. States could also shift who is responsible for drawing lines, or use regional or county lines for districts, which would encompass more racially and economically diverse areas. 

In an interview with ����Ӱ��, Wilson explores some ways segregation has taken on new forms, what states could take up today, and why abandoning integration to “just fix schools” for everyone won’t work in a vacuum. 

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

����Ӱ��: What do you think is missing in the current conversation around desegregating schools? Especially as many districts around the country are about to consider closures or consolidations and might be looking at attendance zone lines? 

It’s a tough question, but I’ve thought about this. One thing I wish that people would consider about not just school desegregation issues, but education in general, is the importance of public education to a healthy and thriving democracy, especially a multiracial democracy.

We really didn’t have a robust system of public schools nationwide until after the Civil War and Reconstruction, and that is in large part because the formerly enslaved and emancipated Africans made education a cornerstone of their efforts to become full citizens …. They understood, and I wish we understood as well, how important that is to cultivating citizenship on equal terms and allowing us all to live together harmoniously. 

It’s kind of a pie in the sky answer – but I do think it’s an important one. We’re seeing the rollbacks on public education, the push towards forms of privatization, at the same time as we’re seeing a complete erosion of democratic norms and commitment to democracy – I don’t think those are a coincidence.

Part of your work is explaining how violence maintained all-white areas and how district maps are now maintaining that exclusion. Can you talk about the ways that you’ve seen that violence shift over time to maintain these areas? Are there more quiet ways that you’ve seen play out?

One of the things I talk about is the way that violence becomes ensconced within geography. And how, at least with respect to schools, we think of geography as race-neutral, unattached from that history of violence against Black bodies in particular.

When you think about modern ways that this manifests itself, the rigid maintenance of school district boundary lines around areas that we know are formerly whites-only sundown towns are an example. 

A less obvious example might be the way that we see zoning laws in these areas… they’re not going to build the kind of multifamily housing or high higher density housing that would attract people who are not predominantly white and/or affluent.

Those are certainly examples of the ways the violence that was used to create these all-white areas continues unabated, in a way that’s completely lawful, and in a way that people are hesitant to associate with forms of violence. Because it would implicate themselves in terms of their desire to move to the whitest areas with the best school districts.

I don’t know that you would use this exact term, but you’ve also written about new forms of segregation, like  school districts in the south seceding from more integrated districts, which used county lines, under the guise of local control. Can you talk about the scale of these kinds of efforts and what sort of protections would have to exist to curb them?

It’s hard to quantify from what I’ve seen, particularly with the secessions. Around 2000 to 2014, there was a ramp up in efforts and then a scaling back as it got a little bit more attention. 

I do think that the scale is larger or at least increasing in the South as these particular school systems are released from desegregation orders. Even if they’re still under existing desegregation orders, the people charged with enforcing them aren’t paying attention. Suggested changes may go uncontested.

One of the things I wrote about was what was happening in Baton Rouge and St. George – just the other day St. George found a workaround. .

The next step will undoubtedly be to try and create their own school district.

So this is the other danger, and part of the reason why it’s difficult to quantify scale. Even when there are protections put in place to stop things like secessions, there’s immediately an attempted workaround. Whether it’s what they did in St. George or attempted to do in North Carolina, where they tried to create these charter school enclaves that were essentially charter districts that would have the same effect as a public school district secession.

What I’ve tried to do is identify where it is happening, because usually what you see is copycat attempts. I wouldn’t be surprised if what St. George did ultimately gets replicated in other places. Honestly, creating their own city is even worse than creating their own school district – that has even broader implications.

For tax revenues, policing, everything. The St. George example also gets at an idea you explore in your work, that high quality schools are scarce partially by design. In this current context, how do you see state legislatures taking desegregation up?

I like to remind people that states have plenary authority over public education. There’s a whole lot that they could do if they wanted to, but often states lack the political will. We worry about campaigns, reelections, perceptions, all of those things. But in a perfect world where we could muster the political will, then there are a number of things that state legislatures could do.

The first I would suggest is rethinking the amount of authority given to school districts, particularly drawing school district boundary lines around municipal boundary lines. We take for granted that’s the way it has to be, but it doesn’t have to be like that.

Many of us don’t live our lives confined to one municipality, particularly when you’re in a metropolitan area with many neighboring municipalities. For example, I live in Durham but I work in Chapel Hill, I often drive [outside] for my son’s sports. We don’t live just confined to Durham, but the way that schools tend to work is that we confine [entry] based on these arbitrary boundary lines that don’t make sense, to reinforce segregation and inequality.

States could decide, for example, that their primary way of distributing public education would be around regional boundary lines. They might take a group of municipalities and lump them together for the purposes of creating a school district unit. Those municipalities might share local revenues, they might assign children across municipal boundary lines, that sort of thing.

They could also read the right to education clauses in state constitutions differently to require more robust forms of funding, to suggest that any kind of secession, for example, would violate that right to education clause.

I’ve also heard this critique that it’s difficult to challenge these systems that are dependent on geography because of the limitations of the equal protection clause and the , which states the neighborhood is the appropriate basis for determining school assignment. Could you walk through the new legal framework you put forth in your work, and what might be required to get there?

The framework I set forth is to really challenge this connection between racialized geography and school assignment.

When you look at a seminal case like Milliken v. Bradley, where the Supreme Court said that you could not bring in the suburban school districts to help desegregate the Detroit public schools because those suburban school districts didn’t do anything wrong. 

Well, that’s just not true. As I note in the article, something like two thirds of the suburbs surrounding the Detroit public schools were sundown towns. They were quite complicit then in the segregated patterns that ended up happening with Detroit public schools.

The problem I’m suggesting is that from an equal protection perspective, there’s no doctrinal mechanism to unearth that kind of connection between race and geography that would create a racially segregated pattern.

I suggest borrowing from the Voting Rights Act, which has this sensitive test of factors that it uses to suss out whether or not boundary lines should exist or persist. And I suggest that we borrow some of that framework to look and see when we should abrogate boundary lines for purposes of an equal protection challenge.

Similarly, I suggest that that framework could also be useful to legislators in deciding whether or not they want to maintain certain boundary lines if they want to, as I alluded to earlier, use their plenary power to rethink and redraw district boundary lines in ways that would be more racially and economically inclusive.

I wonder if we could spend just a moment with charter schools because they do have some parts of their enrollment policies that people have pointed to as promising, like, as you know, requiring a lottery once they’re full or perhaps requiring some geographic quotas. Do you see charters more often being used as the example you shared before, to create exclusionary districts of their own?

It really depends. 

We have a large contingent of parents of color who are flocking to charter schools. It says something about what the feeling is around some of the deficiencies of public schools. That being said charters were never meant to supplant a system of public education. Where we go wrong, I think, is having charters be the primary [school option] rather than supplementing public schools.

Their original intention was to be places of innovation where you could have some relaxed regulations and you would reach a smaller cohort of students. Well, that’s being turned on its head so that charters … seek to be a primary vehicle of educating children.Some of the benefits of relaxed regulations, innovation, all of those things become detrimental when charter schools are the main thing in town, because charters can be places of exclusion. 

For example, a charter school can basically lawfully exclude poor children, children with disabilities, children of color by using race neutral mechanisms to do so. Some charter schools may say we’re not gonna offer free and reduced lunch. Well, that’s going to cut out a swath of children who would depend on free and reduced lunch. Other charters might say we’re not gonna offer transportation. Well, that’s gonna cut out a large swath of children who need transportation. 

A more sneaky way of doing it is that we have the specialized charter schools, let’s say, a Latin charter school, a Montessori, an Afrocentric charter school, some of the theme charter schools are going to attract a certain cohort of students.

And if you have a combination of a special charter school like that and they don’t offer free and reduced lunch and they don’t offer transportation, then what you’re going to get is a very specific kind of student who attends.

From that perspective, they can be exclusionary. 

If we think about public education as a gateway to cultivating citizens for democracy, the exclusionary aspects of charter schools are very bad, in ways that are even more dangerous than private schools because people tend to believe that because charters are quasi public that they’re doing the right thing. It’s just not always true. Some of these charter schools operate as exclusionary as private schools depending on some of the rules that are put in place. 

It’s great that charter schools do things like a lottery to ensure equity in terms of enrollment. Even those processes can be skewed in terms of information and symmetry to even sign up to be a part of the lottery. Some schools have requirements that you have to, for example, stand in line to put your kid’s name on the list. Parents have camped out in order to do that, and what kind of parents can do that?

The saddest part to me is that we are resulting to a lottery to distribute forms of public education. The kind of education you get shouldn’t be subject to the whims of a lottery.

Are there any efforts that you’ve seen successfully disrupt the significance of geography in school opportunity?

A while back in Nebraska, they made attempts at a regional school district. There was a voluntary component to it though, that didn’t make it ideal. I sadly can’t point to any area and say this is a model of how it should be done.

The one area I would say used to be a model is actually in Wake County, North Carolina. They have county based boundary lines, which means that all municipalities within the county are part of the school district. They used to have this really great socio-economic diversity school assignment plan that ultimately got shot down, because parents were upset and didn’t like it.

Would you say that’s usually where the efforts end? With failure of political will or the parent outrage, white parent outrage particularly?

Yeah, I think the parents are a huge driver of what ultimately ends up happening … there’s this idea that their child is being denied something … It’s a mix of parents and special interests that pump up certain kinds of parents and use them to advance ideas that are meant to decimate public education. I’ve seen those explode in recent years.

Anything on your mind that I haven’t asked you explicitly, or any areas you feel the media has ignored or misconstrued?

The question I get often is, given the reluctance of parents, particularly white parents, and the lack of political will, aren’t we better off just trying to abandon notions of integrating schools and just fixing schools so that they are great schools for all children? Even if they end up being racially and economically segregated schools?

I think that’s a fair question. But my response is that it’s important that we not abandon the project of trying to get racially and economically integrated schools.

Throughout our very brief history in the United States, we have not seen a successful model of racially and economically segregated schools that really advances everyone because of the way that race operates in America. Segregation by design is going to end up connoting forms of inferiority. It’s going to preclude necessary intergroup contact that we need to buttress a really flailing democracy.

The one time period in America where we can say that we actually try to have racially integrated schools, it worked. If you look at about 1968 to 1984, where we actually took seriously the legal mandate to integrate schools, what we saw happening is better cross-racial relationships. Reduction of the achievement gap score between Black and white. These are things that I think we lose sight of.

It might seem like there’s some pathway to just fix schools even if they end up being predominantly white or predominantly Black or Latino or nonwhite schools. It doesn’t work. A lot of focus goes on how it doesn’t work for students of color, but it really doesn’t work for white students either.

In the seminal Brown v. Board of Education, everyone’s heard of the doll test that the court relied on to suggest that segregated schools make black students feel inferior. What people don’t know is that the court was also presented with social science evidence regarding the harms of segregation for white students.

One of [the harms] that’s important at this moment is that white segregation creates feelings of superiority, but moral conflict as well. 

Having a group of inferior people – they struggle to reconcile that in ways that makes them more susceptible to authoritarianism and less likely to embrace democratic norms and ideals, which have the potential to disrupt their so-called superiority.

Almost everything that was in that social science research brief about the harms of white segregation is arguably coming to fruition today in terms of the way that democracy is unraveling.

This Friday, May 17, marks the 70th anniversary — the landmark United States Supreme Court ruling that ordered an end to racial segregation in American public schools. And while resistance to desegregation never went away, there was a window of time – particularly in the late 20th and early 21st Century — in which many states and localities, including North Carolina and several of its counties, made enormous headway in building much more diverse and better integrated public school systems.

As a new report from researchers at NC State makes clear, however, that momentum in our state has waned and now things are trending strongly in the opposite direction.

The report is entitled . It was published earlier this month by the , and recently NC Newsline interviewed one of the authors, NC State professor of education, Jennifer Ayscue.

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According to Ayscue, the gist of what she and her colleagues, Victor Cadilla, Mary Kathryn Oyaga, and Cassandra Rubinstein found is that while overall public school enrollment in North Carolina has steadily become more diverse, patterns of segregation in individual schools have greatly intensified.

And this, she says, is worrisome news since, as was noted in the release accompanying the report, “…segregated schools are systematically linked to unequal educational opportunities and outcomes, while desegregated schools are associated with numerous short-term, long-term, academic, and nonacademic outcomes for individuals and society.”

In addition to chronicling the resegregation of North Carolina schools, the report points to several potential tools and tactics for policymakers to employ in combating this trend – though almost all would buck recent trends at the state legislature and in the Department of Public Instruction. These include:

• School districts should design voluntary school desegregation policies that could include student reassignment, controlled-choice attendance and the development of more magnet schools.
• DPI should provide incentives to districts and schools via grants and technical assistance.
• State lawmakers should enact stronger charter school regulations that require the provision of transportation and free school meals, while also amending the state voucher program to include civil rights protections and greater transparency and accountability.

It should be noted that the report does not address segregation in private schools and that a) private school enrollment in North Carolina has , and b) that private schools are generally more segregated than public schools.

The following numbers are from :

41% – growth in overall North Carolina public school enrollment from 1989-90 to 2021-22 (from 1,074,120 to 1,517,300)

45% White, 25% Black, 20% Hispanic, 5% Multiracial, 4% Asian, and 1% American Indian – racial/ethnic breakdown of students in 2021-22

67% White, 30% Black, 1% Hispanic, 2% all others – racial/ethnic breakdown in 1989-90

13.5% – share of all North Carolina public schools in 2021-22 that were “intensely segregated schools of color” (schools that enroll 90-100% students of color)

3.5% – share that were intensely segregated in 1989-90

0.9% – share of North Carolina public schools in 2021-22 that were “hyper-segregated schools of color” (schools that enroll 99-100% students of color)

0.7% – share that were hyper-segregated in 1989-90

23.5% – share of charter schools in 2021-22 that were intensely segregated

6.0% – share of charter schools in 2021-22 that were hyper-segregated

1 out of 4 – share of Black student who attend intensely segregated schools

1 out of 5 – share of Hispanic students

82.6% – of the students attending intensely segregated schools of color, the share who were recipients of free or reduced-price lunch, indicating a double segregation of students by race and poverty

61.3% and 55.3%, respectively – percentage of low-income students in schools attended by typical Black and Hispanic students

38.0% and 29.4%, respectively – percentage of low-income students in schools attended by typical White and Asian students

58.9% ­– the typical White student attended a school where 58.9% of the students were White, even though White students only comprised 45% of the total state enrollment

41.2% – the typical Black student attended a school where 41.2% of the students were Black, even though Black students accounted for 25% of the state’s enrollment

28.3% – the percentage of White students at a school attended by the typical Black student

68.6% – despite accounting for less than half of the state’s enrollment in 2021-22, 68.6% of White students attended majority White schools

to explore the report.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. NC Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Rob Schofield for questions: info@ncnewsline.com. Follow NC Newsline on and .

In the first of its kind , researchers unveil troubling laws, loopholes and trends that undermine the legacy of Brown v. Board, in which the supreme court ruled “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and violate the Fourteenth Amendment.

Public schools today are not required to explain or prove why they are denying a student enrollment. Paired with pressure to stack classrooms with “easier to educate” kids, school administrators say this leads to practices of denying Black, brown, low-income students and those with disabilities enrollment to public school, without consequence.

The report argues discrimination has also been made widespread by allowing – and in four states, requiring – districts to use and enforce school attendance zones, which often mirror racist housing maps from the , separating children by home addresses. Schools contract with private investigators, prosecute or fine parents who defy zone lines via address sharing. Only one state, Connecticut, has decriminalized the common practice.

Researchers say the need to reform and undermine the weight home addresses have on educational outcomes is more urgent than ever, as many districts start to weigh closures and consolidations, leaving thousands of children, , hanging in the balance.

“You can’t be turned away from school because of your race, but if all of the Black people live on one side of the line, all the white people live on the other side of the line, it’s OK to draw the line and assign kids to school based on that,” said Tim DeRoche, coauthor of the report and founder of Available to All, a watchdog organization.

In the wake of Brown, courts took charge, taking on dozens of cases and stamping out explicit racial segregation, particularly in the south. 

“But they never came back around to fulfill that promise, that public schools had to be available to all in equal terms,” DeRoche said. “There’s all these other ways that we sort kids into schools that give advantages to people who have money or live in the right part of town. The courts have just neglected to take that up and frankly, the legislatures have failed to take that up as well.”

The report makes the case for better legal protections, like requiring districts to operate open enrollment zones for families within a 3-mile radius, reserve seats for nonresidents, publish data on enrollment application and denials, and, when schools do reach capacity, require lotteries, common practice at public charter schools.

It also provides a legal profile for each state, outlining their stance on laws that govern public school admissions. In 36 states, for instance, families couldn’t appeal their public school assignment even if they wanted to; Arkansas and California are among the few to explicitly protect the right to appeal to a neutral party.

In Tampa, for example, a predominantly Black elementary school closed, its grade level reading proficiency rates at 11%. Instead of sending any of the few hundred students to the coveted school where 80% read at grade level minutes away from their homes, they were bused to poorer performing, majority minority schools further away, citing capacity constraints. 

“When you see school closures, the politics comes out. You can see the exclusion very clearly,” said DeRoche.

Low-income students, students of color and those with disabilities are those most often excluded. “Thereʼs this systemic pressure to sort of stack your school with kids who are easier to educate,” said a former administrator cited in the report.

Certain students — unhoused, migrant, incarcerated students or those with disabilities or in foster care — are supposed to be protected from enrollment discrimination by federal law, allowed to continue attending original schools in the event of moves. 

Still, the vast majority of decisions lay in the hands of administrators, whose admission practices fly under the radar, unrequired to publish data or provide written reasoning. “In some states with strong open enrollment laws, such as Arizona and Wisconsin, districts are allowed to use unverified claims of capacity constraints to keep children with disabilities from enrolling,” the report states.

As one school psychologist with Los Angeles Unified described to ����Ӱ��, “I’ve seen [zones] weaponized, too … used more as a tool to get rid of students that are engaging in more problem behavior. ‘Well, their address isn’t even in our residence.’”

The school psychologist, speaking on condition of anonymity, witnessed kids get turned away about 15 times this school year. Some common reasons given to families — always verbally, never written — is that their school is full of capacity, can’t accommodate the student’s IEP, or, in one case, “we don’t enroll in April.”

A few times, students were pushed out after mentioning moves offhand to teachers who said, “well, you cause too much havoc in my classroom. So I’m gonna let somebody know.” Some were able to stay because parents were “more assertive,” in meetings with administrators, who then backed off. 

“A lot of the parents don’t know their rights – some of them are just trying to survive so they don’t have the time to go fight the district and be like, ‘oh, my kid’s not being enrolled.’ These families get taken advantage of more often.”

Such was the case in the four counties around Philadelphia, where a public radio investigation revealed the hundreds of kids kicked out of the districts each year for residency fraud were overwhelmingly . Pennsylvania does not have any law or process set for families who want to appeal admissions decisions.

But changing district attendance zone lines is no easy feat.

In , parents flooded houses within the zone for sought-after Lincoln Elementary. When the district considered withdrawing boundary lines, parents were outraged and plans fizzled. Ultimately the state allocated $20 million for the school to build an annex and add more seats, even though hundreds sat empty at schools in the neighborhood. 

“They’re trying to protect these families who feel like, ‘oh, I’ve already paid for my kids’ school via my mortgage,’” said DeRoche. 

Available to All presents an alternative: even if attendance zones were redrawn, other protections like laws to require 15% of seats be reserved for nonresident families or using a lottery once seats are filled, wouldn’t force middle- or higher- income families out of quality schools they’ve invested in via housing. 

Lines were not redrawn; Lincoln Elementary only became more accessible for the wealthy, predominantly white families who could afford to live in the attendance zone.

“[Educational redlining] is a part of the fabric of our lives and we all kind of take it for granted. We’re just trying to call it out and make people look at it straight in the face.” 

Disclosure: Stand Together provides financial support to Available to All and ����Ӱ��. Andy Rotherham co-founded Bellwether Education Partners. He sits on ����Ӱ��’s board of directors.

In the American judicial system, the two small words “et al.,” meaning “and others,” erase the names, faces and histories of everyday individuals seeking justice, fighting for their rights. Used as a reference in class action litigation in place of listing the names of each individual plaintiff, those four letters relegate men, women and children to what can be characterized as a “legal wasteland,” rendering them and their stories unknown.

In the instance of Brown v. Board of Education, those four letters diminished the stories of men, women and children who participated in five class-action lawsuits across the nation. Those five suits were consolidated by the United States Supreme Court in an opinion announced on May 17, 1954: Oliver Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (Kansas), Briggs v. Elliott (South Carolina), Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (Virginia), Belton (Bulah) v. Gebhart (Delaware) and Bolling v. Sharpe (Washington, D.C.).

The legal citation in the landmark ruling, one of the most famous and enduring in history, lives on as Oliver L. Brown, et al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka (KS), et al.

Below are more details about these pivotal cases that were joined together at the High Court:

Bolling, et al. v. C. Melvin Sharpe, et al. (Washington, D.C.)

Since its inception, Washington, D.C., has been home to a significant population of African Americans. Yet as the nation’s capital, the District of Columbia did not set a positive example regarding race relations; it merely followed custom. Washington, D.C., was firmly rooted in racial segregation.

After World War II, the country moved to integrate the military, but Washington, D.C., seemed uninterested in challenging racial custom. By 1950 the traditional African-American community leadership, i.e., churches, sororities, lodges, etc., had failed to organize any protest about run-down facilities that served as schools for their children. Even most parents with “good” wages from government jobs remained silent in the matter of substandard segregated schools. That same year, the owner of a local African-American barbershop stepped forward and filled the leadership void in the matter of better schools for their children. His name was Gardner Bishop, a man who simply knew civil right from social wrong.

It has been reported that on Sept. 11, 1950, Bishop led a group of 11 African-American children to the city’s new junior high school for white students. The school, named for John Philip Sousa, was a large modern building, boasting multiple basketball courts and spacious classrooms. At that moment Gardner Bishop asked for admittance for the African-American students who had accompanied him to see Sousa Junior High School. It seemed clear that the building could accommodate a higher enrollment. His request was denied, ensuring that the African-American students continued to have an unequal educational experience.

Bishop had been organizing parents to act regarding the poor school their children were assigned to. After his field trip to Sousa High, it was time for action. He approached attorney Charles Houston on their behalf. The idea was to request that a facility, equal to that of Sousa High, be constructed for their children. Houston worked on this case independently; it was not an NAACP case.

In 1950 while preparing the Bolling case, Charles Hamilton Houston was stricken with a heart attack. As a result, he asked colleague and friend James Nabritt Jr. to help Gardner Bishop and his group. At that point, the idea of equalization of facilities was rejected by Nabritt and replaced by a challenge to segregation per se.

In 1951 in U.S. District Court, the case of Bolling v. Sharpe was filed. This case was named for Spottswood Thomas Bolling, one of the children who accompanied Gardner Bishop to Sousa High. He was among those denied admission based solely on race.

Although unsuccessful, Nabritt trusted his concept of an all-out attack on segregation. The Bolling case would later meet with success as one of the cases combined under Brown v. Board of Education.

Belton (Bulah) v. Gebhart (Delaware)

The final court challenge to segregated schools in Delaware was filed in the wake of a narrowly tailored ruling in state courts that granted relief from racially segregated public schools only for children of the plaintiffs named in the litigation, leaving the matter unresolved. Ending racial segregation in public schools statewide would require federal intervention. In order to accomplish statewide change, two cases bypassed Delaware state courts and were filed in federal court. One case was from Claymont, a suburb of Wilmington, and another from Hockessin, a rural district in New Castle County.

The state court decision focused on the only high school open to African-American students in the entire state of Delaware: Howard High School, which was located in an industrial business area in Wilmington. For African-American parents residing in Claymont, it meant that their children were forced to pass by Claymont High School, a spacious, well-maintained public school, and travel 20 miles round trip each day to Howard High School. Not only was the distance an adverse factor, but class size, incomplete curriculum and teacher qualifications (in terms of advanced degrees) also angered African-American parents. Students interested in vocational training courses had to walk several blocks to the run-down Carver Annex, regardless of the weather.

In March 1951, eight African-American parents sought legal counsel from attorney Louis Redding. At his urging, these parents asked state education officials to admit their children to the local Claymont school. They were denied. Consequently, Redding agreed to take their case. In 1952, Chancellor Collins J. Seitz, presiding judge of the Delaware Court of Chancery in Wilmington, directed the immediate admittance of the African-American plaintiffs’ children into segregated all-white Claymont High School. Although challenged, his decision was upheld by the Delaware Supreme Court. The Delaware decision offered that the doctrine of “separate but equal” was unconstitutional but decreed that any legal determination on the constitutionality of segregation would come on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Delaware attorney general then instructed the superintendent of Claymont schools not to admit the African-American students because two cases from the state had been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Determined to move forward, school administrators defied state officials and decided that the African-American students would be enrolled. School board members, in an act of defiance, called the state board of education and the state attorney general every hour requesting the legal mandate to allow the African-American students to remain enrolled — knowing that the mandate would have to be oral rather than written. At a special late-night board meeting, the state Board of Education finally called and gave permission (an oral mandate) to enroll the students. With that, in 1952, a small group of African-American high school students integrated public schools in Delaware prior to the Brown decision.

Although a victory for children of the named plaintiffs, Judge Seitz’s decision had not dealt the sweeping blow to segregation in public schools they had hoped for. The decision did not apply broadly throughout Delaware. His decision only directed that the 12 students who were children of the named plaintiffs would be immediately admitted to Claymont High School. As a result, the following students became known as the Claymont Twelve: Carol Anderson, Joan Anderson, Merele Anderson, Ethel Louise Belton, Bernice Byrd, Elbert Crumpler, John Davis, Spencer Robinson, Robert Sanford, Styron Sanford, Almena Short and Myrtha Trotter.

The challenge to racial segregation at the elementary school level emerged from the rural community of Hockessin, where Mrs. Sarah Bulah wanted equal opportunity for her adopted daughter, Shirley Barbara. While a bus carrying white children passed her home each day, she had to drive Shirley two miles to an old one-room schoolhouse designated for African-American children. Sarah Bulah decided to share her concern with state officials, so she wrote to the department of public instruction and to the governor. Their replies reaffirmed that no bus transportation would be provided because “colored” children could not ride on a bus serving white children. Undaunted, Mrs. Bulah made an appointment with attorney Louis Redding.

To accomplish more sweeping change, Redding set out to challenge the general notion of racially segregated public schools and developed litigation filed using the names of Sarah Bulah and one of the parents involved in the Claymont case, Ethel Belton. Their cases named the state board of education as the principal defendant. The board members were specifically charged. The first name among the members was Francis B. Gebhart. The resulting cases were led as Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah v. Gebhart. The Belton and Bulah cases would ultimately join four other NAACP cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and become part of the May 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (Virginia)

In the Commonwealth of Virginia, the only way an African American could receive a high school diploma in the early 20th century was by attending a private academy. Private high schools were operated by Catholics, Methodists, Episcopalians and Presbyterians in Virginia. The public schools for blacks were elementary schools (grades 1-8) operated by county school boards. The fact that school boards were county-affiliated rather than city- or town-affiliated might have something to do with the relatively rural population of most school districts.

In Prince Edward County, Virginia, public schooling for blacks was considered “progressive” compared to neighboring counties. Due partly to the fundraising efforts of the Farmville Colored Women’s Club, the Robert Moton School added grades 9-12 by 1947. Prior to 1947, African Americans “graduated” from high school after the 11th grade. Given that the number of school years were fewer than in the white schools, African Americans from neighboring counties came to Farmville to attend Robert Moton High School in the 1930s and 1940s. The original building was a two-story frame building that later became the elementary school once the “new” Robert Moton High School was built in 1943 across the street. The “new” school was never large enough, necessitating the use of tar-paper-covered buildings hastily constructed on the campus for use as classrooms. It was the use of these temporary buildings as classroom space that sparked a student strike in 1951.

One hundred seventeen African-American high school students chose to strike rather than attend Moton High, which was in need of physical repair. The students’ demand was simple: They wanted a new building with indoor plumbing to replace the old school. The students who provided leadership for the strike were from families who were all long-term residents of the surrounding area. Their spokesperson, Barbara Johns, had a family distinguished by activism. Barbara was the niece of Vernon Johns, the legendary minister who served in the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church the 10 years prior to Martin Luther King Jr. Vernon Johns was an outspoken critic of segregation and was involved in numerous protests throughout his career. Although he lived miles away, in Montgomery, Alabama, community members reported that he was influential in giving advice to the striking students. His wife was a former teacher at Robert Moton High School, and he still had numerous family ties in the community of Farmville and the surrounding area.

The Johns family knew the social politics of the area. Farmville is an hour and a half southwest of Richmond, on the same route Robert E. Lee followed during his retreat from Richmond in the spring of 1865. Farmville is just two miles from where the Confederacy made its last stand at the Battle of Sailor’s Creek. Even in 1950, life in the rural South still carried certain risks for adults whose livelihoods were inextricably linked to a group of whites who controlled commerce in the area. Opinion was divided within the African-American community over whether segregated conditions in Farmville should be challenged.

The students were supported by the Rev. Francis Griffin, a local pastor and civil rights activist, who considered the situation unacceptable and used every opportunity to address the need for change. As president of the local NAACP and chair of the Moton High School PTA, he was well positioned to push for change. He joined Moton High Principal M. Boyd Jones in petitioning the school board, asking that the obvious disparity between the county high school for African Americans and white schools be addressed. In short, they called for a new building to replace Moton High. After several months of inactivity by school officials, the stage was set for the Moton students frustrated with their circumstances to take action.

On April 23, 1951, a student strike organized largely by Barbara Johns was underway. School principal Jones was called away by a false claim of racial problems at the bus station downtown. With him absent, the students assembled under the pretense of a school-sanctioned gathering, and Barbara spoke of the plan to strike. The strike amounted to students walking out of school with instructions, from strike leadership, not to leave the school grounds. Some of the students were given signs to carry that expressed their goal of better facilities. With the strike underway, Barbara Johns and classmate Carrie Stokes sought legal counsel from the NAACP in Richmond. The students received a response in the form of a commitment from NAACP attorney Oliver Hill, agreeing to meet with them. The strike lasted 10 days. Hill promised that action would be taken on their behalf. With that, the students returned to school on May 7, 1951.

After a month of legal maneuvering, a suit was filed in federal court by Oliver Hill’s colleague, Spottswood Robinson, citing the students’ complaint. Surprisingly, when the case was filed, it did not carry the name of Barbara Johns as its lead plaintiff. It was by happenstance that the first student listed was a ninth-grade girl, daughter of a local farmer. Her name was Dorothy Davis. The Virginia case was filed as Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County. After filing this case, Spottswood Robinson immediately traveled to South Carolina, where the case of Briggs v. Elliott was scheduled to be argued in another federal court.

In the case of Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, the U.S. District Court ordered that equal facilities be provided for the black students but “denied the plaintiff’s admission to the white schools during the equalization program.” Attorneys for the NAACP filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court. Their case would eventually be argued with appeals from Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina and Washington, D.C., all of which became part of the court’s unanimous ruling as Brown, et al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka (KS), et al.

County officials ultimately defied the Supreme Court ruling and closed public schools for five years, from 1959 until 1964. It would require another action against the county school board to reopen the schools. Rev. Griffin led the push, becoming the named plaintiff in Griffin v. County School Board. The courts directed the Board of Supervisors to immediately reopen and desegregate its public schools. Because this ruling was met with international media attention and the threat of federal enforcement, the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors reopened and desegregated its public schools in 1964.

Briggs v. R. W. Elliott (South Carolina)

In 1947 a chance encounter between the Rev. James Hinton, president of the South Carolina NAACP, and the Rev. J.A. DeLaine, a local schoolteacher, led to a push to improve access to public education for African-American children living in Summerton, South Carolina. The NAACP leader, in a speech attended by Rev. DeLaine, issued a challenge to find the courage to test the legality of the discriminatory practices aimed at African-American schoolchildren.

Rev. DeLaine was teaching in St. Paul Rural Primary School while serving as the pastor of several small African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) churches. Historically, schools for African Americans in Clarendon County held classes in churches and later moved into buildings designated as schools. Consequently, many schools and churches in Summerton and throughout Clarendon County had the same names, such as Liberty Hill A.M.E. and Liberty Hill Elementary. The establishment of these schools presented a challenge for African-American parents because they were located miles from where many of the children lived.

At issue was the lack of access to school bus transportation for African-American schoolchildren in the county. While taxes paid by African-American parents helped support the buses used by white students, their children were forced to walk as far as eight miles each way in order to attend their public schools. To challenge these unequal conditions, Rev. DeLaine appealed to the school officials, but he failed to secure school buses for African-American students in the county. The Clarendon County school officials justified their refusal by claiming that since the African-American community did not pay (collectively) much in taxes it would be unfair to expect white citizens to provide transportation for African-American schoolchildren. Even a letter-writing campaign launched by Rev. DeLaine yielded no assistance from state educational officials. Determined to lessen their children’s long trek to school, African-American parents collected donations within their community and purchased a secondhand school bus. Eventually continual repairs on the bus proved to be too costly for the parents.

Afterward, Rev. DeLaine tried to garner support from District Superintendent L.B. McCord. It was hoped that since McCord was a fellow clergyman, he would be sympathetic. However, he refused to even consider Rev. DeLaine’s request. As the NAACP state president, Rev. DeLaine determined that litigation was the best course of action.

On March 16, 1948, local attorney Harold Boulware, along with Thurgood Marshall, filed in U.S. District Court the case of Levi Pearson v. County Board of Education. Their case was dismissed on a technicality about where Pearson paid his taxes. Since his land straddled more than one school district, the court ruled that Pearson had no legal standing because he paid taxes in District 5 while his children were in schools in Districts 22 and 26.

Unwilling to give up, Rev. DeLaine gathered enough signatures to file a second legal challenge in 1949. The national office of the NAACP agreed to represent the parents. In May 1950, with the help of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the case of Briggs v. Elliott was filed. Their legal strategy shifted from simply pursuing equalization of facilities and obtaining buses to attacking racial segregation.

The court ruled against the NAACP argument to end the practice of racial segregation in the public schools of Clarendon County. Instead, the court ordered schools to be equalized, focusing on equalization and ignoring the broader question of the constitutionality of racial segregation. The state’s action resulted in an NAACP appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the Briggs case became part of the Brown v. Board of Education litigation.

The Briggs case elicited extreme reactions from whites opposed to desegregation. The petitioners, who were African-American parents of school-age children, suffered swift and severe hardships for their courage. Harry Briggs was fired from his job. Annie Gibson lost her job as a motel maid, and her husband lost land that had been in his family for eight decades. Rev. DeLaine saw his home burned to the ground. Federal Judge Julius Waites Waring, who sided with the parents, was forced to leave the state by a joint resolution of the South Carolina House of Representatives.

By appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the Briggs case was consolidated with four cases already on the court docket, it became part of the final ruling on the matter of racially segregated public schools. On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren announced in an unanimous decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that racial segregation in the nation’s public schools was unconstitutional.

Brown, et al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka (Kansas)

In the fall of 1950, members of the Topeka, Kansas, chapter of the NAACP agreed to again challenge the “separate but equal” doctrine governing public education. The road to their decision came by way of 11 school desegregation cases dating from 1881 to 1949 that had been argued at the Kansas Supreme Court. Kansas law permitted but did not require racially segregated elementary schools in what they defined as “first class” cities with populations of 15,000 or more. Several of the early cases heard by the state Supreme Court successfully integrated schools in Kansas towns that did not meet the population standard of a “first class” city.

For a period of two years prior to legal action, McKinley Burnett, president of the Topeka NAACP, attempted to persuade Topeka school officials to integrate their elementary schools. The Topeka Board of Education did in fact have leeway to comply with the NAACP request to desegregate the elementary schools, since the community met the standard of being a “first class” city, thereby permitting but not requiring racially segregated elementary schools. The NAACP felt that school board refusal to end the practice of racially segregated schools necessitated litigation. Junior and senior high schools in Topeka had already integrated.

The strategy for legal action was conceived by the chapter president, Burnett, attorneys Charles Scott, John Scott, Charles Bledsoe and Elisha Scott and NAACP chapter secretary Lucinda Todd. Their plan involved enlisting the support of fellow NAACP members and personal friends as plaintiffs in what would be a class action suit filed against the Board of Education of Topeka Public Schools. A group of 13 parents agreed to participate on behalf of their children. Each plaintiff was to watch the newspaper for enrollment dates and take their child to the elementary school for white children that was nearest to their home. Once they attempted enrollment and were denied, they were to report back to the NAACP, which provided attorneys with the documentation needed to file a lawsuit against the Topeka School Board.

African-American schools appeared equal in facilities and teacher salaries. However, with only four elementary schools for African-American children, compared with 18 for white children, attending neighborhood schools was all but impossible for African-American children. In many instances, the schools for African-American children were forced to use out-of-date textbooks and were not permitted to participate in districtwide programs. What was not in question was the dedication and qualifications of the African-American teachers and principals assigned to these schools.

The NAACP, with the assistance of the national organization’s legal team, led by attorneys Robert Carter and Jack Greenberg, filed suit against the Board of Education on Feb. 28, 1951. At that time, the name of Oliver Brown was assigned as lead plaintiff. It is suspected that this was a strategy to have a male leading the roster since he was the only man among the local plaintiffs. Their case became Oliver L. Brown, et al. vs. the Board of Education of Topeka (KS). The district court ruled in favor of the school board, forcing the NAACP to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. At the U.S. Supreme Court, the Topeka case joined four school desegregation cases from Delaware, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington, D.C. already on the court docket. The court consolidated the five cases under the heading of Oliver L. Brown, et al. vs. The Board of Education of Topeka, et al.

On May 17, 1954, at 12:52 p.m., the United States Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision, ruling that it was unconstitutional, violating the 14th Amendment, to separate children in public schools based on race. Brown v. Board of Education ushered in a period of unprecedented change. One year later, in December 1955, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decree that desegregation of public schools should occur “with all deliberate speed.” This pronouncement is known as Brown II.

The process of school desegregation proved to be a challenge for school districts across the country. In 1979, a group of young attorneys concerned about a policy in Topeka Public Schools that allowed open enrollment, fearing it would lead to resegregation, filed suit against the local board of education. They believed that this choice would encourage white parents to take their children out of schools with diverse student bodies, thereby creating predominately African-American or predominately white schools. As a result, these attorneys petitioned a federal court to reopen the original Brown case to determine if Topeka Public Schools had in fact complied with the 1954 ruling.

The 1979 case is commonly known as Brown III. The attorneys involved, Richard Jones, Joseph Johnson and Charles Scott Jr. (son of one of the attorneys in the original case), in association with Chris Hansen from the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) in New York, proved the premise that the local school board was presiding over “racially identifiable” schools and had failed to fully end the practice of racial segregation. In the late 1980s, Topeka Public Schools were found to be out of compliance. The Topeka Board of Education appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the court declined to place the case on the docket. On Oct. 28, 1992, after several appeals, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a final denial. Instead, the federal district court directed the Topeka Board of Education to develop plans for compliance. The approved plan entailed building three magnet schools. These schools are excellent facilities and made every effort to be racially balanced. Ironically, one of these new schools is named the Scott Computer and Mathematics Magnet School after the Scott family attorneys for their role in the Brown case and civil rights.

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to ����Ӱ�� and funded The Brown Foundation for Educational Equity, Excellence and Research to produce the new book Recovering Untold Stories: An Enduring Legacy of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision.

The brilliance of Stockstill’s work is in how she brings readers down from the abstract to nitty-gritty reality: How do concentrations of poverty or privilege influence the minutiae of early childhood settings, ranging from how much of the daily routine is completed to how children are allowed to interact with objects brought from home? What societal and institutional expectations are being implicitly and explicitly taught? What does this mean for the experience of teachers? And, what does understanding the implementation level suggest about our policy conversations?

Whether you are a child care veteran or new to the issue, you’ll walk away from False Starts buzzing with thoughts. I had so many I decided to schedule an interview with Stockstill to go deeper.

The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Elliot Haspel: One of the fundamental points you make is that there are several different ways of thinking about preschool, and two of the dominant ones are ‘compensatory’ versus ‘supplemental.’  Can you talk a little bit about that distinction, and how you saw it underlying different characteristics in the two programs you observed?

Casey Stockstill: I think you see preschool as compensatory all over Head Start. I think that’s maybe a controversial claim these days, because I’ve seen a shift. In the sixties, definitely, Head Start was supposed to be a compensatory program to make up for these quote-unquote “shortcomings” of poor families. But the discourse has shifted and I think Head Start describes itself as a whole-child, whole-family approach. They talk about wraparound supports. They don’t want to have a deficit framing, that’s not the intention.

Yet for me, when I was in the classroom with teachers, that is some of the [deficit] language they were using. And I mean, honestly, I’m like, how do you say something is missing without applying a deficit? I heard expressions like, ‘Oh, we gotta take the kids outside because some of their parents might not take them outside.’ ‘They might not be able to brush their kids’ teeth at home.’ ‘We can’t do show and tell. The parents are really busy and don’t always have toys for their kids.’ It’s interesting because some of it is reflecting real scarcity and real gaps. But some of it is not.

What was interesting to me is this framework of Head Start’s going to compensate for challenges at home. It makes a lot of the classroom rules go to the least advantaged kid.

And then I’d say, preschool as a supplement – – that’s more coming from my analysis. It’s something I want us to consider in the way we talk about preschool. I hear it in mom groups, honestly the thinking being ‘I have many options for the kind of child care I could have, or maybe I could even be a stay-at-home parent, should I send my kid to preschool?’ And the thinking is like, ‘Yeah, it’s a positive social experience that will add on to the great stuff you’re probably doing at home.’

Haspel: That makes sense. I’ve always remembered the LBJ quote in announcing Head Start about how it was going to “rescue these children from the poverty which otherwise could pursue them all their lives.” Even though we’ve tried to move away from that, it’s still in there from the very beginning. One of the impacts of segregated classrooms you write about is that they aren’t neatly captured in the observational checkboxes that are used to rate the quality of classrooms. As you know, there’s been a debate in recent years around how we think about quality in ECE settings and how we think about Quality Rating & Improvement Systems (QRIS). So given that, what do you think your research suggests for the future of quality?

Stockstill: I think, yeah, this is being talked about. I’m happy to see it discussed. But I feel like the discussion is more ‘how can we tweak these QRIS systems to make them fold in equity?’ I think we need more discussion and more of an examination. I hope my book pushes that along a little bit, because I feel like quality is how we sleep at night. People often seem to care about segregation because they’re worried that poor kids or kids of color are more likely to be in low-quality programs. The assumption being: as long as we get those kids into high-quality programs, this is all fine. And so much of the texture and the feel of classrooms for children is not captured at all in quality systems.

So yeah, I don’t know if it’s a rethinking or, more unlikely, QRIS would be abandoned. But I’d like to see more of incorporating families’ feelings about their school. Are they getting what they need out of school? I do like the discussions of equity; like, you shouldn’t be able to be a five-star or “high quality” program and be expelling and suspending Black children at a higher rate.

Haspel: Absolutely, it’s a live conversation. I think there’s not one clear answer. I think this book really does contribute to that conversation, too. Because you show so clearly that you can look at a program that has the things that check the boxes, but if they don’t have the other characteristics in place, they are not necessarily getting the quality for the kids.

One thing along those lines: I was really struck by the part where you talked about the daily routines. How many books Great Beginnings had read, how many books Sunshine Head Start had read and so on. Is it fair to say that segregation is getting in the way of learning opportunities or the building of that academic foundation that we’ve been increasingly asking early childhood education to provide?

Stockstill: Would I say, were the Head Start teachers doing a good job? Yes. Were they doing what they should have done with the group of kids that they had? Yes. However, like all teachers know, you have to teach a whole group of kids and that includes focusing on the ones that take most of their attention. So there were kids that could have sat through a book, that wanted to read more, wanted to have more engagement, but could not because we have clustered so many of the challenges of poverty and structural racism in one class.

And I just really want people to see the link between doing that and having these schools that are all affluent and mostly white. Like Great Beginnings, which is able to be the way that it is because it’s not asked to serve kids of color and poor kids. And they chose to use what I saw as time and attention to spare on reading. So yeah, I think it does play a role in school readiness for both groups.

Haspel: One interesting difference was the way that the Great Beginnings teachers much more tightly controlled the play in the classroom, like directing free choice time versus the autonomy that was given with Head Start kids. It really reminded me that a lot of the discourse — and you even mention this — around intensive parenting being the dominant parenting philosophy. So my question is, why do you think that the Great Beginnings teachers were being so much more prescriptive? What do you think was underlying that?

Stockstill: I think they see it as encouraging well-rounded skills. And they talked about social exposure and liking the kids to mix up their playmates. So you know, Ms. Erika in the book talks about like, ‘oh, if I see one girl only plays with this other girl, I want to make sure she can connect with other kinds of people, so I’ll make sure she’s paired with one of the boys.’ But yeah, I definitely see intensive parenting in it, too, this idea that we need to curate children’s experiences.

Haspel: Speaking of the teachers: We talk a lot in the field around compensation as being the key factor in recruitment and retention. And it is, of course! But you talk about Great Beginnings teachers — who don’t get paid a whole lot more than market rate — who had such low turnover. So is there something that’s missing, do you think, in the workforce conversation?

Stockstill: Yeah, I mean, it’s an uncomfortable conversation. But kids, behaviors and families — what families are needing or demanding or assuming that teachers can do — that is workload! That is a teacher’s workload and their workplace environment. The Head Start teachers had better benefits from what they told me, but the pay wasn’t great, and all of them worked second jobs. And then at Great Beginnings, they had [worse benefits], similar pay and they also worked second jobs. Yet they have this satisfaction. That’s not even just about being a preschool teacher. But it’s the Great Beginning teachers saying, ‘I want to work at this school for life, I’m a lifer.’ They would say that the kids are so great, the families are so great, my co-workers get it. They also really appreciated lesson planning autonomy.

I find this fascinating because we are trying so hard to deliver a good preschool experience for poor kids. The way that gets done is kind of like other social programs for kids in poverty. We layer on paperwork and requirements, because if we paid for something to happen in that classroom, we want it documented that it happened.

So Head Start has meal counts and tracking interventions and developmental checklists and 4K curriculum. All this stuff that in many teachers’ view, takes them away from the job. It adds stress without adding benefits. Teachers know it is hard to find a preschool where you’re gonna make great money. So if you’re going to be low paid, they are like, where can I find respect and support for my craft of teaching? My new project is actually a deeper look at how teachers experience workloads across 60 segregated classrooms.

Haspel: You have this great quote: “In the U.S., we ask for preschool to do something we don’t ask of any other institutional experience. Through one fantastically enriching year, the hope is that poor kids will be equipped to succeed in navigating underfunded, unequal institutions as they progress through the rest of their lives.

Public discourse is normalizing pouring more into the fourth year of a child’s life than into their first, second or third years of life.” Broadly speaking, then, how do you think society should properly position preschool?

Stockstill: I’m so tired of the preschool discourse and I was so into it. By the way, that’s part of what inspired the project: working as a teacher aide in a Head Start being like ‘this is great. These kids are gonna benefit so much that they wouldn’t without this!’ All of that.

I was completely inside of that discourse watching presentations from poverty scholars about how ‘look at the impact we can have. If we just spend this money, we spend this X amount on a 4-year-old, it gives these returns. It’s cheaper for society to invest here as opposed to elsewhere.’

I’m tired of that narrative. It’s an efficiency narrative. I know that’s not popular, because we don’t have unlimited funds. But I see child care as part of families, villages. I want to see that we’re making a lifelong investment in citizens. Because, you know, hopefully, we all want an educated, thriving citizen base and workforce. And that starts from birth. I want families to have options for affirming, respectful, exciting child care from birth.

Haspel: Here’s my last question for you. If the book has the impact you want it to have, what’s gonna look different when you and I talk 10 years from now?

Stockstill: We’ll have more preschools that are not segregated by accident. We might have some [segregated preschools] left that are culturally affirming, providing a protective kind of a buffer effect for families of color that want that. But we’ll have a lot more class- and race-integrated preschools.

We are hopefully at an inflection point where we’ll continue expanding and integrating preschools [as part of a system that starts at birth]. Unlike K-12, where we built so many schools in an era of segregation by law and then we’ve been trying to undo that, we’re not done building preschools. So we have the opportunity to make them fantastic for kids, right? But we have to ask slightly different questions, I think, than what we’re currently asking.

The proposal never received serious consideration from Congressional Republicans. But the Department of Education didn’t give up and won approval from to apply a far more modest amount of existing funds toward helping districts stem increasing racial isolation in the nation’s schools.

“It has been a priority for our administration since day one to really build on our country’s greatest strength, which is our diversity,” said Roberto Rodriguez, the department’s assistant secretary for the Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development. 

in California, the , Tennessee district, which includes Chattanooga, and a are among the recipients. They plan to use the funds on family engagement, college and career programs and improving student performance in high-poverty neighborhoods. The will work with five districts to increase diversity in pre-K, expand dual language programs and push more minority students to apply for selective schools and programs. 

The grants, totaling $14 million, follow a from the department that connected widening achievement gaps to the end of major desegregation efforts in the 1980s and ‘90s. Nearly one-third of all students now attend schools where the vast majority of their peers are minorities. The Fostering Diverse Schools program also comes in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to end race-conscious college admissions, which Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said calls for a“courageous commitment to equal opportunity and justice.” The court is now considering whether to take up an appeal over a competitive high school admissions policy in Virginia. 

At the state level, meanwhile, conservative lawmakers have restricted how educators can discuss or address — all of which makes integration efforts “tricky politically,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a Georgetown University researcher and senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute.

“These grants will help showcase models for school leaders across the country who might be nervous about tackling segregation and are looking for concrete ways integration can be accomplished,” he said. 

With House Republicans wanting to and the fiscal year 2024 budget over issues like aid to Israel and Ukraine, it’s unclear if the department will be able to award more grants next year. But Rodriguez said officials see the need for “a stronger investment from the federal level to encourage and partner with districts that are doing more to intentionally enhance diversity and in their schools.” 

‘Thinking across sectors’

During the Obama years, former Education Secretary John King launched a similar initiative, called . The department allocated $12 million for the program and 26 districts applied. But former President Donald Trump eliminated it once he took office. 

Reviving the effort by using funds dedicated for student support and enrichment will allow the department to “get this off the ground,” said Halley Potter of The Century Foundation, a left-leaning that is part of the , a network of almost 60 organizations. The Foundation, she said, worked with “champions on The Hill” to tap funds for providing students a “well-rounded education.”

Three districts — , , and — received the largest awards to implement programs intended to attract a broader cross section of families to public schools. 

The department awarded the New York City schools two separate grants totaling over $3 million to further integration efforts, even as the district continues to face opposition over efforts to diversify elite schools and programs. 

Under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, the district to increase the number of Black and Hispanic students from low-income schools considered for admission to the district’s specialized high schools. But Asian American groups sued, saying the change is discriminatory. 

, pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, shows how controversial such changes can be. The city’s efforts to increase diversity in and middle school have also received pushback. 

The district aims to create more racially and socioeconomically balanced schools in other ways. In District 3, on the West Side of Manhattan, schools will focus on “culturally affirming” learning, according to a of the application. The goal in Brooklyn’s District 13 will be to attract more minority families to the city’s middle schools — including those who attend charters, which can minimally contribute to segregation.

“If your goal is to have integration in your schools, you really need to be thinking across sectors,” Potter said.

The other 10 grants are smaller and will support planning efforts, giving districts a chance to “piggyback” integration efforts onto other priorities, such as school construction and renovation projects, she said.

The Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools in North Carolina will use the $445,000 it received to take a fresh look at its school assignment plan, which hasn’t changed in 30 years. The district is among the top 10 most in the state, with predominantly white schools concentrated in the western part of the county, schools with a higher enrollment of Hispanic students in the southern region and those in the urban core with a majority-Black student population. 

The district will use the funds to hire mapping experts and gather input from families and district employees on school attendance boundaries, with the goal of reaching at least 5,000 students, parents and educators over the next nine months. As a bonus, leaders hope that redrawing attendance boundaries will reduce commute times for students. 

“These zones have not been adjusted to reflect population shifts since the 90s,” said Effie McMillian, the district’s chief equity officer. It’s important, she added, to give “students an opportunity to interact with people that they may not always interact with within their local community of where they live.”

“Our motivation for building outside of the system is because we saw our system crumbling in the midst of the pandemic,” said Lakisha Young, founder and CEO of The Oakland Reach in California, which in the early months of the pandemic launched a virtual hub for students who lacked internet access. Now, the nonprofit is training Black and Hispanic parents to work as math and literacy tutors —  “liberators,” they call them — to help students thrive in local schools. 

“Not only are we putting caring, committed people back into our communities,” Young said, “the system now has to re-engage with us in a different kind of power dynamic.” 

As they look to build a movement, however, leaders are grappling with some thorny questions. Are they contributing to school segregation? And to what extent do they want to remain connected to the very public schools their families left?

Young was among the leaders and researchers featured in a Monday webinar hosted by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a think tank studying the future of pods after most students have returned to traditional schools. The center’s showed that Blacks were more than twice as likely as whites to report that their children were happier in pods — 52% to 25% — and also that they had more trust in the educators leading them than they did teachers in public schools. 

The majority of Black children still attend traditional public schools — 85%, according to . But CRPE researchers wanted to see whether Black pods and microschools connected to broader trends, such as the increase in Black , the and the growth in legislation supporting such models.

Are such policies “paving the way for an explosion in self-determined alternatives to public schools?” asked Jennifer Poon, a fellow with the nonprofit Center for Innovation in Education, which contributed to the research. “And if so, what would that mean for the families in Black pods and microschools? On the flip side, what would that mean for the majority of families who are still served by public schools?”

Introducing a topic often debated in the first year of the pandemic, moderator Chris Stewart, CEO of Brightbeam, a nonprofit that focuses on improving educational opportunities, pitched another question to the panelists: Do pods and microschools contribute to ? 

Speakers rejected the idea. Janelle Woods, founder of the Black Mothers Forum in Phoenix, said Black students are already segregated within public schools because they are suspended and expelled at higher rates than white students.  

Maxine McKinney de Royston, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, formed a small pod for middle school students in cooperation with the Madison school district. She said “it’s a particular form of gaslighting” to blame Black parents for resegregating schools, which she chalked up to  predominantly white, middle class communities from urban school districts.

What ‘schools aren’t delivering’

While homeschool families are used to patching together a variety of learning settings and programs for their children, that is becoming increasingly true of public school parents as well, according to recent research from Tyton Partners, a consulting firm. Its demonstrated growing interest in what researchers described as “multi-site schooling.”

Supplemental pods like those in Oakland are a part of that trend.

“In some cases, parents are looking actively and aggressively for something that schools aren’t delivering,” said Adam Newman, managing partner at Tyton. “It really increases opportunities and challenges for schools to be more creative [and to think] about how they can bridge some of these gaps, particularly around issues of equity.”

Historically, Black parents have always sought better opportunities for their children outside of mainstream schools, said Robert Harvey, former superintendent of a charter school network in East Harlem, New York, and now president of FoodCorps, a nonprofit that helps students access healthy food.

“The early pod school was the slave cabin,” he said.

And four years before the pandemic, Woods founded the Black Mothers Forum in Phoenix to support parents whose children were disproportionately disciplined in public schools.

“Our children were being criminalized and demonized for behavior that was normal for their age group,” she said. 

When schools shut down, the organization launched microschools to serve students whose parents had to work and couldn’t stay home to supervise remote learning. Parents who stayed with microschools are happier, she said, because their children aren’t being disciplined for minor infractions.

Economic options

Because they receive state education funds, the forum’s microschools are free for families. But Woods said foundations can help by supporting meal costs at microschools, which don’t qualify for the National School Lunch Program. It costs $6,000 to $7,000 per month to feed students, she said.

Pods and microschools serve as a “safe harbor” for some Black students, Stewart said. But in states where public funding isn’t available, many Black families can’t afford to form a pod or pay for a private microschool..

Harvey added that Congress opted not to increase the expanded child tax credit, which could have been an “economic option for … Black folks who live one check away from suffering and one check away from thriving.” 

Young said she wants to see more microschools, like those in Arizona.But The Oakland Reach “evolved and adapted” to offer enrichment and tutoring support rather than establish pods outside of the district.

“For better or for worse,” she said, “most of our families are going to be in these public school systems.”

In , scholar Leslie T. Fenwick, tapping seldom-seen transcripts from a series of 1971 U.S. Senate hearings on the topic, writes that the loss of Black educators post-Brown was “the most significant brain drain from the U.S. public education system that the nation has ever seen. It was so pervasive and destabilizing that, even more than half-century later, the nation’s public schools still have not recovered.”

While Black students now represent about 15 percent of K-12 enrollment, just 7 percent of teachers and 11 percent of principals are Black. Research shows that this dearth of Black educators has consequences: One 2018 study, for instance, found that Black students who had by third grade were 13 percent more likely to enroll in college. Those who had two were 32 percent more likely.

What’s more, Fenwick says, current threats over issues such as Critical Race Theory are cut from the same cloth as the threats that Black educators faced post-Brown.

74 contributor Greg Toppo spoke with Fenwick, an education policy professor and dean emerita of the School of Education at Howard University, about the Senate hearings, the backlash to Brown and ways to bring Black teachers back into the classroom.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: Can you take us back to the moment when you first learned about this history?

Leslie T. Fenwick: I learned this history on my own as part of my disgust with a Politics of Education class that I was taking as a doctoral student. The professor decided that the class on the politics of education would not discuss Brown! Instead, we were going to start at a different point, the [the 1971 decision that upheld busing to achieve integrated schools]. And I remember being outraged by that. If there’s any place where we should be unpacking Brown, it should be in that class. Additionally, the faculty member opened the class with this roster of statistics reflecting disparities in education between Blacks and whites, but I was concerned that there was no framing for these statistics, and that without the framing, there was kind of a tacit reinforcement of some racist assumptions about Blacks and intellectual and academic underachievement. So after class I marched to the library, almost in protest, saying to myself that I was going to bring back some statistics and facts to inform this faculty member about education disparities and also to make the case for why we should be discussing Brown. And as I’m looking for resources in the library — I’m literally in the stacks because this is before the Internet — I come across these on the displacement of Black principals. And I start reading them. And that’s where I learned about this history. I carried those transcripts around for quite some time, looking for someone to write the book that I ended up writing.

Those 1971 Senate hearings feel like a hidden history. Why are they not more widely known?

These [Senate hearing] transcripts have been cited at least 100 times in work by scholars and journalists, but no one has written in depth about the most prominent focus of the transcripts, which was Black educators’ superior academic credentials and professional experiences, and how they were replaced by lesser-qualified whites. I wasn’t expecting to find that. … This is the thrust of the hearings. And yet in all the work that cites the hearings, there’s not a focus on these Black educators’ exceptional academic credentials.

You paraphrase testimony from the hearings, writing that as school desegregation slowly played out post-Brown, “White principals and teachers became its direct beneficiaries, while Black educators were its primary prey.” Reading that, I wondered, “Who were the hunters?”

We’re talking about life in the 17 dual-system states, although outside of those states, there are jurisdictions that also have . And we see, even in the North, this is happening too. But en masse, it’s happening in the 17 racially segregated states, from Delaware down to Florida, over to Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, etc. And the hunters become governors, mayors, state legislatures — not individual legislators, but legislatures — and also locally elected officials: mayors, but also school superintendents and school boards. Remember, this is a time still after Brown of a lot of racial constriction. The customs of racism and Jim Crow are alive and well, which means that Blacks experience difficulty and barriers to voting. So that means local officials, school board members, superintendents in the states and jurisdictions where they are elected — and certainly state legislatures and governors [are involved]. And so without full voting rights extended to Blacks, those controlling the state and local levers of power and policy are almost all white and mainly committed to maintaining the segregationist hold on schools. And these are the individuals and entities that facilitate, through the use of state budgets and the use of state codes and statutes, the firing, dismissal and demotion of Black principals and teachers.

You write that Thurgood Marshall in 1955 noted that Black educators’ jobs needed to be protected. Did he and the legal team go into Brown with this possibility on their minds?

There was a that led up to Brown that were about disparities in paying Black and white teachers. Again, Black teachers with more credentials would make less money in the 17 dual-system states than white teachers with certificates. Thurgood Marshall and many of his team litigated those cases … Marshall and his team knew Black educator displacement was likely to happen. Remember, prior to Brown they’re going to Southern and border states, and they’re litigating all the cases around pay inequalities and voter registration. They knew the parameters of Jim Crow very well. In fact, early on, Marshall establishes the of the NAACP to provide funding for legal support to the Black principals and teachers whom he thought would be illegally targeted and lose their jobs as a result of white backlash to Brown.

Do you give Marshall’s legal team any culpability for being naive in their strategy?

I don’t hold the Brown decision, nor the men who were the geniuses behind that decision, culpable. But what I do hold culpable is white resistance and the ability of local and state leaders to, in a swoop, use state statutes and budgets to support their segregationist agenda in the face of Brown, which would become the law of the land. Brown was right: There is no place in an American democracy for segregation. There is no reason Black citizens should not be able to access tax-supported institutions. There is no reason we should have, in this great country, racially segregated customs and laws. Brown was a great and brilliant decision. But there was powerful backlash to the decision that continued for at least 25 years. Sadly, I think it’s still continuing. In fact, the current death threats against superintendents who have initiated race equity initiatives, the physical intimidation of school board members, the threats against teachers and to burn books — when I was writing Jim Crow’s Pink Slip and then looking at the current news, it’s the same script, and that really shocks me.

You’ve anticipated my next question: Reading your book, I felt like the conversations we’re seeing now about CRT and pushing students away from subjects that make them uncomfortable are a direct result of this history. Can you reflect on that?

I wrote the book to push against this myth that there are not enough Black teachers, because after Brown, Blacks fled the profession to pursue fields and careers that were previously unavailable. Well, the history doesn’t say that, nor do U.S. Labor Department statistics show that. And we’re still living with this history: Of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers, about 7 percent are Black. About 11 percent of the nation’s 93,000 principals are Black. And less than 3 percent of the nation’s almost 14,000 superintendents are Black. And so I ask myself, and I ask the reader: Where would we be if these generations of Black educators, who were more credentialed than their white peers who replaced them, who had a personal commitment to end anti-Black racism, who had put their lives on the line to lead voter-rights campaigns in their communities, who were committed to a representative democracy — what if they hadn’t been fired? What if they had been in place during a critical time in our nation’s history and were part of building integrated schools? Where might we be as a nation now?

As you write, they weren’t just teaching, they were also politically active.

Many of these principals and teachers were establishing voting-rights campaigns in their locales. They were establishing NAACP chapters. This was their activism. And in other literature, they’re called community activists and community leaders. But more specifically, their community activism was devoted to helping Blacks get registered to vote and working with the NAACP on lots of equality issues. And so they were threats. These Black educators were cornerstones of political activism even in the face of threats to their own lives.

So in 2022, if the dearth of Black teachers isn’t a recruitment issue, what’s the solution?

When the Nixon administration was pressured about this as a result of the Senate hearings in the ‘70s, the response of the administration was not pro-integration. They designated $3.2 million to the retraining of Black educators for integrated schools. Well, Black educators didn’t need retraining. On a near one-to-one basis, they were more credentialed than the white educators who replaced them. So, the Nixon administration’s retraining investment is literally used to usher Black principals and teachers out of the profession. I go into great, great detail and cite the federal documents that show how they were ushered out of the field. So we need a counter-investment, and particularly in institutions that produce large percentages or numbers of Black and other educators of color. I always say that even in 2022, HBCUs, which are 3 percent of the nation’s colleges and universities, are producing 50 percent of the nation’s Black teachers — and two HSIs (Hispanic Serving Institutions), one in Texas and one in Florida, produce 90 percent of the nation’s Latinx teachers. So we do need some financial investment in the institutions that are producing teachers of color. And we need to examine, I think, any other structural barriers preventing Black and other teachers of color from entering the profession, either as teacher education students or novice teachers.

It strikes me that it’s such a vicious cycle: If you’re a Black student and don’t see Black teachers, your incentive to do this work, to see yourself in this job, just gets reduced. And that feeds into an ongoing cycle.

We know that academic and social benefits accrue to African-American, Hispanic/Latinx students when they’re in highly diverse-staffed schools. They’re less likely to be expelled, less likely to be misplaced in special education, more likely to graduate high school, more likely to apply for college, have reading and math achievement that’s excellent in certain grades. And so we are losing out on some academic achievement, not just for Black and brown students, but possibly for all students. I say in the book, over and over again, that all children benefit from having diverse models of intellectual authority.

See previous 74 Interviews: professor Daryl Scott on teaching the history of race in America; author Amanda Ripley on losing trust in schools; professor Seth Gershenson on the importance of teacher diversity; author Paul Tough on higher education myths; and the full archive of 74 interviews.

Some sift through these data and conclude that the U.S’s growing diversity is sure to deliver an “” for progressive politicians. At the same time, fret that these trends are fated to generate anxious, — even ethno-nationalist — political backlash from blue-collar, white (generally non-Latino) Americans. 

But comparatively few have approached the demographic facts as an opportunity to be engaged, or as a situation to be managed. After all, if these trends are as certain as the tides, what is left to be done? This is a mistake — and an abdication of our obligation as citizens in a self-governing democracy. This growing diversity presents schools with a major opportunity to rectify long-standing inequities and reform themselves to help Latino students build on the strengths that they bring to campus.��

suggest that U.S. schools now enroll more than twice as many Latino students as they did in 1995. Indeed, the data suggest that, by 2030, Latinos will make up roughly 30% of all public school enrollment. This should spur schools and policymakers to action, since research suggests that these students bring and — — some of the country’s .

As , “With the ability to navigate across and between cultural and linguistic differences, Latino students bring a multitude of talents and assets that make our schools — and our country — stronger.” However, U.S. schools have a checkered history of recognizing and valuing that potential. 

American public schools have historically Latino students from of other racial or ethnic backgrounds through a variety of overt and covert methods. This isn’t just a problem from the distant past. English learners, who are disproportionately likely to be Latino, are currently the student group most likely to attend . And, as the UnidosUS report makes clear, schools have particularly struggled to adequately support children of these backgrounds throughout the pandemic. This echoes a of finding English learners and were often left out of schools’ pandemic learning efforts.

In sum, it is far from clear that American public schools are prepared to provide all Latino students with high-quality learning opportunities in this era of new and growing student diversity. These trends have been building for years, and Latinos have faced inequities in American public education for generations. They will face versions of these injustices next fall. They will almost assuredly still be facing them in 2030 (and beyond). 

This will necessarily be a complex project, as American Latinos are profoundly diverse. Latinos in Chicago are , while Latinos in D.C. are . Latinos in Miami are more likely to have ancestry, though many in the community . And Latinos are , encompassing groups of people who identify as ethnically Latino but also racially white, Black or some other identity. While , others speak English, both languages, Portuguese, or one of a panoply of Central American languages. 

From to to to to to to to , Latino diversity shows up in myriad ways throughout the culture of the United States. Latinos have long been at the vanguard of improving American soccer and lists of all-time great Major League Baseball players are stacked with Latino players from , the , , , and (to say nothing of Latino stars in the and ). 

As such, while policies aimed at improving English learners education in the US are necessary to helping more Latinos succeed (), neither are they sufficient for expanding opportunities to the full range of Latino students. What else can we do? 

For one, policymakers at all levels should prioritize diversifying the teaching force in their communities — and across the country. A recent Urban Institute study from Texas confirms that from having some teachers who share their identities. Specifically, that Latino students who had Latino teachers in elementary school had higher academic achievement, better behavior and better high school graduation rates. 

Meanwhile, current teacher training, credentialing and licensure systems are broadly ineffective at producing highly effective teacher candidates, but are reliable at reducing the linguistic, cultural and racial/ethnic diversity of the teaching force. Fortunately, there is that alternative certification programs such as district-driven “grow-your-own” programs, teacher apprenticeships and residencies, and other fellowship programs are generally effective at diversifying local teacher training pipelines.

And as policymakers commit to teacher diversity, they should pay particular attention to linguistic diversity. Research suggests that EL children — — gain from enrolling in schools that provide them with bilingual instruction. Yet, these programs are relatively rare, with nowhere near enough supply to meet demand, particularly in light of . Most communities won’t be able to grow access to bilingual — or integrated dual language immersion — programs . 

Finally, education leaders should prioritize young English-learning children as they invest in early education programs. While there is ample evidence that early education programs are universally beneficial for children and families, research indicates that . Further, show a for . 

Of course there’s more that can be done beyond these three big proposals: diversify the teaching force, ensure that Latino children have widespread access to bilingual education and prioritize enrolling these children in early education programs. But this simple agenda would go a long way towards rectifying long-standing educational inequities and preparing U.S. public schools to deliver on the newly diverse demographics already arriving at its doors.

In , academics at the University of Rochester, the University of Colorado, and Duke University discovered that many winners of North Carolina school board races saw property values rise in their neighborhoods. The gains may have been generated by winners’ manipulation of attendance zones to sort whiter and higher-achieving students into nearby schools.

The findings also deliver an unmistakably partisan message: Board members registered as Republicans or independents yielded increases in home prices, while effects for Democratic winners were null. 

“The finding that non-Democratic — but not Democratic — school board members affect local school attributes in ways that raise home prices in their neighborhood…raises the question of self-interested, as opposed to public service-oriented, motivations for seeking office,” the authors write.

The study’s design offers a somewhat dark perspective on the linkage between school quality and the cost of real estate, hinging on the often-controversial power of local education authorities to determine which schools in their district enroll which students. To derive a clear picture of board members’ potential unspoken agendas, it combines data from a host of sources and examines three phenomena at once.

First, the research team gathered a comprehensive set of election results from the North Carolina State Board of Elections, focusing on all school board races between 2006 and 2016. While the vast majority of those races were nonpartisan (as are most such races around the country) they were able to determine the partisanship of roughly two-thirds of all candidates by matching them to county-level voter registration rolls, which also provided identifying information on race, ethnicity, age, and home address.

Next they built an index of home values throughout North Carolina at the level of the Census block using records from ZTRAX, a database encompassing all home transactions in the state between 1995 and 2016. The inventory, maintained by the online real estate marketplace Zillow, tracked not just sales prices and addresses, but also design and construction details such as square footage, structural condition and number of bathrooms. 

The combined figures clearly showed that property values in winning, non-Democratic candidates’ neighborhoods rose by an average of 4.2 percent — compared with the neighborhoods of losing non-Democrats — in the four years following a school board election. By comparison, winning Democratic board members enjoyed no bump in prices relative to losing Democratic candidates. Among winners registered as Republicans, who made up roughly 80 percent of non-Democratic candidates, the effects were even larger: a 6.2 percent increase in home prices relative to Republican losers.

“It could totally be possible that board members are increasing house prices across the whole district because they’re doing great things for schools,” said co-author John Singleton, a professor of economics at the University of Rochester. “What we’re showing in this paper, though, is that the distribution of those effects across neighborhoods is related to where school board members live. It’s about how the pie is being divided, and it looks like it’s being divided in a more equal fashion by Democratic candidates.”

Controversy over attendance zones

But what could explain the higher prices?

To answer that question, Singleton and his collaborators introduced a final set of facts: records from the North Carolina Education Research Data Center, which included academic, residential, and demographic information on students and schools. Soon enough, they found that the schools serving the neighborhoods of winning non-Democrats seemed to improve in the years following their election to school boards.

Specifically, math and reading scores on the North Carolina standardized End-of-Grade Tests increased slightly for children enrolled in those schools between kindergarten and the eighth grade. At the same time, average years of teacher experience (a crude but intuitive measure of school quality) increased significantly, with the proportion of brand-new teachers dropping by 12.8 percent and the proportion of teachers with over a decade of experience increasing by 3.8 percent.

Singleton said that the marked increase in teacher experience could be linked to lower turnover. Whatever the cause, it would be one of the clearest signals to potential home buyers — along with climbing overall test scores — of elevated school quality, which would in turn push home values higher.

“That’s something that’s potentially very visible to people who are deciding which neighborhood to live in and where to send their kids to school,” Singleton said. “But it’s also going to be private information that’s not more widely known — it travels by word of mouth through social networks: ‘This school is good, they retain their teachers.’”

But the perception of better academic performance seems to have more to do with changes in school composition than actual improvement. While overall standardized test performance in these schools trended upward, scores derived from teacher value-added — by economists to isolate exactly what schools contribute to student learning — remained flat. 

Instead, the ostensible academic growth may have been generated by changes in the schools students were assigned to. Those patterns in school assignment are substantially decided by board members, who may have a personal financial stake in having “good schools” (often, those that enroll more advantaged students who are most prepared to succeed academically) located near their own homes. 

The process of drawing and redrawing school attendance zones is typically highly controversial for that reason. In recent decades, some education analysts have advocated the intentional construction of attendance zones that cultivate more racial and socioeconomic diversity in classrooms. Efforts to put such plans into action have sometimes been stymied by changing election results — including in Wake County, North Carolina’s largest school district, where to an ambitious desegregation plan.

Singleton and his colleagues found that in the years after local non-Democrats won election to school boards, the schools serving their neighborhoods became 3.5 percent whiter relative to those serving the neighborhoods of non-Democratic election losers; enrollment of high-achieving students (those scoring higher on state exams than same-aged children the previous year) increased by 3.6 percent. No such changes were detected among schools serving the neighborhoods of winning Democrats.

The authors also revealed that, compared with results measured in the year before an election, average test scores markedly increased in the schools enrolling children who lived in the same Census block as a winning, non-Democratic school board candidate; in other words, local kids were being assigned to higher-performing schools after their neighbor became a board member.

Eric Brunner, an economist at the University of Connecticut, said that factors like test scores operated as clear signals in real estate markets because of the “very limited information” that families can otherwise access. Previous research has shown that the school ratings included in sites like Zillow can lead directly to neighborhood segregation. 

“What buyers are given by their realtors, and the research they do themselves, is typically the average test scores in different school zones,” Brunner argued. “If [board members] were able to adjust test scores within the boundaries of the school zone such that they went up on average — even though students weren’t smarter, and it was just due to sorting — then home values will go up. People think it’s a better product.”

‘Normal people engaging in politics’

Brunner noted that the study builds by Singleton and another co-author, economist Hugh McCartney, which found that Democratic school board members in North Carolina tended to reduce school segregation by shifting school assignments. The latest paper takes that insight “one step further,” he said, by demonstrating the self-dealing that might follow from the massaging of attendance zones. 

He also took note of an interesting sub-finding of the newer study: The changes in school-level achievement and home values were driven not only by non-Democrats, but also by candidates elected on an at-large basis to represent an entire school district. 

At-large contests only made up about one-quarter of board races in North Carolina over the course of the study, but their structure could help explain its results, Brunner said. Marginal changes to school attendance zones would theoretically produce a small number of winners, but also some “losers”: those who live near a board member but see themselves as adversely impacted by school assignment changes.. Under new assignment patterns, such voters might see their own property values fall as their children are enrolled at relatively lower-achieving schools.

That kind of dissatisfaction would be a serious liability in a ward-based race, Brunner observed; but if the candidate was elected on an at-large basis, most of their voters would take no notice of minor assignment changes occurring in other parts of their school district.

“If you’re elected at large, you could do something that satisfies a very small, unique group of people without pissing off the other voters within your ward. You don’t need to be worried about satisfying the rest of your ward — you could satisfy a microcosm of it.”

Robert Maranto is a political scientist at the University of Arkansas’s Department of Education Reform. Between 2015 and 2020, he also held a seat on the Fayetteville School Board, which undertook several rounds of student redistricting during his tenure. Maranto noted that such policy changes were some of the most fraught he could remember, recollecting in an interview that certain constituents needed to be “grandfathered in” to attendance zones viewed as superior.

“When people buy a house, or sometimes even an apartment, they have the expectation that their kid will go to a certain school,” Maranto said. “So if you upend that expectation, it can be very controversial. Even if they’re redistricted to a brand-new school, people are usually not happy about that.”

He added that the magnitude and direction of the effects measured by Singleton and his collaborators was “very plausible,” but added that his own interpretation was “somewhat less nefarious” than what others might infer.

“Your constituents either want or, more often, don’t want boundary changes,” he said. “It could be for elitist purposes — ‘We don’t want our kids going to school with those kids’ — but you’re representing that on the board. For me, it seems more like normal people engaging in politics.”

Singleton himself added that he would like to see similar research conducted in other states to reveal more about the connection between district leadership, school outcomes, and home prices. Though the findings from North Carolina were suggestive, he noted, the “very distinctive flavor” of local politics — including a comparative abundance of private and charter schools, which could dilute the effects somewhat by partially de-linking home addresses from school assignment — meant that a similar experiment might yield different results elsewhere. 

Above all, he said, it was important to further explore the role of school boards as actors in a complex machinery of school governance because the difference between a good board and a bad one might be greater than is now understood.

“I think there’s mounting evidence that boards can be consequential players. And we’re just starting to learn more about the conditions under which these kinds of effects can arise.”

The publication of the report from The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, was timed to mark the 68th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education and demonstrates the degree to which the nation’s schools remain segregated by race long after it was legally outlawed. 

‘Pernicious’ segregation between school districts, not within them, is the primary reason for racial isolation in 280 out of the 403 metro areas, the report said. That is particularly true in the Northeast and Midwest, where counties often have multiple small school districts. Within-district segregation is greater in the South, which tends to have larger, countywide districts.

“The way that district lines are drawn has a huge impact on segregation and the resources that students in segregated districts have,” said lead author Halley Potter, a senior fellow at the progressive think tank.

Enrollment losses in urban public schools, exacerbated by the pandemic when many students left for private and charter schools, have likely contributed to further racial isolation in some communities, Potter said. But she chalked up the chief causes of segregation to migration, immigration and population growth. School attendance policies that keep students from enrolling in neighboring districts and white residents’ push to secede from majority minority districts are also contributing factors.

The Biden administration has proposed policies to address the issues, including a $100 million to support racial and socioeconomic diversity. Potter said states also have “carrots and sticks” to achieve more integrated schools.

For example, states can allow students to transfer across district lines. They also can design magnet schools to draw students from multiple districts. And they can require districts to take diversity into account when making boundary changes — a practice that only Arkansas and California have implemented.

“It’s a lot of work and coordination to get individual districts to come up with this on their own,” she said, adding that if more states prevented secessions and actively encouraged district mergers that promote integration, “that could be a powerful tool for tackling interdistrict segregation.”

The report complements recent research from Bellwether Education Partners that focused on “border barriers” — district boundaries that keep low-income families from enrolling their children in higher-quality schools.

The Foundation’s report features a first-of-its-kind interactive — developed by Ann Owens of the University of Southern California and Sean Reardon from Stanford University — that allows users to isolate metro areas and different types of segregation. The team developed a measure that ranges from 0, which means no segregation, to 1, which indicates students attend schools with no students from other races. 

Here are four takeaways from the data:

1 Milwaukee leads the pack

Overall, Black-white segregation is especially pronounced in 39 — or about 10% — of the nation’s 403 metro regions, including Milwaukee (.73), Newark (.71), Chicago (.70), Detroit (.70) and New York (.69). 

Hispanic-white segregation is greatest in Philadelphia and Reading, Pennsylvania, as well as Boston, Memphis and Los Angeles.

2 Economic segregation affects Black students the most

Economic segregation is also extreme in many metro areas, particularly Newark, Bridgeport, Milwaukee and Chicago, and affects Black students more than other groups. The average Black student attends a school where the rate of students who qualify for free or reduced-price meals is 16 percentage points higher than in the average white student’s school in the same metro region.

3 Private schools are not a leading factor

Private school enrollment is not a driving force behind segregation overall. But there are some areas where it’s a bigger factor, including Sumter, South Carolina, Napa, California, and the New York-Jersey City-White Plains area of New York and New Jersey. 

4 Research influenced White House on charters

Potter’s past influenced the Biden administration’s controversial proposal to revamp the federal Charter Schools Program. The plan would discourage the creation and expansion of charter schools in districts that have voluntary integration programs. 

The new report, however, shows that charter schools account for just 6% of segregation by income and 4% of white-nonwhite segregation across metro areas. 

But until recently, it remained unclear what impact the decision had on California’s Chicano students.

This spring, in a published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, scholars Francisca Antman and Kalena Cortes filled the gap with the first-ever quantitative analysis of the case’s long-run impacts. 

Participating in desegregation, they found, led to a significant increase in educational attainment for Mexican-American students. Those born after the ruling completed nearly a full year of schooling more than a comparison cohort born 10 years prior and were nearly 20% more likely to graduate from high school. In the decades following the case, Chicano students in highly segregated counties were able to cut by more than half the disparity in their schooling outcomes with those of Chicano students in minimally segregated counties.

“What we see is really a dramatic rise in educational attainment for Hispanics after the end of de jure segregation,” said Antman, an associate professor of economics at the University of Colorado Boulder. That finding, she noted, held true “particularly in those areas that we think were most likely to be segregated.”

In California before the Mendez decision, segregating Mexican-American students into separate schools was common practice, driven to a large extent by . Those who advocated for separate schools claimed Hispanic students were unclean, intellectually inferior and lacking English language skills — even though Mexican-American youth who did not speak Spanish were also segregated.

Today, Latino residents make up of the U.S. population and an even of the nation’s public school student body. Yet Latino youth continue to be . Analyzing the Mendez decision is key to understanding the present circumstances for Latino students and families, the authors .

With desegregation, Antman explained, “Hispanic students [began to] have access to white classrooms or schools that they didn’t before” — meaning more resources and improved facilities. Though exact data on the flow of financial resources does not exist, she and her co-author hypothesize that such shifts may have triggered the outsized benefits for Chicano youth.

At the same time, education outcomes improved for all learners, Mexican-American and white students alike.

“Educational attainment is rising for all groups,” she said, adding that students nationwide tended to complete more schooling over the time period her study observed.

There is no official record of which areas separated Mexican-American students into separate schools as exists for school segregation in the American South — posing a major obstacle to research on the topic. That did not stop Antman and Cortes.

“A lot of times, researchers only pursue questions that they can answer [cleanly with existing data],” said the CU Boulder economist. But “sometimes the question is so important that you want to pursue it even if you can’t get the absolute best, clearest answer.”

She and her co-author got around the limitation by using 1940 census data to create a proxy measure for segregation levels. According to historical accounts, areas with the highest share of Hispanics in their population were the locales with the most rampant segregation. The researchers then identified the top quarter of California counties with the highest share of Hispanic residents and compared them to the bottom quarter with the least to represent high- and low-segregation counties.

In another key hurdle, records are also absent on how effectively each school district followed through on the desegregation effort. Implementation varied at the local level with some districts opening separate schools or maintaining segregation in certain grade levels while desegregating others. The authors account for the messy rollout using what’s called an “intent-to-treat” approach that includes all students in their analysis, regardless of their district’s follow through on desegregation. The method simply measures the effect of students’ exposure to the legal change. If anything, the approach would understate the impacts of integration, the authors explain, by grouping students who experienced desegregation together with those who remained separated.

As with the Brown case, impacts grew over time, Antman and Cortes found. Mexican-American students who were toddlers at the time of Mendez were likely to complete more total years of schooling than those who were in primary school (who in turn were more likely to see higher educational attainment than their older peers). Achievement gaps between Chicano and white students closed over time.

Compared to cohorts that began school before Mendez, those who matriculated after segregation was outlawed were 18.4% more likely to graduate from junior high school and 19.4% more likely to graduate from high school, the analysis revealed.

Fast forward to the current day, and school segregation levels nationwide have — with a for Latino students, who continue to have than any other racial or ethnic group in the U.S. and have been hit especially hard by the pandemic. With that backdrop, Antman said her results underscore the continued need for integration.

“Some might might say, ‘Well, would it really matter to desegregate [in the present day]?’” she said. “This certainly would suggest that it would matter very much.”

The 12-minute history lesson, which landed in mid-February, traces the decades-long legal leadup to the case, as well as the “unforeseen consequences” that played out afterward, series host Clint Smith on Twitter.

“Brown v. Board was an historic and incredibly important court case that reshaped the landscape of American society, but sometimes it’s presented as a singular good without people sitting with its more unsavory consequences,” said Smith, who is the author of New York Times bestseller .

“As always, we have to hold and grapple with both.”

The video is the 33rd in what will be a on Black American history launched by Crash Course in April 2021. The episodes cover topics ranging from the and the to and of African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North. Each is narrated by Smith and are eight to 15 minutes in length. Crash Course has some 13 million YouTube subscribers and most of the Black history episodes have racked up hundreds of thousands of views. 

“I am learning so much from these videos on the African American fight for civil rights and ��’v�� taught it for years! So worth the watch!” history and politics teacher Swerupa wrote in a Twitter sharing the Brown episode.

Experts say the lesson captures a level of historical complexity that frequently evades teachings on the topic.

“That video got at all of the important elements of [Brown], but also presented the story in the nuance that I think it deserves and often is not given,” said Keffrelyn Brown, co-founder of the Center for Innovation in Race, Teaching, and Curriculum at the University of Texas.

“We often just say, ‘Here’s Brown, and then society changed after ’54 …. You do not [frequently see it taught] that there were multiple cases, there were multiple actors, multiple plaintiffs,” added Anthony Brown, the Center’s other co-founder.

As the Crash Course lesson explains, the NAACP played “the long game” in order to win the Brown case, laying the legal foundation for their victory over the preceding two decades. In 1930, they issued the 200-page challenging the doctrine of “separate but equal.” In the 1940s, they won some smaller legal victories against segregation in higher education. And then in 1952, the NAACP brought separate cases challenging K-12 segregation in South Carolina, Virginia, Kansas, Delaware and Washington, D.C. that in 1953 were combined into Brown.

But after the historic victory, some efforts to desegregate schools triggered harmful consequences for Black families.

“Some school districts completely closed schools rather than integrate Black children,” explained Smith. 

The video references Prince Edward County, Virginia, for example, where in 1959, lawmakers shut down all public school classrooms for five years rather than educate Black and white children together.

As lawmakers across the country have moved to restrict what opponents have deemed to be divisive teachings on race and gender, with legislation introduced in 37 states and passed in 14, according to , the University of Texas Center’s co-founders agree that materials such as the Crash Course video may be useful for teachers looking to cover this episode in history accurately and without bias.

“I don’t think I found anything in it divisive or controversial,” said Anthony Brown. “The archives will speak for themselves. The histories will speak for themselves. And then it will provide opportunities for learning for students that I think this video did well.” 

His 8-year-old daughter would be able to watch and understand the content, he believes.

Carol Swain, on the other hand, believes the clip is “well done,” but appropriate only for high school students, not those who are younger.

The former Vanderbilt University professor, who is Black and has emerged as an outspoken critic of teachings on structural racism, takes issue with the video’s ending, which relays that school segregation today remains as severe as it was in the late 1960s.

“The implication is that it’s because of white people,” she told ����Ӱ��. “There are many reasons that segregation persists today, including socioeconomic factors.”

Through the 1960s and into the ‘70s, schools made progress toward racial integration, particularly in the American South. But much of those gains have since eroded, leaving the country’s schools highly segregated today.

The scholar, who co-chaired former President Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission, argues that K-12 lessons should strike a more positive tone, for example by highlighting the multiracial collaborations that won gains for Black Americans through the Civil Rights Movement. Lessons on entrenched racism she argues are less productive for students of all races.

“It saps you of hope if you learn the system is rigged against you,” said Swain. 

April Peters-Hawkins, who is an associate professor at the University of Houston and has studied the ripple effects of Brown, strongly disagrees. It’s important for students to learn the accurate history of Jim Crow even when ugly, she argues, because those events have implications for today.

For example, after Brown, thousands of highly qualified Black teachers were dismissed because white parents would not accept the idea of their children being taught by Black instructors. Academic research documents to students of all races, but especially Black students, from having a Black teacher. The U.S. continues to have a persistent racial gap in its teacher force. About 79 percent of teachers nationwide are white compared to only 47 percent of public school students.

“We’ve never recovered from that [loss of Black educators] as a society,” Peters-Hawkins told ����Ӱ��.

She regrets that many states are clamping down on lessons on race rather than addressing those issues head-on. 

“We continue to get more and more restrictive about what can be taught,” she said. Pushing away from tough topics, she believes, means “we’re actually becoming more ignorant.”

For those who worry over the comfort of white students learning about past and present racism, she poses a separate consideration.

“Think about how uncomfortable it is to live in this country in 2022 and be a Black American,” said Peters-Hawkins. “That’s uncomfortable every day.”

Conducted by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Maryland, the analysis of over 14,000 districts nationwide shows that in 2000, the average child from a poor family went to an elementary school where almost half of the students were defined as middle class. By 2015, that figure had fallen to 36 percent.

As the nation’s population grows, the shift — especially in the West and the South —means they are less likely to experience of racially and socioeconomically mixed schools, the study notes, including higher test scores, smaller racial achievement gaps and higher college enrollment rates.

The findings, according to the researchers, also carry broad implications for academic recovery efforts in the wake of the pandemic. 

A previous analysis by ����Ӱ�� showed disproportionate increases in chronic absenteeism among English learners, three-fourths of whom are Spanish-speakers. And data shows that Latino families were among those by COVID-related job loss and financial hardship, creating a larger challenge for schools serving high concentrations of Latino students.

“Deeper forces have sustained achievement disparities in recent decades, especially this worsening isolation of the poor from middle-class students,” said Bruce Fuller, a Berkeley sociology professor and lead author of the paper. “COVID-era learning loss is but a surface symptom of deeper ills that beset public education.”

“slowed desegregation efforts” in districts with large Black student populations and shifted attention toward improving schools in Black and Latino communities, the authors said. 

Now among Latinos, combined with the movement of Latino families to the suburbs, have contributed to racial isolation, they wrote.

“‘White flight’ from the public school system translates into resource flight from racially isolated schools,” said Feliza Oritz-Licon, chief policy and advocacy officer at Latinos for Education, a nonprofit focusing on teacher recruitment and education policy. She added that in racially isolated schools it becomes easy to “dismiss” Latino students as underperforming.

But not all districts have seen a decline in their white student populations. The chances that Latino children will interact with white peers at school are higher in the Midwest and Northeast. In fact, the researchers found 800 school districts where the white student population had not declined over that 15-year time period, even as the Latino student population grew. 

‘Under one school roof’

The Berkeley study builds on research by Sean Reardon at Stanford University, drew connections between racial segregation and large achievement gaps due to concentrations of Black and Latino students in high-poverty schools.

Pedro Noguera, dean of education at the University of Southern California, said rising segregation not only affects who students sit next to in class, but also broader support for public schools. 

“All of this is troubling. We have to get better at offering the kinds of programs that will attract affluent parents,” he said, noting that International Baccalaureate programs, Advanced Placement courses and other offerings “send the signal of a high standard. That’s what Latino parents want as well.”

Fuller and his co-authors wrote that without more inter-district choice programs, which would allow entree to higher-performing schools in wealthier neighborhoods, Latino students will continue to have fewer opportunities to attend integrated schools. 

A report released last year by Bellwether Education Partners explored additional obstacles to integration created by a lack of affordable housing in districts with higher performing schools; even if low-income families want to move into such school districts, housing options are scarce.

“Civic leaders and educators must expand ways of pulling the nation’s diverse children under one school roof,” Fuller said.

In 2020, the Century Foundation, a left leaning think tank, identified initiatives underway in school districts and charter school networks to increase integration. Some of the programs were voluntary, while others resulted from desegregation orders.

‘The country’s prosperity’

But Noguera said some charter schools predominantly serve Black students or Latino students, . 

By 2060, Latinos are projected to make up over one fourth of the U.S. population, according to Census Bureau , and Latino children currently account for of public school enrollment. 

Increasing the numbers of Latino educators is one way for districts to increase achievement, researchers at the Brookings Institution wrote in last year that focused on the Clark County School District in Nevada. They cited studies showing that Latino students are more likely to be placed in gifted programs and take Advanced Placement courses when their schools have more teachers that look like them.

Recruiting more Latino educators and giving Latinos a greater role in education policy is also a priority for philanthropist McKenzie Scott, who last week donated to Latinos for Education to support the organization’s work.

Latino educators are often assigned to high-need, racially isolated schools because they reflect the cultural backgrounds of students. But turnover is high, with many leaving the profession within four years, noted Oritz-Licon of Latinos for Education.

The organization’s October featured concerns from Latino educators, such as the cost of earning a degree and requests from administrators to provide translation services without additional compensation. 

Oritz-Licon called on schools serving Latino students to use relief funds for afterschool programs, academic support and parent engagement efforts since many high-needs schools might lack those services. 

“Latino students are American students,” she said. “Their educational outcomes should matter because as a growing population, their prosperity is the country’s prosperity.”

But in truth, separating toddlers and preschoolers based on family income is the default in early education. It just usually happens in separate programs rather than the same building, making it harder to see. Early childhood programs are likely the most racially and ethnically segregated educational spaces in the country, according to . Government funding for child care has historically been reserved for the very poor, leading to subsidized means-tested programs for low-income families, with everyone else’s child care options defined by what they can and cannot afford. This has created our current patchwork of early education programs that are rigidly segregated by income and race.

But as Marks and her colleagues sensed, defaulting to segregation is a missed opportunity. It normalizes the experience of segregated schools for new parents, and a growing body of work suggests that racially and economically diverse preschools have significant learning benefits, which some researchers say is not surprising given how much growth in preschool happens through playing and sharing with peers. “Children of all backgrounds learn more on average in racially and socioeconomically diverse preschool classrooms, and diverse early learning settings can help reduce prejudice among young children,” wrote Halley Potter, senior fellow at The Century Foundation, in a that dives into that research and offers ideas for how the federal government can foster integration in universal preschool.

In 2018, Marks and her colleagues began the process of combining the two early education programs which served more than 200 children into one intentionally integrated school. Early Learning Nation talked with Marks about that process and what other programs can learn from their work. She notes that if the Build Back Better plan passes, the growth of affordable and free early education programs could pave the path for more intentional integration.

The interview has been condensed and reorganized for clarity.

KENDRA HURLEY: Educational Alliance’s preschool program has been around since the 1800’s and your Head Start program since the 1960’s. What sparked the decision to combine them?

JACQUELINE MARKS: When I was hired in 2014, there was a new CEO, Alan van Capelle, and Joanna Samuels was the new executive director for the organization’s just-opened Manny Cantor Center. The community center housed the early childhood programs, and our vision was to make it . But that doesn’t go with having two separate schools. You’d walk into the building and push the elevator button to go to a different floor, and then you were going to a different school with a different funding stream, and a different philosophy. So the three of us who were new all had the same wondering: Why are families separated in the first place? Can we change that?

I soon began to also hear from families that having two schools didn’t seem to be consistent with the mission of the organization. At that point it became really clear we needed to find a way to make our school open and accessible to all.

HURLEY: Why were the schools kept separate for so long?

MARKS: The backend finances are very complex. We’re a direct federal Head Start grantee. We’re also a direct grantee from the New York City Department of Education. And we have many philanthropic gifts. Each of those funding streams has very specific requirements that are different from one another.

For example, in the Head Start landscape you need to do developmental screenings of children and there’s a lot of other reporting that needs to happen. And then the Department of Education has their own system for many of the same things, but it’s in a completely different system, and those systems don’t talk to each other.

To blend the programs is a lot of work and takes a lot of resources, so I think what we had done as an organization, and what we have done as a city, actually, is separate children based on how they’re paid for.

HURLEY: How did your funders react to the idea of blending the two schools?

MARKS: There was a lot of lore out there saying it’s not possible. Our funders had questions like, “Why would you want to do that? It’ll make the finances really complicated.”

But we heard that as an opening. We thought, “Great, if we’re able to figure out the finances, this is something that’s possible.”

After that, one of the things we looked for was: Where’s the model for this? Who are the people that we can talk to and learn from? That’s when we kept encountering places that weren’t able to do it. One economically integrated school we found charged tuition based on a sliding scale, but they don’t receive federal and city funds so did not face the same challenges as us.

In the end, we needed to make sure that the money that comes in is spent as intended, while continuing to hold our progressive pedagogy. That required a pretty complex finance team. We are a large organization and were able to make that happen, and at this point, all of our funders are very interested in the work we’re doing. They’re now connecting us to other schools and programs that are interested in doing this. If the Build Back Better plan passes, I think more schools will have an easier time with the funding piece.

HURLEY: How did you decide programming for the blended school?

MARKS: We wanted to combine the best of what we had. Our tuition-based school is progressive and inspired by the schools of Reggio Emilia in Italy. Our curriculum is co-constructed with the children and teachers and families through observing what the children are interested in and creating opportunities that are specific and relevant to them. It’s based on the idea that all children come to school capable and full of potential, and that every family has much to contribute. We wanted to give everyone access to that.

Our Head Start program, while more traditional in nature, had thoughtful social work supports that we thought all families could benefit from.

To combine them, we were again unpacking the lore around what was possible with our funders. We learned that you actually can have what’s called an “emergent curriculum” like ours through Head Start. On their grant application, you select from a box of options for what curriculum you’re using, and we just had to check “Other,” which means we would need to prove that our curriculum is a research-based effective curriculum, and the emergent curriculum we use is exactly that. Once we knew we could do that, we knew that what we were hoping for was possible.

HURLEY: How did staff and families adjust?

MARKS: Many families come to this neighborhood because they want to raise a family in this beautiful, diverse landscape. So for families it felt right, like this is something that has needed to happen for a long time. Our Policy Council, which is the Head Start term for Parents Association, has been working to create ways for families to come together outside of the classroom too, though due to the pandemic these gatherings have been a bit different and smaller than planned.

With teachers it has been more complex because that’s where we’re asking people to make change. When you have two schools with two philosophies, and both groups of teachers are deeply rooted in their own understanding of early childhood education, it can be challenging to ask for change. If you’re used to taking a curriculum book off the shelf and following it, that can be hard, because that’s no longer the school’s philosophy.

So we gave ourselves lots of time to come together. We started professional development with teachers before we combined the schools as a way for teachers to begin to get to know each other and learn about the strengths of each program. We learned that one teacher may have a really strong background in progressive education, while someone else may have a strong background in building trust with families. For teaching teams we thought about who’s going to work well together and complement each other.

HURLEY: What advice would you give other programs interested in creating economic integration?

MARKS: When programs have different funding sources that serve different populations separately, children then grow up through those different streams. They go to public school according to who they’re in preschool with, and it continues from there and you have these segregated schools. As preschool providers, we can help stop that cycle.

Now, every day during morning drop-off, I see the relationships that families from all backgrounds are building as they help each other fold a stroller, or sit together on a bench and talk about their weekend. It’s happening because they have the opportunity to be together.

We need more of this, and I think that some of the federal funding that will hopefully soon roll out for child care and pre-K can create more opportunities for economic integration. My advice to programs in diverse neighborhoods is to absolutely do this. This is important.

Each school day, the students of the John Jay Educational Campus line up outside their squat, brick-lined Brooklyn building and make their way through a metal detector on the way to class at one of the four floors inside.

Isa Grumbach-Bloom heads up to the third floor for classes at Millennium Brooklyn High School. Hajar Bouchour has been learning remotely for a year now, but when she is on campus, she keeps walking, up to the fourth floor, the site of Park Slope Collegiate.

Despite sharing a roof, students’ learning experiences inside can look very different. Millennium has been rated “excellent” in set by the city, making it one of the top schools in the borough. Park Slope, on the other hand, garners “good” ratings and occasionally just “fair” for some metrics.

Why students end up at one school instead of another can be a bit mysterious—the product of “screening” algorithms that more than 100 high schools in the city customize and then use to decide which students to admit, often using variables like test scores, attendance, and behavioral records that disproportionately affect students of color. Millennium has chosen to use screens to pick its students, while Park Slope’s high school program does not.

Bouchour, who is North African Arab and now a sophomore at Park Slope, applied for admission to Millennium Brooklyn but didn’t make the cut. She wasn’t sure why—maybe the week of school she missed because of the flu in seventh grade. “They don’t actually give you why they don’t accept you,” she said. “They just don’t.”

What both students couldn’t help but notice was how many white students shuffled up to one floor and how many students of color moved on to the others. Park Slope was 10% white during the 2019–20 school year, compared to 46% at Millennium. “I enjoy most of my classes,” Grumbach-Bloom, who is White, said, “and I think the main thing that’s missing is a diverse group of students in my classes.”

Most media attention has focused on the city’s handful of “specialized” high schools, which admit students based on the results of a single test, called the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), and which have a history of admitting a dismal number of Black and Latino students. This year, were admitted to the competitive Stuyvesant High School, in one high-profile example.

The controversy has spurred calls to consider other factors when students apply to those schools. But the many screened high schools around the city that already use other factors for admission are also creating apparent barriers for students of color.

New admissions data obtained by The Markup and THE CITY shows how Black and Latino students are regularly screened out of high schools across New York City—most strikingly, the city’s top-performing schools. While Black and Latino students do apply for admission to these schools, they are consistently admitted at much lower rates than White students and students of Asian descent.

Black and Latino students are frequently filtered out of the top-performing screened schools

Source: NYC Department of Education/The Markup. See the fall 2020 data .

The Markup and THE CITY do not have access to data on the students’ test scores, grades, attendance, or other academic measures used to assess their qualifications for admission in any given school, but the admission rates show clear racial trends.

At Millennium Brooklyn, which has been consistently ranked “far above average” in multiple metrics the school system uses to measure success, 24% of the more than 5,700 applicants in the 2020 admissions cycle were Black, but Black students made up less than 10% of those ultimately admitted. White students? They made up 23% of the applicants but more than 34% of the offers. That disparity extends across the top high schools in the city.

At Millennium Brooklyn, there was a wide disparity between applications and offers for Black and Latino students

Source: NYC Department of Education/The Markup. See the fall 2020 data .

Of the 27 best-performing screened schools in the city, White and Asian students were admitted at almost double the rates of Black and Latino students. While 4.4% of Black students and 4.9% of Latino students who applied to these schools were accepted, 9.2% of White students and 8.6% of Asian students who applied were offered a spot.

The school a student is accepted to can mean a major difference in resources and set a student on a different academic path.

Bouchour couldn’t help but notice the better options Millennium offered in its course catalog. “I saw that they had a lot of AP classes, and they had photography class, and all this stuff. I was like, Whoa, whoa, whoa! That would be so cool,” she said. “And then I was like, Oh, wait, but we don’t have that.”

After years, the schools in the building only recently decided to merge athletics programs—Millennium Brooklyn’s was at one point of the other schools’.

Pushed by the pandemic, the city has made changes to the process for the next school year, curbing the use of some screens and improving transparency, but experts say it’s nowhere near enough to undo the racism baked into the system.

“We continue to remove barriers and make our school system more equitable, and we’re always exploring ways to build on the promising results we’ve seen already,” Katie O’Hanlon, a spokesperson for the NYC Department of Education (DOE), said in a statement. “The recent admissions changes are driven by the best interest of our students and, while we know there is more work to do, we won’t stop working to bring real, lasting change to our public schools.”

School screening has become a part of segregation in the city that goes well beyond education, said Johanna Miller, an attorney with the New York Civil Liberties Union, but one the city has in its power to change. “It’s the primary driver that we have to grapple with as a city,” she said. “In our opinion, it’s also the most clearly wrong policy choice that the city has made.”

Black and Latino Kids Are Screened Out of the Top Schools

In 2014, from the University of California, Los Angeles, found that New York City had among the most segregated schools in the nation, and since then, the city has been forced to look for answers on just how the situation turned so dire.

Like other American cities, schools in New York have a long history of residential segregation to reckon with, but one contributing factor has stuck out: New York City’s intense admission process for public high schools.

This year, as it has in the past, the New York City 2021 high school admissions guide , almost topping 500 pages. Schools have wide latitude to make decisions about admissions, and even if families are dedicated to learning the exact requirements for different schools, it’s not easy to find them. For a , researchers scoured web sites and contacted high schools directly to find the exact admissions criteria for 157 screened programs. They got just 20 responses back.

“That’s one thing about New York is that the screened and audition programs, they pretty much rank students however they see fit,” said Sean Corcoran, an associate professor at Vanderbilt University who’s tracked data on admissions in New York City schools for years. “There’s no uniform formula that schools use across the city, so you never know what’s happening behind the curtain of these screening programs.”

Students rank up to 12 schools when applying and are then matched by computer. At any one of those schools, a formula might rank students with a score calculated through something like, say, 40% test scores, 30% grades, and 30% attendance. But the variables, and how much they count for, can vary wildly. Some screens are complicated algorithms that set rigorous requirements for entry—high test scores, consistent attendance, excellent grades.

Other academic “screens,” as some , are almost meaningless. Students with barely passing grades, or even below-grade-level test scores, can still be admitted. Some more targeted “screens,” like an audition for a dance-focused school, are less controversial.

and have looked at whether screening disadvantages students of color more than other ways of picking students. A local student advocacy group, Teens Take Charge, also late last year on admissions rates as part of a U.S.��Department of Education civil rights complaint on screening practices in the city.

The Markup and THE CITY wanted to know precisely how many students were pushed out of every school by the screening system—and where the gaps were the largest.

There are 75 non-specialized high schools that select all of their students with a screen, and through a public records request to the NYC Department of Education, The Markup and THE CITY obtained the number of students of each racial demographic who applied to every screened school for the fall 2020 admissions cycle versus how many were accepted.

Portions of the dataset that involved very small numbers of students were redacted to protect students’ privacy, and the data didn’t include racial data about applicants coming from private schools. Beyond the 75 schools we looked at, there are dozens more that select some of their students with a screen and others without one. But to focus on the effects of screening specifically, our analysis only tracked completely screened schools.

We also looked at recent achievement metrics for each of the schools, using , and found that screened schools with some of the high rankings for metrics like four-year graduation rates, access to advanced courses, and math and English test scores, were more likely to use screens that disproportionately accepted White or Asian students.

Take the Scholars’ Academy in Queens, a top-ranked school that stood out in the data for its admissions gaps. Nearly 300 White students applied, and 103 got in—an acceptance rate of about 35%. Slightly more Black students, 315, also applied—but only 25 received offers, an acceptance rate of around 8%.

The principal of Scholars’ Academy didn’t respond to a request for comment.

At Scholars’ Academy in Queens, White students had a much higher offer rate than other demographics

Source: NYC Department of Education/The Markup. See the fall 2020 data .

The mayor’s office has the broad authority to decide whether schools can use screens or whether to allow only specific types of screens. Right now, though, schools have been given wide discretion over what their screens look like.

O’Hanlon, the Department of Education spokesperson, told The Markup that the city has prioritized community engagement, including with disadvantaged families, to build a fairer process. But the data shows the potential limits of engagement alone. A similar number of Black and Latino students applied to the best-performing schools we looked at, compared to other demographics. They were just less likely to get in.

The city and state have also provided funding to some districts to develop diversity initiatives, O’Hanlon pointed out. More than 100 schools are part of the city’s “Diversity in Admissions” program, in which schools pledge to give priority to disadvantaged students. But only 10 of the 75 screened schools we looked at were part of the program during fall 2020 admissions, according to city data.

argue that the algorithms are simply measures of academic strength. But the families with the most resources, those in favor of reform say, are better positioned to navigate every part of the admissions system. They can hire tutors, get test prep, learn about admissions to the best schools through networking, and have the means to make sure their kids get there on time.

Many of the admissions criteria are beyond a student’s control. Until this year, if a student lived in a different district, in order , that student may have had to contend with the hurdle of a high school geographically preferencing some students for admission. Black and Latino students are also more likely to suffer from some chronic health conditions, which might affect middle school attendance records. Advocates say other potential screening factors, like behavioral records, are also prone to bias against students of color.

Screening didn’t bring racial segregation to schools in the city—schools were segregated well before the system was in place. But it has further separated students by their records of achievement and put in new barriers that reinforce an already racially divided system.

“The way I always think about this is, the legacy of racist housing policies laid out the groundwork for segregation,” said Matt Gonzales, director of the Integration and Innovation Initiative at New York University’s Metro Center. “The school admissions policy, particularly the most egregiously racist ones, basically uphold and reinforce and replicate those patterns of segregation.”

That system doesn’t ensure certain students won’t succeed, but, he said, it effectively stacks the deck against them.

Eliminating the “Low-Hanging Fruit” of Racial Discrimination

Late last year, Mayor Bill de Blasio to the screening system in the city. Middle schools, he said, would “pause” using screens for the upcoming school year and re-evaluate the following year. All high schools, he announced, would permanently phase out the use of geographic preferencing, which favors admission for students living in certain parts of the city and can disproportionately lock students of color out of schools in White areas.

Eleanor Roosevelt High School, for instance, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which has been ranked as “far above average” by the city in metrics like four-year graduation rate and math test scores, had prioritized admission for students living in District 2, an part of the city.

For fall 2020, the school offered slots to 345 students. While 26% of the applicants vying for a slot were Latino, less than 5% of the offers went to those students. The exact number of Latino students that eventually got through the screen was redacted in the data because the DOE claimed that releasing it would violate students’ privacy.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s principal did not respond to a request for comment.

High schools, however, will be allowed to continue using other screening metrics.

There will also be more transparency: Schools are now required to publish their screening requirements on a centralized city website.

“Getting rid of the geographic screens was sort of the low-hanging fruit,” Miller said. But she adds that “we want to see public schools be a public resource.”

“We don’t think, at any scale, the best and most supportive and most well-resourced schools should be something that everyone doesn’t have access to,” she said.

Others haven’t been so pleased. Some parents have argued that students who work especially hard or perform especially well should be placed together in schools where they can get advanced learning. After the announcement, one parent advocate there was “a sense that there is no regard for even pretending to maintain academic excellence and that they are more concerned about optics.”

The decision was largely driven by the pandemic, which caused schools to temporarily abandon measures of success like test scores and attendance for the year, and, depending on your view, school officials to overhaul the system or gave them reason to do so.

, Richard Carranza, de Blasio’s recently departed schools chancellor, explained that the plan would “address the current circumstances attendant to the pandemic.” It particularly wasn’t viable to screen middle school kids based on pandemic attendance and grades, especially when state test exams were canceled for the year. “We’ve had to re-invent the building blocks of public education in the nation’s largest school system from how to go to class, to a grading policy, attendance and everything in between,” he said.

There have been some signs of success. Early data, , showed that low-income students were receiving more offers to competitive middle schools, compared to past years.

At Eleanor Roosevelt, the Department of Education said in an email, the removal of geographic barriers made a big difference: More than 60% of offers went to students outside of District 2, compared to 1% the previous year.

Admissions for students who are eligible for free and reduced lunch also tripled this year—from 16% to 60%. That might be partly because Eleanor Roosevelt started participating in the Diversity in Admissions program this year, which prioritized those students for 38% of offers.

The city hasn’t yet produced racial data on schools for the year.

How lasting those changes are may hinge on the winner of this year’s mayoral election, which will determine who takes authority over school screening policy.

“This is an administration that’s on the way out, so they basically punted to the next administration and said, We’re going to pause for a year and then let whoever else comes in figure it out,” Gonzales said.��

The data The Markup obtained shows how many students were eventually turned down by the system, but what it can’t show is how many students felt out of place in the system even when they succeeded.

Stephanie Chapman, who is Afro-Latina, is a high school junior who went to a middle school in the Bronx. “It was a low-income neighborhood; we barely had any funding,” Chapman said. “We had half of a floor—literally our school was half of a floor.”

When she was looking for high schools, she decided to take the SHSAT for entrance into one of the school’s elite specialized schools. She got a seat at one but worried with her background she wouldn’t fit in. “I just didn’t want to go, because I felt imposter syndrome,” she said. “I felt like I didn’t deserve to go.”

She ended up going to Bard High School Early College Queens instead, a screened school that’s been great for her. She’s on her way to getting a college associate’s degree there, and the faculty goes above and beyond to help with anything students need.

But she’s had to take some time to adjust. Other students would talk about going snowboarding over the weekend as if it were a regular activity. She had a hard time relating. “Growing up in the Bronx, my school, we were all pretty low-income,” she said. “Just to see the shift in people and their economic stance was kind of a shock.”

Bard Queens’s principal didn’t respond to a request for comment.

“Not all people are test-takers, not all people are interview people, not all people have the same access to things,” said Bouchour, the Park Slope Collegiate student. “It’s just not fair how you judge someone based off that stuff and you know absolutely nothing about their story.”

THE CITY is an independent, nonprofit news outlet dedicated to hard-hitting reporting that serves the people of New York.

One way to measure the depth of a particular element of structural racism is to check the burden of proof it takes to force the privileged to notice it. Structures are where racial injustice goes to hide. That is, most of the deep, systemic biases in American life are woven so deeply into the fabric of our daily lives that they’re not only beyond questioning, they’re beyond noticing.

These innocuous, neutral-seeming rules and norms — if an officer thinks you might have a weapon, — encode of color as “fair” and “normal.”

Consider: most white Americans have only recently begun to reflect on how police wield violence towards Black men. The burden of proof? Repeated video documentation of the problem, from Jacob Blake to Eric Garner to George Floyd (et al). That’s what it took for them — for us — to even begin to see it, even as the country waited some 11 hours to find out late Tuesday afternoon that a Minneapolis jury had found ex-police officer Derek Chauvin in Floyd’s murder.

What about in education? What might it take to alert the white and privileged to the profound inequities tilting the daily normal operation of public schools away from providing equitable opportunities to historically marginalized families? The data aren’t lacking. We know that our schools segregate students by , , , and more. We know that this segregation facilitates a privileging mostly white school districts. Perhaps most of all, we know that our system responds to the and of privileged white families first — and all other stakeholders second.

. The study analyzed discussions of Washington, D.C. schools on a popular local discussion forum, “DC Urban Moms and Dads.” The largely anonymous online forum is ubiquitous in white D.C. parents’ discourse — it’s widely as the place that some of the city’s of race, , and schooling. Researchers Vanessa Williamson, Jackson Gode, and Hao Sun surveyed more than 400,000 forum messages across more than a decade of discussions.

What they found was — well, you be the judge. The forum is obsessed with real estate. Mentions of being “in-bound” for a neighborhood school “appeared in nearly two-thirds of all conversations in the forum,” that is, roughly 10,000 of the forum’s 15,000 schools conversations since 2008 included discussion of how to buy guaranteed access to particular schools. “In-bound” is the common term on the forum. Not coincidentally, “the zip codes most commonly referred to on DC Urban Moms are 20016, 20015, and 20007, the three most expensive zip codes in the District.”

As a result, , “Within the DC Urban Moms’ forum much of the local school system is simply invisible; many schools are never discussed.” Within the pool of schools that are visible to the forum, those that get the most attention are disproportionately white and privileged. What’s more, these schools are generally discussed in terms of what they offer — services and extracurricular options, for instance — while some of the analysis found that conversations about less-discussed schools were more likely to center on student demographics.

So: is that shocking? In this deeply progressive city, where Joe Biden won , where Black Lives Matter signs, murals, and artwork are nearly as common as street signs, white parents are still grinding their gears to ensure that there are fewer Black people in their children’s lives.

I wasn’t surprised. I’m a white, middle-class D.C. dad, which means that I am already privy to these conversations, the ones that white people have when they think they’re unaccountable. ��’v�� written for years. .

But those of us sounding this alarm haven’t broken through. Most communities seem content to leave these educational inequities intact. Remember, that’s how we know that a bias is systemic. “Children who live in this neighborhood get to go to this neighborhood school” is innocuous enough. And yet, it lives atop a deep, broad legacy of race-driven policies that have established intergenerational wealth gaps and segregated housing and schools. In theory, anyone can buy access to a neighborhood school where housing for a two-child family runs at least $3,000 per month. In practice, that restricts access to a narrow band of wealthy — — families.

Why can’t we confront the unjust systems that facilitate the toxic privileged behavior visible in tony enclaves like DC Urban Moms? It’s because structural racism in public education runs particularly deep. Consider: if (some) white Americans have learned to decry violent police acts that endanger — or end — Black lives, it’s still the case that the current moment in racial justice activism has not yet required much new behavior from most of us. We’ve been permitted to treat this as a movement exclusively about other white people.

But white supremacy is built into broader structures of American life and it’s daily reinforced by white choices. Schools are a central mechanism for its maintenance: If you are a white person who moved to a “nice,” mostly white, upper-middle class town or neighborhood “for the schools” (full of mostly white, upper-middle class children), for instance, you are following a well-trodden — but privileged — path. You are moving to a place where the are likely to be better and of a higher quality. You are weaving the thread of your family’s life into the United States’s social fabric and reinforcing its inequities.

Those comfortable choices sustain American white supremacy. They keep Americans from one another. keep American , housing, society, and life unequal and inequitable and unjust. And they are much for most white Americans to notice, acknowledge, face, unpack, and reverse than clear acts of police brutality caught on video.

Not coincidentally, white Democrats are than Black Democrats when it comes to major school integration policies, such as busing, or policies that give students to purchase through the housing market.

D.C. isn’t unique. , white, middle-class progressives are when it comes to building or public housing that might make their neighborhood schools more accessible to a wider range of diverse families. “I don’t want my kid to be an experiment,” write thousands of like-minded white parents on listservs in cities across the country, as they move to the whiter, wealthier neighborhoods nearby. “I couldn’t sacrifice my kid to my beliefs,” write thousands more. And thus, white supremacy will persist and continue threatening Black lives until white Americans actually turn and confront the perniciously hidden systems that keep us from including Black Americans in our daily lives.