A re-posting (with edits) of an earlier post.
One of the most intractable issues related to structural racism in the U.S. is that of public schools and who attends them. When the issue discussed here was current (2017), we covered it; the story of Jefferson County is representative of one way Southern school districts get around the law and create all-white school districts, despite the fact that most Southern states have county-wide districts which, were Brown v. Board of Education being implemented, would result in decent levels of integration.
The resegregation of Jefferson County, Alabama schools was the topic of a major investigative report by NYT’s Nikole Hannah-Smith in 2017, which we’ll re-visit in the near future.
Takeaway: The means by which Southern and Northern (urban) school districts manage to resegregate are somewhat different; Southern districts are often county-wide, so what townships with populations of 5,000+ try to do is “break off” from the county-wide school district to form independent, majority-white districts. Northern urban districts have increasingly moved toward the (a) closing of public schools in majority-black neighborhoods which are deemed to be “failing” (cf. Chicago under Mayor Rahm Emanuel) and the (b) simultaneous creation of “charter schools” (privately-administered, publicly-funded schools) and employment of “vouchers” for private schools. Neither charters nor voucher schools have been demonstrated to achieve better overall outcomes than (integrated) neighborhood schools, while both demonstrate higher levels of segregation than districts overall (in both directions, i.e. majority-white, majority-black).
What’s the point, really?
Detailed reporting on the campaign by Gardendale School District outside Birmingham, Alabama, to break off from the Jefferson County School District and form an 80%-white “enclave” segregated school system.
State-of-play: “In 1954, when the Supreme Court handed down its landmark Brown (v. Board of Education) ruling declaring that separate schools for black and white children were inherently unequal, there were five school districts in Jefferson County. In the 63 years since then, that number has more than doubled as white communities established new school districts separate from the increasingly black and Latino county district. If Gardendale succeeds, it would become the 13th school district in Jefferson County. While this kind of splintering has been going on across the country, what makes the Jefferson County case unique is the federal government’s power to stop it there. That’s because Jefferson County is one of just 176 school districts, out of the 13,500 across the nation, that are still under federal oversight to make sure they’re keeping their promise to fully eliminate all vestiges of Jim Crow.” [emphasis added]
There are absolutely no arguments in favor of segregation—apart from the one nobody has the temerity to say out loud, because all evidence points in the opposite direction:
“Rucker Johnson, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, has looked beyond test scores. He’s found that white students who attend integrated schools have measurably less racial prejudice and tend to live in more integrated neighborhoods as adults. As for African Americans, Johnson has found that those who attended integrated schools earn more as adults, live longer, healthier lives, and even pass down these benefits to their children.”
Given current conditions at the federal/state/local level in the Deep South, Gardendale is “…a battle that is likely to be one of the last fronts in the long war for school desegregation. It’s a battle that black families and school integrationists are losing.”
During the campaign to break off from Jefferson County and form a separate school district (a vote was needed, because a tax increase would be required to support the large, new, renovated high school), “… the secession effort’s proponents created a number of campaign ads. In one flier, they asked voters to consider Gardendale’s future. The flier showed a young white girl looking up at the question: ‘Which path will Gardendale choose?’ To her side are two lists of communities in Jefferson County. The first includes towns that have large and growing black populations, all of them still served by the county district. The second list includes ‘some of the best places to live in the country’; they’re the predominantly white cities that formed their own school districts, where the enrollment ranges from 57 to 82 percent white.”
The new Superintendent of Schools hired in 2014 after the vote (52-48 in favor of the tax increase) was Dr. Patrick Martin, a former superintendent who had served in Washington, IL, a rural district near Peoria:
“When U.W. Clemon, the lawyer in the Stout case, deposed him, Martin testified that he had never hired a black teacher in his life. He had also never worked in a district that was more than 5 percent African-American. It would be Martin’s responsibility to come up with a desegregation plan that would have to include, among other things, a strategy for hiring more black teachers.”
Here’s what the Judge who oversaw the desegregation order had to say (April 2017 decision):
“Race was a motivating factor in Gardendale’s decision to separate from the Jefferson County public school system. More specifically, a desire to control the racial demographics of the four public schools in the City of Gardendale and the racial demographics of the city itself motivated the grassroots effort to separate and to eliminate from the Gardendale school zone black students whom Jefferson County transports to Gardendale schools under the terms of the desegregation order.”
But in the end, she sided with Gardendale—citing her respect for “local control” and her fear “that black kids in Gardendale would be targeted if she ruled against the white residents.”
There has been an appeal, so Gardendale isn’t starting up its new district—with its new, color-sensitive boundaries—in 2017-2018.