Tag Archives: magnet schools

Will America’s Schools Ever Be Desegregated?

Originally published in Pacific Standard on December 5, 2017, co-authored with Will Stancil.
——

Only a few years ago, school desegregation was a topic confined to history books—a tumultuous chapter of the civil rights era, starting with Brown v. Board of Education and ending, ignominiously, with the backlash of white parents in the 1980s and ’90s. But over the past three years, thanks to the renewed efforts of advocates and researchers, a surprising resurgence has taken shape. Authors and activists are once again highlighting America’s failure to successfully integrate its schools as a root cause of educational inequality and a driving force behind the nation’s persistent racial divides.

As concerns over unresolved segregation have picked up steam, so too has recognition of the hard practical obstacles to educational integration. Is desegregation a feasible goal? Even some self-described integrationists voice skepticism—potentially slowing, or even derailing, momentum for integrated schools. History threatens to repeat itself, with frustrated advocates accepting segregation as inevitable and refocusing, as many did in the ’90s, only on providing better education in racially isolated environments. But this would be a mistake.

No obstacle to school desegregation is greater, or has been more frequently cited, than racially divided housing patterns. The basic issue is simple: Segregated neighborhoods tend to produce segregated schools. If most of a school district’s population is black or Hispanic, most of its schools probably will be too.

This relationship between school and housing segregation has long been the bugbear of integration efforts, though for slightly different reasons than today. During the 1970s, when courts across the country tried to dismantle segregated districts, education officials pointed to housing patterns as a reason they couldn’t be held legally responsible for the demographics of their schools. The Supreme Court agreed, in part. It called school segregation that arose out of living patterns “de facto segregation,” and argued that it represented private activity that shouldn’t be corrected by government action. The role of the courts, it said, was to eliminate the effects of officially sanctioned discrimination, not to engage in racial balancing for its own sake.

But recent work has helped expose the government’s pivotal (and heretofore frequently overlooked) role in the creation of housing segregation. In 2014, as part of an explosive Atlantic cover story, Ta-Nehisi Coates traced how the government redlined black neighborhoods and denied their inhabitants good mortgages, trapping residents in place. This year, Richard Rothstein followed up on Coates’ work with The Color of Law, a book that takes aim at the myth that racialized living patterns are the result of individual choices. Instead, he shows, they are mainly the product of government policies developed to maintain the racial character of neighborhoods.

With these developments have come a subtle shift: Where housing segregation was once cited as a legal defense excusing districts from the obligation to integrate, it is now raised as a practical obstacle that makes integration impossible. Skeptics say that, until cities address their legacy of discriminatory housing, little can be done to ameliorate school segregation. This argument was notably deployed last spring, when New York City mayor Bill de Blasio suggested his options were limited on school integration, given that “we cannot change the basic reality of housing” across the city.

Undoubtedly, segregated housing complicates school integration. But residential patterns can’t become a scapegoat for racially divided education either.

For decades, school districts have exploited arguments about housing to attack court-enforced desegregation plans. Critics still maintain that any form of proactive school integration will result in white flight, intensified housing segregation, and, ultimately, greater racial isolation in schools.

Experience shows, however, that segregated neighborhoods are not inherent barriers to integrated education. Following a 1996 state supreme court decision, the racially fragmented region of Hartford, Connecticut, established a school desegregation program by funding the creation of diverse magnet schools in Hartford and expanding an interdistrict choice program in the suburbs. Today nearly half of all Hartford public school students attend integrated schools, and parents are clamoring for more.

There is no secret method of school integration that works best. Magnet schools, careful boundary drawing, even the much-maligned practice of busing students to integrated schools instead of just the closest—all seem to work under the right conditions. New York City just announced it will be launching its first-ever district-wide integration plan, using “controlled choice“—a model used in cities such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Champaign, Illinois, that balances racial diversity with parental preference. Families rank their top school choices and the district assigns students to schools taking those considerations into account, but also considers the demographics of each school.

And, besides, neighborhood diversity alone will not always guarantee that schools integrate. In the absence of proactive desegregation plans, it isn’t unusual to find diverse communities served by segregated schools.

Consider the school districts surrounding Minneapolis, Minnesota. Several of the city’s major first-ring suburbs have experienced a rapid demographic transition over the past few decades as the region’s non-white population has quickly grown. Over 30 years, these cities—formerly monolithically white—have become highly diverse.

But change in the cities’ schools has outpaced change in their neighborhoods, and tipped into the realm of outright segregation. In 2010, for example, 50 percent of residents in the large suburb of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, were white, but only 26 percent of the students in its schools were white. In nearby Richfield, which is served by a citywide school district, the mismatch was even greater: The city was 63 percent white while its schools were 32 percent white.

Despite the diversity of the areas they serve, districts like Richfield’s and Brooklyn Park’s are caught in a trap: There’s little to prevent white parents, skittish about the effects of integration, from finding alternatives to their neighborhood school. In Minnesota, that means parents can always place their kids in a charter school, or move their child to a neighboring district under the state’s broad open enrollment rules.

There’s an essential lesson in the plight of these districts. Regardless of whether housing is integrated or otherwise, successful school desegregation requires a plan strong enough to discourage boundary trolling by parents. Indeed, the thing that unites the nation’s best school integration plans is a broad scope. Plans that extend across entire metropolitan regions can coordinate the activities of many different districts and prevent any area as acting as a haven for white flight.

There is no more compelling example of such a plan than Louisville, Kentucky. The Louisville region implemented a city-county school desegregation plan following a court-order in the ’70s. Students still travel between the city proper and its suburbs to attend integrated schools with carefully drawn attendance boundaries. The system has maintained relative demographic balance for decades, even in the absence of quotas.

Of course, the road has been bumpy at times. Desegregation efforts in Louisville faced initial resistance. This is typical: Parents are deeply sensitive to changes in school policy, and adding race to the mix rarely calms things down. Very few cities, districts, or regions have attempted desegregation without some form of parental protest.

But what divides efforts that succeed from those that have failed often isn’t the presence or absence of resistance, but authorities’ patience in overcoming it. Popular dissent over desegregation, it turns out, doesn’t last forever. If changes look inevitable—and can’t be easily escaped by moving to the next town over or enrolling in a different school—parents generally come to accept them. This is what happened in Louisville: resistance gave way to acceptance and even vocal support. The district’s commitment to desegregation has survived multiple attempts to dismantle it—at the Supreme Court in 2006, and just this year in the state legislature. The plan’s resilience exists in large part because it has been embraced by the region’s parents and leaders, most of whom now believe that integration redounds to their benefit.

If anything, research suggests leaders aren’t worrying enough about effects in the other direction: Segregated schools creating segregated cities.

Last year, University of Southern California sociologist Ann Owens published a study examining census data from 100 major metropolitan areas across the United States. She found that large national increases in neighborhood segregation by income—20 percent from 1990 to 2010—were caused almost entirely by families with children, those seeking “good” school districts. Other studies have shown neighborhoods in cities with metropolitan-wide school integration plans are markedly less likely to become segregated over time. (Notably, Louisville’s rate of housing segregation fell more than 20 percent between 1990 and 2010.)

Not that the impact of schools on housing is any great mystery: Ask any real estate agent. It’s no coincidence that real estate services like Zillow or Redfin prominently feature metrics of school quality on their house listings—a legal gray area, since realtor discussion of neighborhood demographics is banned by the Fair Housing Act.

Even the Supreme Court’s desegregation cases, which often treated housing patterns as a fact of nature, conceded that the construction of segregated schools “may well promote segregated residential patterns which … further lock the school system into the mold of separation of the races.”

In other words, regions that wait for diversity in neighborhoods to create diversity in schools may quickly find themselves with little of either.

Advertisement

Desegregated, Differently

Originally published in the Fall 2017 issue of The American Prospect. 
—–

Screen Shot 2017-10-18 at 1.51.44 PM.png

Hartford, Connecticut, is struggling. Teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, the state’s tiny capital wrestles with many of the same economic challenges as other predominantly poor post-industrial cities along the East Coast. Yet Hartford boasts one remarkably unique feature: Nearly half of its public school students attend desegregated schools.

In most places, desegregation was a 20th-century phenomenon that was pulled apart by a skeptical Supreme Court and political backlash from white families. But in Hartford, it’s still happening, thanks to Sheff v. O’Neill, a 1996 state Supreme Court decision in which the court ruled that the region’s racially segregated schools denied Hartford children their constitutional right to an equal education. By suing the state rather than the federal government, the plaintiffs did not need to prove the state’s intent to discriminate (a high legal bar to reach), and instead focused on Connecticut’s obligation to provide all students with equal opportunity. It was a novel legal strategy at the time, and remains so today.

Over the past two decades, Connecticut has slowly but surely funded the creation of integrated magnet schools both within Hartford and in the surrounding suburbs, and paid for Hartford students to attend predominately white schools outside their city’s borders. The magnets—which have proved popular and academically distinguished—come with some rules: No more than 75 percent of a school’s student body can be black or Latino, and, correspondingly, no less than 25 percent can be white or Asian.

But some Hartford leaders have tired of Sheff, which reduces their authority over city schools, and encourages students to look beyond Hartford for public education. A number of Hartford parents have also grown frustrated that their children who can’t land spots in the coveted magnets are falling behind (52 percent of Hartford students are still enrolled in segregated neighborhood schools). Connecticut’s worsening fiscal crisis has also ramped up Sheffresistance from state officials, who have signaled—implicitly and explicitly—their desire to scale back the legal remedy.

So nearly three decades after they first filed suit, the plaintiffs are headed back to court—and longtime observers say they’ve never seen the two parties so far from an agreement. The state wants not only to be freed from court oversight, but also to reduce the number of white students the existing magnet schools must accept, a proposal supporters say will open up more opportunities for marginalized students, and critics say will cripple the goal of integration. The fight is being closely watched by civil rights advocates across the country, who want to know if Hartford and Sheff are a viable new model for school integration—or a dead end.

“I figured this would be a long-haul effort,” says Elizabeth Horton Sheff, an African American community activist, and the lead plaintiff for Sheff since the late 1980s. “But I did not expect this kind of resistance to a constitutional question that’s been asked and answered.”

CONNECTICUT IS AFFLUENT, predominantly white, and largely suburban. Like other New England states, Connecticut largely missed the migration of African Americans from the South, and Latinos from Mexico and the Caribbean. For decades, the state’s relatively few African Americans mostly clustered in Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven—a pattern born out of the state’s racist housing laws, which had barred black residents from owning land, forcing them into ghettos where renting was cheaper.

The Sheff lawsuit began with John Brittain, an African American civil rights attorney who arrived to teach at the University of Connecticut School of Law in 1977. Before then, Brittain had litigated school desegregation cases in Mississippi, and soon after his arrival he began studying the demographics of Connecticut’s schools and neighborhoods, to see if similar legal action might be necessary.

By 1983, Brittain had plans to move forward with a federal school desegregation case. Yet one challenge was a rapidly changing legal landscape following a 1974 U.S. Supreme Court decision, which said that unless it could be shown that a district deliberately sought to discriminate by race, it could not be held responsible for school segregation. Still, Brittain and his team felt they could prove intent.

At the last minute however, they pulled the plug. “Like a NASA shuttle launching, we aborted,” he tells me. One factor motivating the decision, Brittain says, was a sense that the community was not ready, that Northerners viewed desegregation as something only necessary for Southerners reckoning with Jim Crow.

But five years later, in 1988, everything changed. The state’s then-education commissioner, Gerald Tirozzi, published a report concluding that school segregation was a growing trend in Connecticut, with 80 percent of the state’s minority students concentrated within 14 of its 165 school districts. Following the release of the explosive report, the education commissioner emphasized the state’s collective responsibility for the problem and proposed financial incentives for school districts to voluntarily reduce segregation, but stressed that if this proved ineffectual, the state education board should consider a mandatory desegregation plan. It was—and still is—very unusual to have state officials propose strong desegregation initiatives rather than have those initiatives designed by courts.

Leaked to the Hartford Courant, the Tirozzi Report was featured as the paper’s front-page scoop just before Christmas in 1987. It generated massive amounts of community and political attention, and within four months of its release, Brittain and his colleagues drafted their school segregation complaint against the state.

“We strategically solicited just about every social, educational, religious, and community organization to sign on to a pledge to support our case,” Brittain says. “The enthusiasm was overwhelming.” Unlike the ditched federal suit from a few years earlier, this time Brittain felt community members were ready.

Filed in 1989, the suit was tried in the early 1990s. At the time, minority students comprised more than 92 percent of Hartford’s public school enrollment, and of the 21 surrounding suburban towns, only seven had school districts with minority enrollments that exceeded 10 percent.

Sheff was named for Milo Sheff, a black fourth-grade student in Hartford, and his mother, Elizabeth. Sixteen other children were named as plaintiffs—four more black children, six Latino, and six white. It was brought not only for Hartford students stuck in impoverished schools, but also for suburban students “deprived of the opportunity to associate with, and learn from, the minority children” in Hartford, as the complaint read. Sheff lawyers argued that inequality by both race and poverty denied the plaintiffs their constitutional right to an equal education.

Connecticut’s Supreme Court issued its landmark 5–4 ruling in the spring of 1996, holding that “racial and ethnic segregation has a pervasive and invidious impact on schools”—and violated the state’s constitution. (The court ignored the plaintiffs’ poverty argument.) Instead of outlining a remedy, however, the court ordered the governor and the legislature to develop a solution.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the state’s initial response to Sheff was feeble. In 1997, Connecticut’s legislature authorized new investments in early childhood education, a state takeover of Hartford’s schools, and the creation of integrated magnets coupled with an expanded interdistrict school choice program. But the amount of money allocated to the remedies was insufficient, and weak financial incentives led to minimal suburban school participation in interdistrict choice. (The amount of money the state offered receiving districts to take in students was generally not enough to offset the cost of educating them.) The voluntary nature of the Sheff remedy helped it avoid political backlash, but also severely watered down its impact.

Many blamed the court for not ordering its own, stronger remedy. “One of my signature criticisms is that after the courts find liability against an educational authority for violating the Constitution … they remand the remedy phase back to the perpetrators of the wrongdoing,” says Brittain. “I call this asking the fox to guard the hen’s coop.”

But the plaintiffs kept up pressure, and by 2003, the state finally negotiated its first settlement agreement, committing to have 30 percent of Hartford students enrolled in integrated schools by 2007. Though progress felt sluggish at times—not enough suburban schools were reserving seats for Hartford students, magnet construction was slow, and by 2006 still fewer than one in ten Hartford students were enrolled in integrated schools—observers remained optimistic, saying things were at least plugging along in the right direction. Even when leaders may have grumbled behind closed doors about costs or the strategy, publicly they embraced their legal obligations.

But over time, some Hartford leaders began openly criticizing Sheff and questioning its value. As the four-year settlement agreement neared its end in 2007, Hartford’s new school superintendent went before the state legislature to testify that magnets were not achieving their goals and “there is no research to suggest that minority students will do better by sitting next to a white student.”

Elizabeth Horton Sheff, the lead plaintiff, and Eugene Leach, another plaintiff, wrote an op-ed condemning the superintendent’s remarks, noting that he cherry-picked struggling magnets, misrepresented the social science research, and tried to relitigate a matter the Supreme Court had already settled. “The question for Connecticut officials is how, not whether, to achieve desegregation,” they wrote.

Though state officials do not need Hartford’s approval to allocate funds for the Sheff remedy, Connecticut’s legislature was ambivalent about distributing more money without Hartford’s explicit support. Some also waffled on committing more funds, given the slow progress made since 2003. So, faced with a political impasse, the plaintiffs again went to court, demanding better and faster compliance with Sheff.

They were successful, and the new settlement negotiated in 2008 was one both parties agreed was far more likely to facilitate desegregation than its predecessor. “Under the first stipulated agreement, everyone saw their roles differently. … Now we expect there to be better coordination,” said a state Department of Education spokesperson at the time. The agreement called for expanding magnets and interdistrict choice, and for the first time, Connecticut committed to a detailed road map to end racial segregation faced by all Hartford’s children.

By April 2009, two decades after the suit was initially filed, a state official who worked on Sheff remarked that there had been more progress toward integration in the preceding year than in the past decade. The University of Connecticut also released a report in 2009 finding that attending an interdistrict magnet school had positive effects for students in reading and math, and that magnet students reported more positive intergroup relations than non-magnet students in the region. Between 2008 and 2013, the number of Hartford students enrolled in integrated schools jumped from 19 percent to 41 percent.

For a while, the state supported integration efforts not only in Hartford but also in the highly segregated metropolitan areas of Bridgeport and New Haven. The magnet schools were extremely popular everywhere, yet at the same time, state legislators were growing wary about all the money they were spending. By September 2009, lawmakers issued a moratorium on constructing new magnets outside the Hartford region, which they said they were obligated to continue building because of Sheff.

 

EVEN AS STATE LEADERS ostensibly kept up their commitment to Hartford desegregation, some city officials were proposing to move in a different direction by doubling down on efforts to elevate the so-called education reform movement. Since 2006, Hartford’s then-superintendent, Steve Adamowski, had pushed a plan to transform Hartford Public Schools into an all-choice “portfolio” district, a national strategy backed by the Seattle-based Center on Reinventing Public Education. In 2011, Hartford school officials launched a campaign to dissuade families from choosing suburban magnets. One press release said parents should “avoid the temptation to gamble with their children’s future” and enroll their student in a Hartford public school instead. Another district-sponsored TV ad featured a Hartford teacher saying, “Your child’s education is a right and not a game. Why risk their future on a [Sheff] lottery and then a waiting list?” When the plaintiffs criticized the district’s “Choose Hartford” campaign, Adamowski defended it, saying the dragged-out Sheff remedy was harming Hartford schools.

Hartford’s school board has also had an uneasy relationship with Sheff. (It’s not a formal party to the case, yet is generally expected to greenlight plans the plaintiffs and state negotiate.) “Sheff is an abrogation of democratic governance because it transfers [decisions] to confidential negotiations that many, if not most, people don’t know exist, decisions that are the responsibility of state and local government,” says Richard Wareing, a Hartford school board member who recently served a three-year stint as board chair. “There is no transparency. There is no accountability.”

ONE PROBLEM DOGGING Hartford desegregation has been a lack of clear regional coordination. When federal judges ordered school districts to desegregate in the South, many formed new city-countywide school districts, such as Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina, and Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools in Tennessee. Yet Connecticut, a state with 169 small towns, has an entrenched culture of parochialism that is unlikely to change without pressure from a court. While the Hartford metropolitan area has been willing to agree to some regional cooperation for services like hazardous waste collection and firefighting, on most everything else the small towns remain fiercely autonomous.

Accommodating this tradition of “local control” has led to disjointed, kludgy efforts to desegregate the region, especially since the most serious segregation exists among districts, not within them.

Between 1998 and 2016, Bruce Douglas led the Capitol Region Education Council, or CREC, a quasi-public agency that manages the interdistrict program and 17 Sheff magnet schools. When I asked him to reflect on Sheff, he praised Connecticut’s Supreme Court for pushing a voluntary plan, and thereby avoiding the problems of so-called “forced busing.” That said, Douglas, who also believes there needs to be more regional cooperation, admits that the court could have played a larger role pushing that along.

Absent such court mandates, he says, “you would need legislators who have the courage to say, ‘I’m willing to lose my job by voting in favor of regionalizing school districts,’ because there is no doubt they’d be voted out the next cycle.”

Sheff plaintiffs have pushed for more regional coordination at the negotiating table, though they too have stopped short of calling to revamp district lines.

“We’ve never pushed for redrawing school district lines for political reasons, but short of that we’ve pushed for regional solutions ad nauseam, and they’ve never gone anywhere,” says Martha Stone, the lead attorney for the Sheffplaintiffs. “We’ve pushed for regional preschool, for more mandatory participation from the suburban districts [in interdistrict choice], for more carrots for suburban districts that participate at greater rates, for housing mobility certifications that are tied to education options.”

The state, wary of costs and of political blowback, has consistently rejected these proposals, resulting in a series of year-to-year goals, with the prospect of long-term, regional planning feeling at times more elusive than ever.

Andy Fleischmann, a Democratic state legislator from the affluent suburb of West Hartford who chairs the Education Committee, is quick to note that many people have strongly differing views on the lawsuit. “Where you stand, depends on where you sit,” he says. In his community, he admits no one has seriously pushed for redrawing district boundaries. “You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in my town who would say, ‘Oh sure, let’s erase the school district’s boundaries,’” he says. “My town has worked hard to make sure that we’ve maintained great schools and there’s just a huge number of people who wouldn’t want to go ahead and take our great school system, change its boundaries, and potentially throw off what’s been working well for as long as it has. That’s true of folks who are sitting in Wethersfield, or East Hartford, or Windsor and Bloomsfield. That’s just not something that’s been discussed very seriously by many parties.”

Rather than redrawing district lines, Fleischmann supports expanding financial incentives to induce more suburban schools to voluntarily participate in the interdistrict program. When I asked about empowering the education commissioner to mandate greater suburban participation, he quickly dismissed the idea. “That’s been brought up a few times over the years, but that’s never gotten far. Superintendents and school boards of local districts say, ‘Wait a minute, why would that be a good thing from where we sit?’”

Still, calls for greater regional cooperation have grown more pronounced in recent years, in part because the state’s fiscal crisis has ramped up pressure on leaders to identify economic inefficiencies. And longtime observers say there’s a greater recognition now that Hartford Public Schools and CREC must work together to desegregate the region, rather than position themselves as competitors for students, as has been the case at times in the past.

What’s needed now, CREC’s new executive director, Greg Florio, told me, is a comprehensive plan. When asked what’s stopping that from becoming a reality he cited the continual leadership turnover within Hartford and a lack of clear direction from the state.

But it’s not just Sheff’s implementation that’s in flux. The demographic patterns within the state of Connecticut have also been changing over the past 15 years, with suburbs growing more diverse, and in some cases, more poor. Twenty-four percent of school-age children in the towns surrounding Hartford this past school year were black or Hispanic. The population shifts have prompted some to wonder if the Sheff remedy should be revised to reflect these not-so-black-and-white realities.

SHEFF POLITICAL TENSIONS have come to a head over the past two years.

One key factor is Connecticut’s worsening fiscal crisis, which threatens a $5 billion budget deficit. Despite the state’s affluence and Democratic control, lawmakers have been resistant to hiking taxes on its wealthiest residents.

Connecticut’s population is also shrinking. Since 1994, the state’s 35- to 44-year-old demographic has declined by 20 percent, and fewer prime-age adults means fewer school-age children. All of these issues combine to make school funding particularly contentious, especially since Connecticut relies heavily on local property tax to fund public education.

Although Connecticut has poured in funds to construct new magnets, it has not increased the per-pupil spending for those magnet students since 2010—despite increasing per-pupil spending at traditional schools every year. As a result, suburban districts have had to pick up a greater portion of the tab to send students to magnet schools, and some are growing increasingly unhappy about it. “I think the state tried very hard to do right, especially at the beginning, but people got tired,” says Sandra Cruz-Serrano, CREC’s deputy executive director. “The political environment started to change, especially as CREC was building these beautiful new schools while suburban schools from the 1950s struggle to renovate.”

Many leaders, families, and educators have concrete ideas of how to improve Sheff—to make it more user-friendly, more cost-effective, and more equitable—but it’s nearly impossible to make headway on these adjustments without leadership from the state, and many state officials remain cool to the program. “The state has never seen Sheff as a real benefit to them; they’ve only treated it as something that was onerous,” Douglas says.

Not all Hartford leaders believe Sheff can be sufficiently improved. Craig Stallings, the Hartford school board chair, doesn’t think there can be any real tweaks to the remedy, and even if adjustments were possible, the city would still be unfairly deprived of local control.

Stallings, an African American man born and raised in Hartford before Sheffwas litigated, speaks highly of his education, which he says was rigorous and culturally responsive, despite being segregated. “Quality is more paramount than integration,” he tells me. “I’m the anti-Sheff guy around here.” Another vocal Sheff critic is Thirman Milner, an 83-year-old Hartford resident and the city’s first African American mayor, elected in 1981. Milner, who originally supported Sheff, now says it would be better if the lawsuit were abandoned, and the state just gave money to the city to do what it sees fit. “I think the Hartford board would have a much better idea of how to spend the money, and I think we need to get rid of Sheff if we really want to stabilize the schools,” Milner says.

John Brittain laughs hard when I ask him if he thinks the state would distribute the same kinds of resources to Hartford without Sheff mandates. “No, and I believe that’s just a smokescreen for opposition to school integration, just like ‘busing’ was always a smokescreen,” he says. “‘It’s not the bus,’ as we used to say. ‘It’s us.’”

Brittain’s skepticism seems justified: The state funds other segregated regions of the state far less, and is already attempting to shift more Sheff costs onto local suburban districts. In 2015, the state signed a one-year agreement to expand seats in existing magnet schools, but Connecticut officials said they would refuse to open new magnets in the future, and refused to increase magnet per-pupil funding. Even today, the existing magnet schools are operating only at 93 percent capacity, in part because the state has capped the number of seats it will fund.

Julie Goldstein, the principal of Breakthrough, an award-winning magnet run by Hartford Public Schools, says the last few years of budget cuts have been very painful. “One of the misconceptions of magnet schools is that because we have nice buildings we must be oozing with funds,” she tells me as we sit together in her office. Breakthrough recently had to shorten its school day and eliminate two certified positions, including its assistant principal. Continually reducing their resources, supplies, and field trips, Goldstein says, makes recruiting students much harder.

Desegregation efforts came under even more fire this year, as the Hartford Courant ran a series of articles highlighting problems with the school-choice lottery and frustrated Hartford students who struggle to land spots in magnet schools. The fact that some magnets have to leave seats empty in cases where they aren’t able to attract enough white or Asian children has added insult to injury to those who already feel like they are being left behind. “One lesson we’ve learned from all this is that stopping midway, and not meeting the full public demand, creates serious political blowback,” says Phil Tegeler, the executive director of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, and a former Sheff attorney.

In response to Hartford residents’ palpable frustration, this year the state announced plans to revamp the Sheff legal mandates, saying the current 75 percent cap on black or Latino students is ultimately harmful. The state proposed changing the ratio to 80 to 20.

Many I spoke with, however, say they felt this state action amounted to Sheffsabotage, even if it came from a well-intentioned place. Plus, they say, it’s a slippery slope to allow the state to change desegregation standards when it’s politically convenient to do so.

“It was an embarrassing idea to drop the percentage down; the 75 percent standard is bad enough, and 80 percent is even worse,” says Bruce Douglas, CREC’s former executive director. “That’s not desegregation—and this came from a Democratic administration!”

Sheff critics correctly note that there is no real social science justification behind the 75-to-25 standard, but practically speaking, ensuring there are enough white students in a school matters for integration. And for better or for worse, magnet operators have to attract white parents.

“Our schools are in the suburbs, and one of our charges is to bring white children into those schools,” says Florio, CREC’s executive director. “There’s a tipping point, and once it gets below the 25 percent mark, it becomes a much greater struggle to make it a racially diverse school.”

“I’m not saying the state was consciously trying to make Sheff fail, but anyone who would come up with this [80-to-20 ratio] would have to realize this would make the magnet schools fail,” adds Douglas.

A representative from the Connecticut Department of Education declined to comment for this story, citing pending litigation.

THIS PAST JUNE, FOLLOWING a three-day hearing, a Connecticut Superior Court judge blocked the state’s efforts to change the Sheff desegregation standards to 80 to 20. But with the latest Sheff settlement agreement now expired, plaintiffs are expected to head back to court, and the debate will surely be revived again soon.

The Sheff Movement, a coalition of parents, teachers, students, and local residents in Greater Hartford, know the politics of desegregation remain daunting, but they are committed and insist the law is on their side. They have been working to organize and educate community members around integration, but raising money for their efforts has been difficult.

As time passes, the degree to which parents and community members can even speak to the history of the Sheff lawsuit is also quickly fading. When perusing the various magnet school websites, one can find little to no mention of the consequential civil rights lawsuit, including why the Sheff ruling has made these schools a reality. The magnets operated by Hartford Public Schools and CREC aren’t even referred to as “Sheff schools,” but rather as “Hartford magnets” and “CREC magnets.” Some magnet school leaders may also prefer de-emphasizing their school’s connection to Sheff, finding it can be helpful when convincing skeptical white parents who otherwise might be deterred by the desegregation element.

“I understand that schools may not want to be racially identifiable, but it’s important to understand the history,” says Robert Cotto Jr., a pro-SheffHartford school board member. “If you’re talking about branding, and this is a school that is created as a result of maybe the most important civil rights case in Connecticut, why isn’t that being demonstrated? If people have no idea, then that right there undermines the case in the long run. Maybe it’s intentional.”

Elizabeth Horton Sheff doesn’t care if the magnets are named for the lawsuit so long as the desegregation initiative moves forward. But she does think there is a deliberate effort to obfuscate the history, so people “won’t have to worry about things like constitutional rights” and can frame the conversation solely around school choice.

And indeed, though integration advocates think the basic framework of Sheffcan still work—involving a voluntary, choice-based model—there is a genuine concern about what would happen if the state abandoned Sheff in favor of a more free-market-based choice system.

In 2014, Cotto published “Choice Watch,” a report that found Connecticut charters and technical schools to be highly racially segregated, despite both having statutory requirements to reduce racial and ethnic isolation. Connecticut Sheff magnet schools were the only choice-based option Cotto found that significantly reduced segregation. The state’s limited resources and enforcement with regard to charter and technical schools, Cotto says, clearly suggest how the state would treat magnets if Sheff were to end.

IN 2015, FOR THE FIRST time since Sheff v. O’Neill, lawyers in a different state filed a state-level school desegregation lawsuit. Twin Cities attorneys filed a case against the state of Minnesota, saying that the state’s segregated schools violate Minnesota’s constitutional obligation to provide all students with an adequate education. The suit will be heard by the state Supreme Court later this fall, but regardless of what happens, desegregation advocates are saying we should expect to see more affirmative, state-level litigation in the years to come.

In 2016, President Obama’s Education Secretary John King traveled to Hartford and proclaimed that the region’s desegregation work could serve as a model for the country. He touted the state’s hefty investments in magnet schools that attract suburban kids, and praised Hartford’s voluntary busing and interdistrict school choice program.

With conservatives now controlling the federal government, liberal organizations have been focusing much more heavily on how school choice policies, specifically private school vouchers, can exacerbate segregation. But Hartford’s magnet and interdistrict program demonstrates how choice can be used (sometimes awkwardly and imperfectly) to promote school desegregation. Sheff proves that with clear desegregationist goals, ample resources, and dedicated enforcement, a choice-based system need not lack high-quality, integrated options.

The challenge, it turns out, isn’t finding a system that works. Sheff is working: 48 percent of Hartford students are already in integrated schools, a massive improvement without parallel almost anyplace else in the nation. Instead, the challenge has been securing the long-term political commitment to sustain that system—and the financial support to ensure it runs well, which is often the same thing. Integration is possible, but no one would deny it’s been a long, hard road, with more yet to go.

Still, the original activists who stood up to segregated schools decades ago never thought otherwise. They just believed it would be worth it in the end. “I knew this lawsuit would never directly benefit my son,” Elizabeth Horton Sheff told me this past summer. “I didn’t do it for my child. I do it for our children.”

 

 

Obama’s Mixed Record on School Integration

Originally published in The American Prospect on August 31, 2015.
——
As Congress debates competing revisions of the No Child Left Behind Act over the next several weeks, lawmakers are unlikely to spend much time looking at the growing problem of segregated schools. Despite strong academic and civic benefits associated with integrated schooling, and a unanimous Supreme Court decision which ruled that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal”—American public schools have resegregated quickly by race and class over the past two-and-a-half decades.

Many advocates had hoped to see the Obama administration take steps to address rising school segregation, but so far its record has not been great. While the Department of Education has paid lip service to the need to promote integrated schools, and has included modest diversity incentives within a handful of federal grants, it refused to use larger education initiatives like Race to the Top to encourage states and districts to prioritize school diversity. In some cases, the department actually pushed policies that made segregation worse.

The Obama administration came to power at an interesting time for the integration movement. With the help of Reagan-appointed judges and justices, court decisions in the 1990s absolved many local districts from their legal obligations to desegregate schools. Between 1988 and 2006, the number of black students attending majority-white schools dropped by 16 percentage points. Between 2000 and 2008, the number of schools where at least 75 percent of students qualified for free or reduced-meals—a proxy for poverty—jumped from 12 percent to 17 percent.

But many districts were also interested in racial and economic diversity, even if they weren’t legally required to promote it. And so various voluntary integration experiments began cropping up around the country. These new efforts seemed promising but quickly faced legal challenge. In a pivotal 2007 decision, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, the Supreme Court rejected voluntarily desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville, on the basis that their particular student assignment strategies relied too explicitly on race. But the Court did clarify that, under certain conditions, districts can use race-conscious measures to promote diversity. Justice Kennedy even endorsed specific strategies to do so, including magnet schools and interdistrict plans.

The years immediately following the Parents Involved decision sparked confusion, largely thanks to the Bush administration. While the majority of Supreme Court justices said districts could consider race in school assignments, the Bush administration posted a federal guidance that suggested only race-neutral means of pursuing integration would be legal.

In 2009, shortly after President Obama took office, a group of educators, policy advocates, and civil rights leaders came together under the banner of the National Coalition on School Diversity (NCSD) to try and push the new administration to take action.

“Our very first goal was to get the Department of Education to take down the guidance from the Bush administration, which told schools they could not promote racial and economic diversity,” said Phil Tegeler, executive director of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council and NCSD coalition member. Their efforts were ultimately successful. By December 2011, the department posted a new guidance, which affirmed the Supreme Court’s decision and listed various ways school districts could pursue voluntary integration.

Other NCSD efforts met less success. One of their primary objectives has been to get the Obama administration to prioritize school integration within their competitive federal grant programs. While Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has repeatedly said that he supports school diversity and wants to reduce racial isolation, his department has not, for the most part, translated such support into its competitive programs.

Despite NCSD’s urging, the department declined to use its largest grant, the $4 billion Race to the Top initiative, to promote racial diversity. Duncan argued that including incentives for voluntary integration would have been too difficult to get through Congress. He also said that when it comes to successful integration efforts, we can’t “force these kinds of things.”

In 2013, Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute,responded strongly to Duncan’s arguments, pointing out that “no education secretary has been as deft as Arne Duncan in creating incentives—both carrots and sticks—to get states to follow his favored policies that are technically voluntary.” Duncan used incentives to get states to adopt Common Core standards, to promote after-school programs and early childhood education, and even within Race to the Top, incentives were used to encourage states to adopt teacher evaluation systems tied to student test scores. But in the case of school integration, Rothstein noted, suddenly Duncan sings a different tune.

“Only in this area, apparently, does Secretary Duncan believe that progress must be entirely voluntary, unforced by carrots and sticks,” Rothstein wrote. There have been plenty of opportunities to incentivize racial integration, such as rewarding states that prohibit all-white suburbs from excluding poor people through zoning ordinances, or withholding No Child Left Behind waivers from states that allow landlords to discriminate against families using federal housing vouchers. “Adoption of such ‘voluntary’ policies could make a contribution to narrowing the academic achievement gap that is so much a focus of Secretary Duncan’s rhetoric,” Rothstein said.

Despite a frustrating first term, desegregation advocates have seen some progress in the last couple years. The Department of Education recently began to include diversity as a funding priority in several of its smaller grant programs like the preschool development grants and its charter school grants; it also announced that magnet-type integration approaches are eligible for the school improvement grants (SIG) program.

While modest, these changes have led to some important new integration experiments. At the end of 2014, New York’s education commissioner, John King, helped launch a socioeconomic integration pilot program to increase student achievement using newly available federal SIG funds. King has since moved to the Department of Education, where he now serves as Arne Duncan’s senior advisor.

Other advocates have capitalized on the Department of Education’s 2011 guidance. David Tipson, executive director of New York Appleseed, says it was an absolute game-changer for his work in New York City. “Getting that correct interpretation, with some real practical guidance for school districts, I can’t even emphasize how important that was,” Tipson said. “There was a very deliberate effort to misconstrue the 2007 [Supreme Court] decision and put fear into many school officials across the country. Everything we’ve been able to do to promote school integration has come in the wake of getting that new federal guidance in place.” New York Appleseed, along with community stakeholders, sought to design a zoning plan that would help keep a school located within a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood integrated. Officials resisted at first, but they eventually relented after advocates presented them with the federal guidance. Thus at the beginning of the 2013-2014 school year, Brooklyn’s P.S. 133 became the first school in Bloomberg’s administration to foster a specific mix of students based on socioeconomic status and English proficiency. At the school’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, the city’s school chancellor said he believed their innovative admissions model could be replicated elsewhere.

While advocates of desegregation are happy to see the administration beginning to prioritize diversity within its grant programs, some feel these gestures are too little, too late.

In a letter sent to Secretary Duncan last July, NCSD noted that while the Department of Education has included preferences for diversity within some grant programs, in practice, the department has “consistently underemphasized” these incentives. Many grants still make no mention of diversity at all, and in cases where they do, officials tend to weigh other competitive priorities far more heavily, rendering the modest diversity incentives ineffective. For example, in one grant, applicants could earn an additional five points if their school was diverse, but applicants could earn twice as many bonus points if their school would serve a high-poverty student population

The only federal education initiative to significantly emphasize integration is the Magnet School Assistance Program (MSAP), a program first launched in 1976. However MSAP has limited impact today due to the small amount of federal funding it receives. Even though charters are far more likely than magnets to exacerbate segregation, the department gave MSAP $91.6 million in 2014, compared to the $248.2 million it gave the Charter Schools Program.

Advocates have not given up. Next month in D.C., the NCSD will be hosting a national two-day conference, bringing together scholars, educators, parents, students, and policymakers to continue, “building the movement for diversity, equity, and inclusion.” John King will be speaking on a panel there about the progress they’ve made, and further challenges they face on the federal level. NCSD hopes that King’s new role at the Department of Education will motivate the government to take integration efforts more seriously. The department’s press secretary, Dorie Nolt, told The American Prospect that “we’ve taken meaningful steps, and we want to do more.”

Yet this administration has fewer than 18 months left. And the next secretary of education could quite easily end even the modest progress that NCSD has fought for. “Promoting voluntary school integration is an area where the department has a lot of leeway to act on its own, in terms of trying to encourage state and local governments to prioritize diversity,” said Tegeler. “But that also means the next department has a lot of leeway to not act.”