After well over a half-century of efforts to desegregate
American schools, many schools and even school districts continue to be
concentrations of racial and ethnic minority students. Why is this? In academic
and activist circles, the common answer is the “failure of will” explanation.
This holds that we would have created schools that were not identifiable by
race or ethnicity if only the courts and the federal government had continued
to pursue the aggressive policies of coercive student redistribution of the
late 1960s and early 1970s. I think, though, that if we look at what actually
happened in school districts over the decades, it becomes obvious that top-down
programs of forcing social change ran counter to deeply ingrained social
patterns that did not involve only prejudice, but also rational self-interest.
Yesterday,
I started looking at what happened in desegregating districts with a brief
history of one of the most celebrated cases, Little Rock. Today, I’ll
continue this by examining another historically important district,
Charlotte-Mecklenburg in North Carolina, which, like Little Rock, is often
presented as one of the success stories of school desegregation.
Charlotte
offers an important and interesting case for any survey of desegregating school
districts. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system was historically significant
because it began the national move to judicially mandated busing as a means of
achieving desegregation. The district is even more worthy of a brief
examination, though, because Charlotte acquired the reputation as “The City
that Made It Work,” and it was held up as a model for efforts at student
redistribution throughout the nation.[i]
If, in
fact, Charlotte was as successful as often suggested, we should look carefully
at it and see why. Even if this were a case with a relatively positive outcome,
though, it would be wise to be skeptical of claims that these outcomes could be
repeated in other locations. Good public policy does not assume that exceptions
can become the general rule.
The
Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system dates back to 1959, when the city of
Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, which contains it, voted to merge their two
school systems. The system made some attempts to desegregate following Brown,
and some black students did attend predominantly white schools in the region in
the late 1950s and early 1960s. The schools were still largely segregated by
race by the mid-1960s, though.
In 1965, Darius and Vera Swann sued the school
district because their son, James, was not allowed to attend the school nearest
his home, which was an all-white school. The Swanns, then, only wanted to send
their child to a school in their own neighborhood. Ironically, their legal case
would help to send hundreds of thousands of students away from their own
neighborhood schools.
The
Swann case went before Federal District Judge James B. McMillan. In April 1969,
Judge McMillan issued his decision, arguing that neighborhood schools were
discriminatory because black residents lived mainly in a single section of the
city. Judge McMillan maintained that “as a group Negro students score quite low
on achievement tests (the most objective method now in use for measuring
educational achievement)”[ii] as
a consequence of attending all-black schools. The judge ordered the district to
employ all means of desegregating, including busing.
The
school board appealed Judge McMillan’s ruling. The case reached the Supreme
Court, and two years later the high court upheld the decision. The result was
an explosion of similar desegregation plans. The 1971 school year opened with
new plans for assigning students by race in over 100 school districts.[iii]
Judge
McMillan, the plaintiffs, and the school board came to agreement on a plan of
action in 1974. The judge declared himself satisfied and removed the school
from direct supervision, although the school board would have to continue to
follow the 1974 plan. One of the key features of Charlotte’s program was the
pairing of elementary schools. A school in a majority white neighborhood would
be paired with a school in a majority black neighborhood and enough students
would be transported from each to create racial balances.
The
desired racial mixture could frequently not be created with just two schools,
so students were drawn from other locations, known as “satellites.” Most of the
students who came from the satellites were black. This placed greater
inconvenience on black students than on white, but most involved parties were
convinced that sending white children into mostly low-income, black neighborhoods,
would cause whites to leave the public schools.[iv]
From the beginning, then, those in the Charlotte-
Mecklenburg district carrying out school desegregation did recognize the
possibility of white flight, and they made serious efforts to avoid it. The pairing
strategy was not used at the junior high or high school levels. The higher
grades had larger enrollments, so they drew on larger numbers of satellites.
Again, these mainly came from black neighborhoods.
There
was one important exception to the placement of satellites in black
neighborhoods, though. White students in the well-to-do neighborhood of
Eastover were sent into the formerly black West Charlotte. To make this
palatable to whites, school authorities had to put new educational programs in
West Charlotte. The district also re-drew the boundaries of West Charlotte so
that these would include more middle class black families and exclude many of
the poor black families previously within the area.
Unlike
many of the other cases in this chapter, Charlotte did not lose its white
students. The changes in the district’s overall make-up during the years of
aggressive desegregation were comparatively small. In the 1974-75 school year,
the system was 34% black. By 2001-2002, it was 42% black. Charlotte continued
to retain its racial diversity during the first decade of the twenty-first
century.
According
to the district’s statistics, in the 2012-2013 school year blacks still made up
42% of the overall population. Whites had indeed declined as a proportion, from
just under 50% of the school population to 32%, while Hispanic and Asian
representation had grown to 18% and 5%, respectively. However, changes in
student make-up were gradual, and small enough to be attributed almost entirely
to demographic shifts having nothing to do with the schools.
At first
glance, then, Charlotte does look like the rare success story in school
desegregation. It managed to put students of different races together in its
schools. It did not cause whites to flee the system. There was no downward
spiral in the quality of education in the district. A closer look, though,
suggests that Charlotte does bear out the economic model of schooling that we
described in the previous chapter.
White
families did not leave the system, at least in part, because the district
substituted segregated classrooms for segregated schools. Desegregation expert
Roslyn Mickelson observed that “The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system
instituted widespread curricular tracking at the secondary level at about the
same time that it began to comply with the Supreme Court’s Swann orders to
desegregate. Since the mid-1970s, the top tracks—those with the best teachers
and most challenging curricula and pedagogy—have been overwhelmingly white
while the lowest tracks have remained disproportionately black.”[v]
At the
end of the 1970s, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) denied
the school district a major grant on the grounds of excessive within-school
segregation. By the early 1980s, Charlotte’s schools appeared to have student
bodies that were highly mixed in race. Beneath this appearance, though, a
1981-82 survey of tracking in English classes showed that “in this district
acclaimed for its desegregation successes, relatively few black students experienced
a genuinely desegregated education, even in its showcase high school.”[vi]
Even
with the segregation inside of schools, the institutions themselves tended to
move slowly toward more racial separation. In a study of Charlotte schools from
1991 to 1993, the Charlotte League of Women voters concluded, “the system
appears to be continuing to drift toward blacker and whiter schools. Across the
three year period, with few exceptions, the whitest schools got whiter and the
blackest schools got blacker, whether they were elementary, middle, or high
schools.”[vii]
At the
beginning of the 1990s, the district largely replaced busing with a magnet
school program as a strategy for achieving desegregation. Magnet school
enrollments would be kept at 40% black and 60% white. This meant that whites,
with (as we will see) much higher achievement levels than blacks, were limited
in their access to magnet schools. White parents therefore sued the district,
calling for unitary status and an end to race-conscious enrollment policies.
Nearly
thirty years after the Charlotte-Mecklenburg system had made desegregation
history, Judge Robert Potter ruled in September 1999 that the system had
achieved desegregation, and he decreed that race could no longer be considered
in school assignments.[viii]
With the end of judicial control, “the previous twenty year drift toward
re-segregation accelerated markedly.”[ix]
Students began to return to schools in their own neighborhoods, which were
still largely black or white.
In 2009,
looking back on the decade since the end of court-ordered desegregation, The Charlotte Observer noted that “in
the ensuing decade, suburban schools became more numerous, more crowded, and
generally remained higher performing. Last year about two-thirds of CMS’s white
students attended majority white schools in the suburbs. Center-city schools,
including many magnets, have seen white and middle-class students dwindle.
About two-thirds of the black and Hispanic students who make up CMS’s majority
attended schools where less than 25 percent of students are white.”[x]
On the
North Carolina Writing Assessment test for 2004, among CMS seventh graders,
62.3% of whites were in the top two levels, compared to 27.5% of black students.
On the tenth grade portion of this test, 73.6% of whites and 41.8% of blacks
were in the top two levels. On the North Carolina high school comprehensive
test for reading in 2004, 82.2% of whites and 43.9% of blacks were in the top
two levels. On the math test, the two top levels contained 84.8% of whites and
45.9% of blacks.[xi]
The
black-white achievement gap had been given by Judge McMillan as his reason for
ordering desegregation by any possible means. The judge's mandate did not
eliminate this gap. It continued to exist after desegregation had been in effect
for nearly a third of a century.
Relatively speaking, then, Charlotte-Mecklenburg did indeed
have one of the most successful desegregation histories. The redistribution of
students did not destroy the system. But neither did it end inequality in
educational outcomes. For a time, at
least, it created the illusion of a desegregated district by replacing
segregated schools with segregated classrooms.
The only
way families of children with relatively strong academic performance were
willing to place their children into schools filled with children of relatively
weak academic performance was through in-school racially segregated classrooms.
Yet even then, like a centralized economic authority suppressing market forces,
the authorities would have to use continual coercion to suppress individual
choices. As soon as the judiciary removed itself from the school system, the
schools began to re-segregate almost immediately and the re-segregation by
neighborhoods continued over the years that followed.
[i] On the “lavish praise”
heaped on the Charlotte school system after desegregation, see Stephen Samuel
Smith, Boom For Whom? Education, Desegregation, and Development in Charlotte
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004).
[ii] Quoted in Ibid., 60.
[iii]Ibid., 62.
[iv]Ibid., 63.
[v] Roslyn Arlin Mickelson,
“White Privilege in a Desegregating School System: The Charlotte-Mecklenburg
Schools Thirty Years After Swann,” in The End of Desegregation?eds.
Stephen J. Caldas and Carl L. Bankston III (New York: Nova Science
Publications, 2003) 97-119.
[vi] Smith, Boom for Whom?, 83.
[vii]Quoted in Alison Moranta,
“Desegregation at Risk,” in Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of
Brown v. Board of Education, eds. Gary Orfield, Susan E. Eaton, and the
Harvard Project on School Desegregation (New York: New Press, 1996), 195.
[viii] Sue Anne Presley,
“Charlotte Schools are Scrambling,” Washington Post, November 8, 1999,
A3.
[ix] Smith, Boom for Whom?, 6.
[x] Ann Doss Helms, “Schools
Ruling Led to a Decade of Change – End of Race-Based Assignment Launched
Ripples Whose Merit is Still Debated, and Fresh Calls for Vision,” The Charlotte Observer, September 10,
2009, B1.
[xi] Test results are taken from
the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools website, accessed November 8, 2013, http://www.cms.k12.nc.us/departments/instrAccountability/schoolPerformance.asp.
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