For the past couple of days,
I've been looking at the question of why many of today's schools remain
racially and ethnically identifiable. The dominant view among academics and
activists is that the United States was on its way to creating racially
desegregated schools and achieving greater educational equality during the late
1960s and early 1970s. According to this view, aggressive governmental efforts
at the redistribution of students and resources did not achieve their goals
only because policy makers lost the will to push these efforts.
I don't think the actual history
of school desegregation supports that dominant interpretation. Instead, I think
school desegregation largely failed precisely because it was a coercive,
top-down attempt at social engineering.
I began looking at this issue by tracing the history of school
desegregation in two highly influential districts,
Little Rock, Arkansas, and Charlotte-Mecklenburg,
North Carolina. Both of these have been widely presented as "success
stories," although I think the facts belie such a presentation. Today, I'll
look at another district, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
When
the Supreme Court handed down the Brown decision, citizens of Wisconsin
generally regarded the Court’s action favorably, but thought that it concerned
other places. Wisconsin’s laws, like those of several other northern states and
in contrast to the laws of the south, prohibited segregated schooling. Several
of Milwaukee’s schools were about half black and half white, and the city’s
free transfer system made it possible for black children to enroll in
predominantly white schools.[ii]
During
the 1950s, a boom in manufacturing drew black Americans from the South to
Milwaukee at a rapid pace. Milwaukee’s black population grew much faster than
that of many other northern cities, including Chicago and Detroit. The recent
migrants flowed into the center of the city, creating rapidly expanding black
neighborhoods with residents of much more limited educational backgrounds than
those of earlier black and white citizens.
In order to address the needs of
newly arrived children with limited academic skills, Milwaukee schools in the
late 1950s developed programs of compensatory education. These programs tended
to separate the southern-origin black students from others precisely because
compensatory education was intended to address the special requirements of the
migrants. School segregation, then, came from diverse educational needs, as
well as from segregated housing and various forms of discrimination.
As
Milwaukee’s black population grew within the city center, so did the number of
public schools with mainly black citizens. While there had been only seven
predominantly black schools in 1950, there were an estimated twenty-three by
1964.[iii] In
the decade after Brown as the demand grew for schools that were truly
integrated, and not simply open to enrollment without racial discrimination,
many black citizens began to see the increasing number of mainly black schools
as evidence of an educational ghetto.
When inner-city schools became
over-crowded as a consequence of the rapidly increasing black population, the
Milwaukee school board bused students from the crowded schools to other
less-crowded schools, but it maintained a practice known as “intact busing.”
This meant that bused black students formed separate classrooms within white
schools, a phenomenon that, in retrospect, ironically mirrored later decades’
white magnet classes within black schools.
Opponents
of racially identifiable schools joined together in the early 1960s under the
leadership of civil rights attorney and NAACP president Lloyd Barbee. Barbee
and his followers demanded that the school district place desegregation at the
top of its agenda, integrate the intact busing students, and develop a comprehensive
desegregation plan. When the school board delayed, the NAACP and its associates
turned to protests and legal action.
During
the mid-1960s, activists joined together to form the Milwaukee United School
Integration Committee (MUSIC), demanding integration by marching and boycotting
segregated black schools. Lloyd Barbee, the chairman of MUSIC and by now
elected a state legislator, also acted as attorney in the desegregation case of
Amos v. Board, filed in 1965 and supported in part by funds from the NAACP
Legal Defense Fund. Long delayed by school board maneuvering, the case finally
went to trial in September 197
While
the case made its way through the court, there were efforts to resolve the
situation by legislative means. Democratic Assemblyman Dennis J. Conta
proposed, in the spring of 1975, that the state legislature merge suburban and
city schools into a single school district. The mainly white suburban districts
of Whitefish Bay and Shorewood, just north of the city, would be joined
together with Milwaukee. At the high school level, this would make possible
transfers among Milwaukee’s Lincoln High School (94 percent black), Milwaukee’s
Riverside (61 percent black), Shorewood High (98 percent white), and Whitefish
Bay High (99 percent white).
Assemblyman Conta proposed to
use financial incentives to get the white schools to take minority students,
and to cap transfer students at 20 percent of each student body in order to
avoid white flight.[iv]
This recognition of the need to reconcile the divergent interests and
motivations of different demographic groups held out some possibility of
successful, if limited, desegregation. Conta’s attempt to move desegregation
from the federal court to the legislature received insufficient support from
his fellow legislators, though, and this attempt at self-imposed metropolitan
desegregation failed.
In
January 1976, Federal Judge John Reynolds ruled that Milwaukee schools were
segregated and that the segregation had been intentionally established by the
school board. The judge decreed that black enrollments needed to be driven down
between 25 to 45 percent in one third of Milwaukee’s schools during the 1975-76
school year and to go down by a similar proportion in the following two years. There
was indeed substantial basis to the declaration that the schools in Milwaukee
were racially segregated. In 158 schools, over 100 were made up of more than 90
percent of a single race.[v]
Judge Reynolds’ demand was
mathematically implausible, though. The proportion of black students in the
system had been increasing steadily, from 21 percent of students in the
district when the suit began, to 34 percent by the time of the decision.
Projections indicated that black students would make up 50 percent of those in
the district by 1980.[vi] The judge does not seem to have given serious
consideration to the problem of making black enrollments at specific schools go
down rapidly when black enrollments overall were rising at such a rate, or to
the possibility that his own decision might speed up the shrinking of white
enrollments.
Following
a second desegregation trial in 1978, the Milwaukee school board began to make
serious efforts at desegregation. The school system as a whole did reach the
predicted half-white, half-black composition in the early 1980s. This was
largely due to the disappearance of whites from the city’s public school
system, though, so it did not bode well for future plans to distribute black
and white students.
Although
Assemblyman Conta’s attempt at metropolitan transfers failed, the state of
Wisconsin did enact legislation to promote voluntary urban-suburban
desegregation throughout the state. Adopted in 1976, Wisconsin Chapter 220 law
provided extra funding to white suburban schools that would accept black
students from majority black districts. This program has met with some
criticism because it has been extremely expensive and, while making it possible
for some individual black students to have a wider range of educational
choices, it has tended to funnel money into already well-heeled schools.
For Milwaukee, with the largest
black population in the state, the program also did not bring about any kind of
desegregation. Even with Milwaukee’s Chapter 220 inter-district transfers, only
17 percent of Milwaukee’s public school students were white in the 2004 school
year. Black students, at sixty percent, made up the majority. Hispanics, at 18
percent, were slightly more numerous than whites.
Schools
are generally judged to be desegregated if relevant racial or ethnic groups are
within plus or minus fifteen percent of their representation as a whole in the
district. For Milwaukee, this means that when Judge Reynolds made his 1976
decision, any desegregated school would have been a majority white school, but
at least one in five of its students would have been black. By 2004, though, a
Milwaukee school could be considered “desegregated” if only three percent of
its students were white. These are the paradoxical mathematics of racial
redistribution.
As
in other districts with large minority populations around the country,
"diversity" came to mean more possibilities of contact between black
students and the growing Hispanic population, since most of the whites had
settled in the suburban fringe. In 2012-2013, Milwaukee public school students
were 55.4% black, 24.0% Hispanic, and 13.9% white. Another 5.5% of students
were Asian. A number of schools had almost no white students.
Carver Academy Elementary
School, for example, was 91.4% black in 2012-2013. Congress Elementary was 94.4%
black. Highmount Elementary was 90.1% black. Lincoln Middle School was 65.4%
black and 25.3% Hispanic. The small Southeastern Middle School had only black
students. Wedgewood Middle School was 91.9% black. James Madison High School
was 93.0% black. Vincent High was 91.1% black.[vii]
By
2013, the official literature on the Chapter 220 inter-district transfer
described the program as aimed at giving minority students in the North,
Central, and South Regions of Milwaukee the opportunity "to attend schools
in suburban areas that are predominantly non-minority (white)." This would benefit only a limited number of
individual minority students and was not intended to break down district
segregation. The MPS literature warned potential applicants that "seats
are limited in the Chapter 220 Program and no student is guaranteed a
seat."[viii]
The
desirability of getting out of central Milwaukee and to the suburbs was clear.
A planning document prepared by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Employment &Training Institute in 2009 reported that "[i]n the
2008-2009 school year, 92% of MPS students attended a school where over half
of the children were poor [bold in
original] (as measured by eligibility for free lunch, or family income
below 130% of poverty). Yet, only 4% of suburban and outer ring public
school students in the four-county area were in school buildings where over
half of the children were poor."[ix]
Academic
results reflected the concentration of minority students and socioeconomic
disadvantage within Milwaukee. The 2009 NAEP results showed that Milwaukee
students scored substantially below others in the state, in other large cities,
and across the nation. These results also showed that racial achievement gaps
remained. Only 28% of black Milwaukee 8th graders scored at or above the basic
level in mathematics, compared to 61% of whites and 43% of Hispanics. In
reading, 41% of Milwaukee black 8th graders scored at or above the basic level,
compared to 78% of whites and 62% of Hispanics.
Within each racial/ethnic group
Milwaukee 8th graders were less likely to be at or above the basic level than
their peers in the rest of the state, in big cities throughout the country, or
in national public schools.[x]
Going to school in Milwaukee, rather than outside of it, greatly increased the
probability that schoolmates would be low achievers. The more minority students
in the classroom, the lower the general level of achievement, and the general
level of achievement would be particularly low in a minority concentration
classroom inside Milwaukee.
Individual minority families,
then, had a genuine interest in getting to schools out in the suburbs. The
Chapter 220 transfers, therefore, could provide good options in the educational
marketplace for them. By the same token, though, families in the suburbs had a
genuine interest in minimizing the flow of students out of the central city. As
a consequence, the voluntary transfers could make greater educational
opportunities to some, but they could not erase racial and socioeconomic inequalities.
[i] Much of the account of the
Wisconsin case is drawn from Jack Dougherty, More Than One Struggle: The
Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee (Chapel Hill, NC: University
of North Carolina Press, 2004).
[ii]Ibid., 36-39.
[iii]Ibid., 149.
[iv] Paul Delaney, “Wisconsin
Ponders a Plan for State to Legislate Desegregation of Four Schools in
Milwaukee and Suburbs,” New York Times, April 13, 1975, 22.
[v] Dougherty, More Than One Struggle, 153.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii]Wisconsin Information System
for Education, Data Dashboard, accessed October 24, 2013, http://wisedash.dpi.wi.gov/Dashboard/portalHome.jsp.
[viii]Milwaukee Public Schools.
Suburban School Opportunities: Chapter 220 Program for Milwaukee Students for
Fall 2013. (Milwaukee: Office of Family Services, February 2013), 1.
[ix] University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee Employment & Training Institute. Socio-Economic Analysis of Issues Facing Milwaukee Public School
Students and Their Families.(Milwaukee: Employment & Training
Institute: 2013), 21.
[x]MPS NAEP Data, Mathematics;
MPS NAEP Data, Reading, the Milwaukee Public Schools website, accessed October
25, 2013, http://mpsportal.milwaukee.k12.wi.us/portal/server.pt/comm/assessment/415/assessment/38462.
Very creative ppost
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