For the past few
days, I've been looking at the question
of why decades of attempts to desegregate American schools did not lead to true
desegregation and why these efforts, instead, undermined the educational
quality of schools. I've been presenting
the histories of school districts that have been seen as "success
stories," beginning with Little Rock, and then going on to Charlotte and
Milwaukee. Today's case is St. Louis,
Missouri.
St.
Louis, Missouri
St. Louis was one of the few
metropolitan areas where the effort to desegregate schools involved both the
cities and the suburbs. It is an important case to consider because it is, along
with Charlotte, one of the few that have been regularly singled out as one of
the “success stories” of desegregation history. It began in the early 1970s,
when a group of black students were reassigned from their neighborhood schools
to less desirable locations on the grounds that their schools were becoming
over crowded. The families of these students began a grassroots movement and
initiated a lawsuit.[i]
On December 24, 1975, the case
came before Federal District Court Judge James Meredith, who found that St.
Louis schools were segregated by race. Judge Meredith issued a consent judgment
and decree, directing the school district to take action aimed at
desegregation. Sensitive to the fact that St. Louis was already losing white
citizens to the suburbs, the judge did not order the reassignment of students
or busing. Instead, the schools were to try to integrate their faculties by
setting minimums for increases in minority teachers, and to use magnet schools
to integrate student bodies.
Judge Meredith’s decision was
only an interim measure, because the case against the St. Louis School Board
was still set to go to trial. The plaintiffs enjoyed the support of the federal
government, after the Justice Department intervened on their behalf in 1977. At
the trial in 1979, though, Judge Meredith found in favor of the school board.
He concluded that the board had tried to create legally integrated schools by
allowing all students to attend neighborhood institutions, and that segregation
had occurred as a consequence of demographic shifts in housing.
Dissatisfied, the plaintiffs
appealed. In March 1980, the Eighth Circuit Court reversed the 1979 ruling.
Even though the court agreed that student assignments to schools had been
racially neutral since the 1950s, the court found that the school board had
failed to correct the results of legally segregated schooling incurred during
the first half of the twentieth century. The school board, according to the
court, had an obligation to create a school system without racially
identifiable schools.
The case went back to Judge
Meredith, who now approved an $18 million plan for desegregation within the
district of St. Louis. A system without racially identifiable schools would be
difficult to create solely within St. Louis, though, because only 23 percent of
the district’s students were white, and they were mainly concentrated in a
single section. Court-appointed desegregation expert Gary Orfield wrote a
report, pointing out that the suburbs would have to be involved in any attempt
at meaningful desegregation.
In the early 1980s, then, the court began
moving toward an inter-district remedy. A St. Louis - St. Louis County
inter-district transfer plan took effect in 1983, with sixteen St. Louis County
districts participating. The suburban districts had agreed to become part of
this metropolitan solution out of fear that a federal judge would create a
single district, encompassing the entire region. The transporting of students
from city to suburb lasted for the rest of the century.
This finally came to an end in
1999, when the plaintiffs to the lawsuit, the state of Missouri, the Justice
Department, the sixteen districts, and the St. Louis Board of Education finally
came to an agreement to end the case. At that time, about 12,000 city students
were attending schools in the county, and about 1,400 suburban students were
traveling each day to the city. With the end of the case, inter-district
transfers were to continue under a voluntary desegregation plan run by the
Voluntary Interdistrict Choice Corporation (VICC), which allowed participating
black students to move out of schools in the city to suburban schools.[ii]
Many have celebrated St. Louis
and its suburbs as a great success in school desegregation. Speaking before the
House of Representatives in 1999, Representative William Clay announced:
I want to call the attention of
my colleagues to the remarkable story of desegregation in St. Louis. St. Louis
illustrates the gains that can be made for children even in these times. In St.
Louis, a 1983 settlement of a desegregation case brought by the NAACP resulted
in the largest voluntary metropolitan school desegregation program in the
nation, with 13,000 black students from St. Louis attending school in 16
suburban districts. The program was very successful in increasing the
graduation and college‑going rates of participating youngsters as was a magnet
program in city schools.[iii]
An examination of the results of
over thirty years of busing raises questions about the basis for this celebration.
Economist Joy Kiviat, in 2000, observed that eight out of ten students in the
city of St. Louis were black. Most were attending schools that contained
virtually no whites. Per pupil spending came to $7,564 ($10,450 in 2014
dollars), but the dropout rate was 62% and students scored at the bottom on
standardized tests. One-third of the public school teachers in St. Louis chose
to send their own children to private schools, and private school attendance
was above that of the national average, especially among relatively high income
families.[iv]
Data from the Missouri
Department of Secondary and Elementary Education supports Kiviat’s bleak view
of St. Louis schools. According to this information, 82.3% of the students in
St. Louis City public schools were black in 2013. Whites, who had been a little
under 18% in 2000, had gone down to just under 12% of the student population in
2013. On the 2013 Missouri Assessment Program tests, 61.6% of Missouri white
seventh graders and 45.5% of St. Louis City white seventh graders were
proficient or advanced in English language arts, compared to 32.7% of Missouri
black seventh graders and just 22.0% of black seventh graders in St. Louis
City.
In mathematics, 64.6% of white
seventh graders statewide and 32.1% of white students in St. Louis were
proficient or higher, but only 33.7% of black seventh graders throughout the
state and 21.9% of black seventh graders in St. Louis City were at this level.[v] The
small number of white students in the city showed poorer outcomes than whites
elsewhere in the state, and the black students in this minority concentration
district showed worse results than both black and white students throughout
Missouri.
The suburban districts that have
received students from St. Louis varied in their racial compositions. The
students of Webster Groves, adjoining St. Louis, were between 12 and 22% black
in 1982.[vi] By
2013, Webster Groves was still racially identifiable as a majority white
district, with whites constituting 74% of students and blacks 19% of the
student population. Black students in Webster Groves did better than their St.
Louis counter parts, since 43.2% of black seventh graders were proficient or
advanced in English language arts in 2013and 56.3% of were proficient or better
in mathematics.
Nevertheless, there was still a
huge racial achievement gap in the comparatively high-performing suburban
district of Webster Groves, since 81.2% of same-grade whites were at least
proficient in English language arts and 83.2% were at this level in mathematics.
The Rockwood district, farthest from St. Louis, with a black student population
under 4% in 1982, had become 12% black and 84% white by 2004 and 10% black, 80%
white, and 6% Asian by 2013. In this still majority white district, the race
gap was also great.
Only 34.6% of its black seventh
graders in the Rockwood district were at least proficient in English language
arts in 2013, compared to 76.6% of whites and 89.7% of Asians. In mathematics,
only 30.0% of black seventh graders were at least proficient, while 79.6% of
whites and 95.3% of Asians were proficient or better, according to the Missouri
Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
The best that one can say about
the supposed St. Louis success story was that it was not a complete disaster.
Since the whites in the suburbs were never forced to send their own children
into the inner city, and busing from the city to the suburbs never inundated
the latter, white families did not move en masse to private schools or leave
the metropolitan area. The minority of black students who did go to school away
from their own neighborhoods may have benefited from advantageous socioeconomic
settings, although the cursory test results just cited suggest that this
requires more study.
Desegregation in St. Louis can
be judged a success only in comparison to the utter fiascos of many other
locations, though. The years of inter-district busing and billions of dollars
in transportation and administrative costs did not accomplish any of the stated
goals of the program, though. These years did not do away with racially
identifiable schools or racially identifiable school districts. Neither did
this Herculean effort eliminate the enormous racial achievement gap, in either
the city or the suburbs.
[i] Where not otherwise noted,
much of the discussion of the St. Louis case is drawn from Amy Stuart Wells and
Robert L. Crain, Stepping Over the Color Line: African American Students in
White Suburban Schools (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Wells and
Crain provide an excellent case study of St. Louis, although their perspective
and conclusions differ from those presented above While I admire their work, I would take issue
with their ad hominem characterizations of the white suburbanites who disagreed
with inter-district busing as simply historically uninformed “resistors,”
contrasted with the “visionaries” who supported the program.
[ii]“Historical Background,
Voluntary Interdistrict Choice Corporation, accessed October 17, 2013, http://www.choicecorp.org/HistBack.htm.
[iii] Hon. William Clay in the
House of Representatives, July 16, 1999.
[iv] Joy Kiviat, “Could School
Choice Save St. Louis?” School Reform News, December 1. 2000, accessed
December 4, 2004, http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=10832.
[v] Missouri Assessment Program
(MAP), 2010-2013. St Louis City Disaggregate Data by Race/Ethnicity, accessed
October 28, 2013, http://dese.mo.gov/schooldata/four/115115/mapdnone.html.
[vi] Wells and Crain, Stepping Over the Color Line, see the
map on p. 254.
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