Why Didn't School Desegregation Work? The Case of Chicago

For the past few days, I've been looking at why attempts to desegregate American schools and equalize opportunities have not been successful.  Tracing the histories of individual school districts, I've argued that the evidence does not support the view that governmental efforts to redistribute educational advantages would work if only we would return to the coercive policies of the 1970s. Instead, if we look at what actually happened in school districts around the nation, mandates to redistribute students by race actually produced more intense segregation and the isolation of minority students.

Chicago, Illinois

Like so many other desegregation cases, the roots of Chicago’s lie in the era of the Civil Rights Movement. Several Chicago parents filed suit in 1961, claiming that the city’s schools were segregated by race. Two years later, attempting to avoid court action, the school board responded by appointing a panel of experts to study the situation, although the board did not act on the panel’s recommendations.

The situation turned more serious in 1965, when the U.S. Commission of Education froze federal funds to the city because of the continuing racial identification of the schools. Political connections temporarily rescued the city, though, because Mayor Richard J. Daley contacted President Lyndon Johnson, and Johnson rescinded the Commission’s cutoff. For the following decade, Chicago largely avoided student redistribution.

Chicago School Superintendent James F. Redmond made some efforts at desegregation, proposing the development of magnet schools and the use of busing in 1967. Still, these types of programs made little headway for the next decade. A new era of pressure from above began in March 1976, when the Illinois State Board of Education told the Chicago Board of Education that the city was not complying with the state’s desegregation rules, and that the state would shut off all funds.

The city board responded to the state’s complaint by initiating its “Access to Excellence” strategy. Chicago school officials pitched “Access to Excellence” as a way of relieving overcrowding in the primarily black schools in its central area. Overcrowding was indeed a problem in many of the central city schools. Clearly, though, much of the motivation for the strategy was the retention of state funds and avoidance of a federal lawsuit.

This 1977 plan aimed at the voluntary transfer of 6,573 black students in 15 overly crowded schools to 51 schools in Chicago’s nearly all-white sections. Some would be transported by school bus and some would be given tokens to ride public transportation to their new schools. By the beginning of the 1977 school year, though, only 1,000 black students had chosen to participate in the program, reportedly because of threats of white violence.^[i]

The U.S. Supreme Court added to the complications of desegregation in Chicago, and elsewhere in the nation. The Court ruled at the beginning of 1977 that the affluent, all-white Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights could enact zoning restrictions that would prevent the building of racially integrated housing for people with moderate and low incomes. To be unconstitutional, the zoning would have had to be clearly racially discriminatory in intent, and not just consequence.^[ii]

This had two important implications for desegregation. First, it raised the requirements for demonstrating discrimination, in both schools and neighborhoods. Second, it meant that high-income neighborhoods could legally keep out lower income people, making it more difficult to integrate schools by integrating neighborhoods. Exclusive neighborhoods conflicted with goals for achieving inclusive schools.

The voluntary busing may have been voluntary on the part of those riding the school buses and public transport out of central city locations. It was far from voluntary from the perspective of those in the suburbs who were receiving the transfers. The controversy turned violent on September 11, 1977, when whites from Chicago’s Southwest Side area held a candlelight vigil in protest, and an angry black counter-protestor drove a car into the crowd.^[iii] White mothers picketed the schools that were receiving central city students, and as many as five hundred white students staged a walkout.^[iv]

Just two years after the voluntary desegregation program began in Chicago, a report to the State Superintendent of Education concluded that the $35 million program had had virtually no impact on desegregating the city’s schools. According to the report, 90.3 percent of black students in Chicago would have to be re-assigned to white schools in order to accomplish desegregation.^[v]Allowing choice would not achieve the desired goals, even if only the families of minority students could choose.

By October 1979, based on a two-year investigation by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare’s Office of Civil Rights, the federal government accused Chicago of maintaining segregated schools. The federal government demanded that local school officials come up with a plan for redistributing the system’s 475,000 students, who were at that time 60% black, 22% white, 15% Hispanic, and 2% Asian. The Board of Education rejected the HEW conditions, laying itself open to the lawsuit it had tried to avoid.^[vi]

For the next year, Chicago and the federal government negotiated. Finally, on September 24, 1980, the Chicago Board of Education, the U.S. Justice Department, and U.S. District Judge Milton I. Shadur came to an agreement on citywide desegregation. The agreement established a broad framework for action, but no specific quotas or numbers of students at particular schools. Acknowledging that demographics dictated that many students would remain in segregated schools, the agreement established that students in majority black or Hispanic schools would be given compensatory education programs.

While majority black or Hispanic schools were acceptable, though, majority white schools were another matter. According to Drew S. Days III, Assistant U.S. Attorney for Civil Rights, “the board would have a very heavy burden to justify majority white schools.”^[vii] From the point of view of numbers, the reluctance to allow majority white schools made sense. Whites, after all, had gone down to under 19% of the school population by the beginning of the 1980 school year.

As white students dwindled in numbers, though, increasingly the options open to white families were to place their children in minority-dominated, often low-income schools, or escape from the Chicago system. Given the reluctance of white parents to place their children in schools in which their own racial group was in the minority, this essentially guaranteed that white flight, a fact of life in Chicago for decades, would take on an added speed and volume.

The Board of Education passed a new desegregation measure in the spring of 1981, delaying busing until 1983, and limiting white enrollment to 70% of any school. Under this measure, schools with too many white students would have to gradually cut down on their white enrollments. Those who did not succeed in getting rid of white students would have special programs imposed on them, such as receiving forced transfers.^[viii]

Although white avoidance of majority black schools was certainly not the only reason for white movement out of Chicago, the unwillingness of white families to send their children into schools in which the children would be surrounded by economically disadvantaged minority group members helped to eliminate the remaining white neighborhoods in the city. By the time of the 1980 census, Chicago was “a highly segregated city in which an expanding black ghetto is displacing whites at its leading edge and leaving shattered, abandoned areas in its wake.”^[ix]

The public received a glimpse of a small part of the on-going cost of desegregation in February 1981. At that time, Chicago Board of Education special counsel for school desegregation Robert Howard billed the school board $87,732 for about five months of legal work on the agreement with the federal government.^[x] This was not, of course, the final bill, and it in fact represented only a miniscule portion of the total expense of this process.

Represented by Mr. Howard, in 1983, the school board asked Judge Shadur to force the federal government to provide funds for the desegregation agreement the board had made with the government in 1980. Over a two-year period, the Chicago school system had paid $93.6 million in its own money to implement the agreement, and it expected to pay another $67 million in 1983-84. Since the school board was facing a deficit of $200 million, the members did not know where they would come up with the money.^[xi]

Chicago had difficulty getting money out of a federal government that had imposed an expensive line of action on the city. After Judge Shadur ordered Washington, D.C. to pay for part of Chicago’s school desegregation efforts, the U.S. Department of Education responded that it did not have the funds and the Justice Department appealed the order. Illinois Democratic Representative Sidney Yates tried to step in by introducing a bill in Congress to give Chicago $20 million.

After the bill passed, though, President Ronald Reagan vetoed it, saying that Judge Shadur had violated the principle of separation of the powers of the judiciary and legislature by freezing other forms of federal spending in Chicago until Washington supplied money for the Board of Education.^[xii] After the 7^th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld Judge Shadur’s order, in September 1983, Chicago did get its $20 million, but this was less than a fourth of what the Board of Education was by then actually spending on desegregation efforts.^[xiii]

Eventually, even the federal judiciary came to recognize that it was not possible to redistribute white students a district does not have. U.S. District Judge Charles P. Kocoras declared at the beginning of 2003 that the agreement between the federal government and the district of the 1980s was no longer workable. He ordered the district to come up with a new desegregation plan, which was approved by the court in the spring of 2004. The only integration possible in Chicago schools in 2004 involved mixing black and Hispanic students. By this time the city’s public school students were 51% black, 36% Hispanic, 9% white, and 3% Asian.^[xiv]

After decades of expensive and contentious efforts to shift students around, the futility of desegregation had become evident. Judge Kocoras finally lifted Chicago’s consent decree in September 2009. Chicago Public school officials had urged this step, “…saying it would free up money spent on transportation and other services needed to comply with the decree. Further, they noted that, with just 9 percent white enrollment, more integration was impossible.”^[xv]

At the hearing on the decree, “more than a dozen Chicago public school students testified … that a 28-year old desegregation decree has failed them,” reported the Chicago Sun-Times. “They begged for more diversity, more and better books, and better teachers in those schools CPS said it has been unable to desegregate – all of which the 1980 decree was supposed to address.”^[xvi] The pleas for more and better books and perhaps also better teachers were understandable. But the school system obviously had no way of furnishing more diversity.

Following the end of the consent decree, the Hispanic proportion continued to increase, becoming a plurality of Chicago students (44.1%) by the 2011-2012 school year. Because of this growth in Hispanic representation, black students were no longer the majority, making up 41.6% of Chicago students in 2011-2012. Whites, however, were still a small minority, at only 8.8% of students, and were concentrated in the system’s magnet and selective schools. Nearly nine out of ten Chicago public school students were classified as low-income by 2012.^[xvii]

The federal government forced Chicago to spend millions of dollars on programs that had no discernible positive impact. Although the white proportion of the student population probably would have declined even without desegregation, active efforts to make white students into a minority in any schools they would attend virtually guaranteed their departure. Most remarkable of all, the mostly black and Hispanic leaders of the school district still had to negotiate “desegregation plans” with the federal government until Judge Kocoras agreed to end oversight on the urging of the mostly minority administrators of Chicago’s schools.

Desegregation efforts did not accomplish any narrowing of racial differences in school performance. Journalist Steve Bogira, in June 2013, cited a University of Chicago study that found that between 1990 and 2009 (while Chicago was still under its consent decree) “…racial gaps in achievement steadily increased. White students made more progress than Latino students; African-American students fell further behind all other groups. White, Asian, and Latino students improved modestly in reading, but there were ‘virtually no improvements’ among African-American students, at the elementary or high school levels.”^[xviii]

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^[i]Paul Delaney, “Chicago to Attempt to Integrate Schools After Success in Other Cities,” New York Times, September 4, 1977, A6.

^[ii] Lesley Oeslner, “Court Backs Zoning that in Effect Bars Low Income Blacks,” New York Times, January 12, 1977, A1.

^[iii] “3 Chicago Youths Injured at an Anti-Busing Rally,” New York Times, September 12, 1977, A18.

^[iv] “500 Chicago Students Walk Out Over Busing,” New York Times, September 14, 1977, A16.

^[v] Nathaniel Sheppard Jr., “Effort to Integrate Chicago Schools Has Had Little Effect, Study Finds,” New York Times, March 6, 1979, A14.

^[vi] “Chicago Board Rejects School Desegregation Under U.S. Conditions,” New York Times, October 18, 1979, B24.

^[vii] Casey Banas, “City Must Involve Most Schools in Integration Plan,” Chicago Tribune, September 28, 1980, sec. 1, p. 2.

^[viii] Casey Banas, “School Board Oks New Bias Plan,” Chicago Tribune, April 30, 1981, sec. 1, p.1.

^[ix] John McCarron and StanelyZiemba, “Still Highly Segregated, Data Show,” Chicago Tribune, April 7, 1981,sec. 1, p. 1.

^[x] “School Bill $87,732 for Bias Pact,” Chicago Tribune, February 11, 1981, sec. 5., p.1.

^[xi] Jean Latz Griffin, “Schools Sue US for Integration Aid,” Chicago Tribune, June 2, 1983, sec. 1, p. 1.

^[xii] John Schmeltzer and John McCarron, “City School Aid Vetoed,” Chicago Tribune, August 14, 1983, sec. 1, p. 1+.

^[xiii] Casey Banas, “379 Schools Vie for U.S. Funds,” Chicago Tribune, December 29, 1983, sec. 2, p. 1.

^[xiv] Mary Ann Zehr, “Close to Home,” Education Week 23, no, 6 (10 March 2004): 30-34.

[xv]Chicago Catalyst, “Federal Judge Ends Chicago School Desegregation Decree,” accessed October 21, 2013, http://www.catalyst-chicago.org/notebook/2009/09/24/federal-judge-ends-chicago-schools-desegregation-decree.

[xvi] Rosalind Rossi, “Kids Beg for Better Schools – Students Say the Desegregation Decree Failed Them,” Chicago Sun-Times, January 23, 2009, 14.

[xvii]“Chicago Public Schools:  Stats and Facts,” Website of the Chicago Public School System, accessed October 21, 2013, http://www.cps.edu/About_CPS/At-a-glance/Pages/Stats_and_facts.aspx.

[xviii] Steve Bogira, “Trying to Make Separate Equal,” Chicago Reader, June 2013, accessed October 22, 2013, http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/segregated-schools-desegregation-city-suburbs-history-solutions/Content?oid=9992386.

Why Didn't School Desegregation Work? The Case of Baton Rouge

For the past few days, I've been posting case studies of school districts, examining the question of why school desegregation did not create educational equality across racial and ethnic groups or lead to schools that did not concentrate racial and ethnic minorities. If we look at the evidence, I argue, the answer is that the attempt to redistribute students by race assumed that educational quality was something that policy makers could redistribute at will. But the value of an education depends heavily on the clientele of schools. Those who have economic and social resources can create high-performing schools. Those who have these resources also have the capacity to avoid low-performing schools. Unfortunately, social as well as financial resources in the U.S. are associated with race and ethnicity. This means that attempts to redistribute students by race and ethnicity means not only redistributing  advantages, but disadvantages as well. 

Previously, I presented the cases of the supposed "success stories" of Little Rock, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Milwaukee, and St. Louis.  When one looks at what happened in these districts, it becomes clear that these were not successes at all. Now, I'll give cases that are much more common, districts in which school desegregation was obviously disastrous.

Baton Rouge, Louisiana^[i]

By the time it ended in 2003, the case of Davis et al. v. East Baton Rouge Parish School Board was said to have been the longest running desegregation suit in the nation. It began in 1956, when black parents sued the school board for running a dual school system. During the 1960s, the school board attempted to answer the suit by adopting a “freedom of choice” approach to integrating schools, allowing black and white students to attend schools without regard to race. This resulted in little change in the racial identifications of schools, though, and educational institutions in Louisiana’s capital remained distinctly black and white.

Despite the long existence of the East Baton Rouge (EBR) suit, active, court-ordered desegregation in the district only began in 1981. In that year, Federal District Judge John Parker decided that the school board had been running a dual school system for the previous twenty years. Judge Parker therefore ordered the closing of fifteen schools, and developed pairs or clusters of previously black and white schools that were to exchange students through busing in order to achieve racial balances similar to those of the district-wide demographics.

The response to the 1981 decision was immediate. White families said that they would leave the public schools if it were put into effect. The president of the parent-teacher organization at a majority white school, whose daughter was to be transferred to a majority black school in a lower-income neighborhood, declared, “She will not do that. Private schools are starting up every day.”^[ii]  Events showed that these were not idle threats.

In the first year of court-ordered busing alone, the East Baton Rouge public school system lost 7,000 white students. Private school waiting lists grew long and new schools started up almost daily. The percentage of white students in the East Baton Rouge school district who attended non-public schools had been going down from 1965 until 1980, from just under a fourth of white students to well under 20% just before the judge’s decree. From the early 1980s onward, though, this proportion went steadily upward, so that nearly half of the white students in the district were in non-public schools by 2000.

In addition to moving from public to private schools, Baton Rouge area white families also either moved out of the East Baton Rouge school district, or, if they were new arrivals, they settled outside of the school district. Settlement in the adjoining Livingston and Ascension Parishes^[iii] had been growing slowly before the 1981 decision, but the proportion of the area’s white population in these nearby areas began to shoot up rapidly just after the decision.

About one-fourth of the region’s white public school students were enrolled outside of the East Baton Rouge district in 1965. By the end of the 1970s, still only about one-third of these white public school students were in adjoining districts. In the two decades after Judge Parker’s 1981 ruling though, the proportion of white public school students in the Capital City metropolitan area that were enrolled in the Ascension or Livingston districts grew to about two-thirds.

A longtime school official in one of the districts outside of Baton Rouge observed that the growth of the district’s population was “almost exclusively driven by white flight and the initial location of new hires for industry in East Baton Rouge who will not live where they work.”^[iv]  Readers should note that this was not a matter of whites leaving some blighted central city for the green lawns of the suburbs. Baton Rouge itself consists almost entirely of suburbs, so that this was movement from the suburbs to the suburbs.

Baton Rouge’s loss of white students briefly slowed in the late 1980s. A school system central office administrator with whom we spoke attributed this to a brief experiment with “controlled choice.”^[v] This was explicitly intended to restore the confidence of those who had lost faith in the local public school system. It relied on magnet programs and special curricula. The experiment broke down, though, because of shortages in funding and difficulties in maintaining support from school officials.

By 1996, East Baton Rouge had changed from a majority white to a majority black district. Two-thirds of the public school students in the district were black, although the proportion had been roughly constant at about 40% from 1965 until just before the 1981 court order. Largely to stabilize this chaotic, rapidly changing system, the school board and plaintiffs to the Davis case, including the NAACP, reached a court-approved consent decree in 1996.

The consent decree largely ended busing, and sought, instead, to pump large infusions of funds into the school system, including generous “equity accounts” for historically black schools. The $2.2 billion dollar program hit a speed bump when it went before taxpayers, though, since voters resoundingly defeated a tax and bond proposal to raise money for continued desegregation efforts. With much of the middle class now out of the local public schools, members of the middle class had little interest in taxing themselves for a system many had fled.

Racial differences in school performance fed desires by whites to leave the East Baton Rouge public school system. On the math portion of the 1999 Louisiana Graduation Exit Examination, for example, white students in EBR’s public schools answered an average of 72% of the questions correctly. Black EBR students answered an average of less than 55% of these questions correctly.

Among schools, the very few that ranked in the state’s top categories as “School of Academic Excellence” or “School of Academic Distinction” on the 1999 Louisiana Educational Assessment Program tended to be precisely the schools where the remaining white students were still clustered. The one school in the top category was about 80% white and the four schools in the next highest category averaged about 55% white. At the other end, the forty-six schools in the next to lowest “Academically Below Average” category averaged 87% black, and the three “Academically Unacceptable” schools averaged 94% black.

As whites continued to leave the desegregating district, they left the less advantaged black students behind. Deputy School Superintendent Clayton Wilcox observed that, “the school system is getting blacker.”^[vi] By the 2002-2003 school year, 73% of the public school students in the district were black, and the proportion was a good deal higher in the elementary grades.^[vii]Several years later, in 2009-2010, 82% of the district’s students were black. A little under 12% were white and the rest were Asian or Hispanic. Most of the white students left in East Baton Rouge in 2010 were in non-public schools (59%).^[viii]               

In the mid-2000s, East Baton Rouge schools, like schools in Orleans and some other Louisiana districts, began to turn in desperation to a form of official segregation by school performance within the district. In 2003, alarmed by the low level of school achievement in several districts, the Louisiana legislature passed an act to create the Recovery School District (RSD), a special statewide district that would take over consistently failing schools, as measured by student performance scores.  Although the RSD was most active in Orleans Parish following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the statewide district also took over the lowest performing schools in East Baton Rouge, either as schools directly run by the RSD or as charter schools under RSD authority By fall 2013, eight Baton Rouge schools were listed under RSD direction.^[ix]

Thus, Baton Rouge had essentially segregated its worst schools from the rest of the district. These schools were also invariably minority concentration schools. For example, the Baton Rouge RSD’s Capitol High School, which received a grade of “F” on the 2011-2012 school report card, had only African American students.^[x]

Crestworth Learning Academy, also a Baton Rouge RSD middle school, had only African American and only low-income students. It received an “F” on the 2010-2011 school performance score, the most recently available on the school’s profile sheet.^[xi] Dalton Elementary School was 100% African American, 100% low-income. It also received a score of “F” on the 2010-2011 school performance score.^[xii]

The RSD may have been a reasonable educational strategy. Desegregation had become impossible. The worst schools were so bad that desperate measures were justified. However the RSD also created a separate internal district of entirely black, entirely poor students within a district of almost entirely black, almost entirely poor students.

`Middle class families with children, both black and white, had already moved out of the core areas of Baton Rouge to the suburbs by the time the Recovery School District came into existence. Concern about the decline of East Baton Rouge schools led to repeated efforts by suburban neighborhoods within the EBR district to break away and form their own systems. The majority black town of Baker became the first to secede in 1999, but Baker contained mostly minority students and saw no improvement in its school system.

Consistent with the argument that being in schools that concentrate advantages pays off, predominantly white breakaway districts had much more success. The Zachary Community School District came into existence in 2003, after residents convinced the state legislature to carve out a new district. By 2011, the Zachary district was Louisiana’s top performing district, as measured by the District Performance Score.^[xiii] When the 2013 school results came out in October 2013, the Times Picayune newspaper reported that “The Zachary school system north of Baton Rouge maintained its status as the top-rated school system.”^[xiv]

In 2005, the citizens of the Central area voted to incorporate as the City of Central, apparently in order to create a separate school system, which was established in 2007. Central also showed a record of achievement much higher than that of East Baton Rouge, and by 2012 the Central school district was the fourth top ranked system in the state. ^[xv]

Like Zachary, Central was among the 12 percent of Louisiana school systems that received an “A” in the 2013 school results.^[xvi] Residents in the southeast part of EBR mounted an effort to follow the examples of Zachary and Central. Frustrated in their attempts to create a separate school system within Baton Rouge, in 2013 the southeast Baton Rouge organization Local Schools for Local Children began calling for a petition to create a new city.^[xvii]

Economists at Louisiana State University estimated that the loss of this middle class, mainly white area, would take $53 million away from the general fund of the rest of the parish. They predicted that the income loss would lead to an increase in taxes in the left over portions. Even with tax increases, the secession of Central would likely result in cuts to police and fire services.^[xviii]

The Times-Picayune newspaper gave some insight into the motivations of those calling for the new city of St. George in southeast Baton Rouge. Describing one of the core group of organizers behind the St. George effort, the newspaper wrote:

Norman Browning wants out. He wants out of a school district where students bring guns to school, where cell-phone videos capture fistfights, where two teenagers recently knocked out a bus drivers teeth, where a middle schooler set a substitute teacher on fire. He wants out of a school district that is attempting – and, he believes, failing – to cater to 42,000 children, the majority of whom are impoverished and struggling in school.^[xix]

Critics of this newest effort to split off from East Baton Rouge to get away from the district’s school system accused the new city advocates of disingenuously denying the role of race in their desire to leave, and of taking their economic and social resources and leaving low-income, minority students behind. But even if one attributes all of the problems plaguing East Baton Rouge’s district to a history of racial oppression, no parent would want to make penance for the sins of ancestors with the sacrifice of his or her own children to a well-documented climate of violence and failure.

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^[i] Events in the Baton Rouge case are drawn primarily from books and articles that I co-authored with Stephen J. Caldas, See Bankston and Caldas, A Troubled Dream.; and, Stephen J. Caldas and Carl L. Bankston III, “Baton Rouge, Desegregation, and White Flight,” Research in the Schools 8.2 (2001): 21-32.

^[ii] Quoted in Bankston and Caldas, A Troubled Dream, 86.

^[iii] In Louisiana, the parish (county) is in most cases identical with the school district.

^[iv]Quoted in Bankston and Caldas, A Troubled Dream, 96.

^[v] See Ibid., 92.

^[vi]Quoted in Ibid.

^[vii] Louisiana Department of Education, Annual Financial and Statistical Report, 2002-2003. (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana Department of Education, 2004).

[viii] Louisiana Department of Education, Annual Financial and Statistical Report, 2009-2010. (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana Department of Education, 2011).

[ix]Louisiana Recovery School District. “Schools in the East Baton Rouge Parish,” accessed October 26, 2013, http://www.rsdla.net/maps/#parish=East Baton Rouge.

[x]Louisiana Department of Education, “2011-2012 School Report Cards, Capitol High School, accessed October 26, 2013, http://www.louisianabelieves.com/data/reportcards/2012/.

[xi]Recovery School District. “Crestworth Learning Academy, Profile,” accessed October 26, 2013, http://www.rsdla.net/schools/pdf/crestworth-la.pdf.

[xii]Recovery School District. “Dalton Elementary, Profile,” accessed October 26, 2013, http://www.rsdla.net/schools/pdf/dalton-es.pdf.

[xiii]Zachary Community School District, “Accountability,”accessed October 12, 2013, http://www.zacharyschools.org/?page_id=104.

[xiv] Danielle Drellinger. “Schools Excel Before Tests Get Tougher,” Times-Picayune, October  26, 2013, 1A.

[xv]Rebekah Allen. “New City Sought for School District,” The Advocate, June 24, 2013, 1A.

[xvi]Drellinger, “Schools Excel,” 1A.

[xvii]Allen, “New City Sought”, 1A.

[xviii] Diana Samuels, “Report Finds Incorporation of New City Could Hurt East Baton Rouge Finances,” Times-Picayune, December 8, 2013, A13.

[xix] Diana Samuels. “In Unincorporated Baton Rouge, Residents Chart Path to New City,” Times-Picayune, November 27, 2013, A1.

Why Didn't School Desegregation Work? The Case of St. Louis

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.        

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^[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.