Segregation 2.0 is Making Public Schools Great Again
Although more diverse, public education in America is as segregated today as it was in the late 1960s
I first entered “the bond business” in 1983. My job was selling securities backed by single-family mortgages. In the beginning, I spent hours trying to understand what was considered a complex financial product. Luckily, most of my prospective clients knew even less about these new securities than I did.
Occasionally, I visited the home of a more experienced colleague who offered to help me work on my sales pitch. During one such visit, my recently divorced coworker’s young son was on hand. After being introduced, I asked the child where he went to school. He said he attended Miss Selma’s School, which I knew to be all-white and private. In what I admit was an attempt to push my colleague’s buttons, I asked why the child didn’t attend a nearby public school.
“Go ahead. Tell Mr. Marlon why you go to Miss Selma’s School,” my coworker told his son. Instead of a pre-rehearsed response, the youngster surprised his father—and me—with the truth. The child, who couldn’t have been more than eight or nine, said, “The Blacks. I go to Miss Selma’s School because of the Blacks.”
I sat in amazement as the youngster explained that Black children at the public school he previously attended “were mean,” so his mom and dad decided the best solution was a school with no Black students. The highlight of this out-of-the-mouth-of-babes moment of truth-telling was my coworker’s attempt to convince me that race had nothing to do with the decision to place his kid in an all-white school. Meanwhile, the poor child looked from one adult to the other, wondering what all the fuss was about.
For the sake of the confused child sitting across from me, I decided not to argue with his father over his prejudiced viewpoint. When I left his home a few minutes after his son’s revelation, it was evident the embarrassment of being outed by his child as a racist was punishment enough.
The white academy movement
Since I began school in the South in the 1960s, I’m old enough to remember racial segregation. The “colored-only schools” I attended left little need for institutions like the one my former colleague chose for his son.
Although the Supreme Court’s ruling on Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled segregation in public schools unconstitutional, has been settled law since the 1950s, racial segregation continued in Arkansas public schools for decades. As a result, my brothers and I didn’t attend school with white children until the early 1970s.
“Today, even in schools where middle-class Black residents make up the majority, the resources follow white students. That fosters more inequality, said Karyn Lacy, a University of Michigan assistant sociology professor. The resegregation of U.S. schools often doesn’t produce all-Black schools as the declining contact with whites has been replaced by growing contact with Latinos, an issue that has received little research.” ~Axios
During the wave of educational desegregation in the mid-sixties and early seventies, institutions like Miss Selma’s School popped up all over the South. Unlike parochial schools, these secular “segregation academies” catered to white families who wanted to avoid integrated public schools.
The Central Arkansas Library System’s Encyclopedia of Arkansas, a comprehensive online project that collects information on the state’s history, describes the impetus for the racially driven private education movement:
Beginning in the mid-1960s and continuing into the early 1970s, there was a rapid expansion in the establishment of new, non-parochial private schools across the South. This phenomenon, often called the “segregation academy” or “white academy” movement, was commonly viewed as a means for white parents to avoid having their children attend increasingly integrated public schools. Within Arkansas, the establishment of new private schools was concentrated in two areas—the Delta region and Pulaski County Starting in the mid-1960s, both of these areas, which had the highest concentration of African Americans in the state, truly began to integrate their schools.
Miss Selma’s School closed in 2021 after 65 years in business when a teaching assistant was arrested and charged with the production of child pornography.
Back to the future
Historically, racial segregation is associated with the Jim Crow laws of the South. But while much attention is focused on the trend toward erasing the “uncomfortable” aspects of America’s history and culture through book banning, less emphasis has been placed on the gradual resegregation of America’s K-12 education system, which has returned to levels not seen since the late 1960s.
According to a 2021 article by Russell Contreras of Axios, “School segregation between Black and white students has returned to 1968 levels, even as the nation grows more diverse.” But unlike the sixties, the current phenomenon of resegregation falls along racial, ethnic, and economic lines.
According to an article published last year by NPR News, a 2022 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that over a third of students, or about 18.5 million, attended schools where at least 75% of students were of a single race or ethnicity. A driving force behind this trend is what is known as school district secession:
One cause for the lack of significant improvement, according to the GAO, is a practice known as district secession, where schools break away from an existing district – often citing a need for more local control – and form their own new district. The result, the report finds, is that segregation deepens…
…Six of the 36 district secessions identified in the report happened in Memphis, Tenn., which experienced a historic district merger several years ago. Memphis City Schools, which served a majority non-white student body, dissolved in 2011 due to financial instability. It then merged with the neighboring district, Shelby County Schools, which served a wealthier, majority-white population.
Joris Ray was a Memphis City Schools administrator at the time of the merger. He recalls that residents of Shelby County were not satisfied with the new consolidated district. They successfully splintered off into six separate districts.
As a result, the GAO report says, racial and socioeconomic segregation has grown in and around Memphis. All of the newly formed districts are whiter and wealthier than the one they left, which is now called Memphis-Shelby County Schools.
In 1968, just under 80% of Black students went to predominately non-white schools. Desegregation peaked in 1988, with almost 40% of the country’s Black students attending majority-white schools. That percentage declined to only 19% by 2018, according to a report from The Civil Rights Project at UCLA.
A prime example of public school segregation 2.0 is North Carolina’s Topsail High School. (Full disclosure: one of my children is a recent graduate of Topsail High, and another currently attends the school.) Despite its location in a county that is almost 14% Black, according to U.S. News & World Report, the school, which has more than 1,500 students, is less than 3% Black.
For parents who seek to avoid racial diversity, the need for all-white academies like Miss Selma’s School is no longer necessary. Our public school systems are doing the job for them.
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