NAACP - Thinking About Voluntary Desegregation

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Thinking About Voluntary Desegregation

Thinking About Voluntary Desegregation

LOUISVILLE

Louisville and Jefferson County have done something we think other places around the country should consider modeling. They've created a countywide district (though they had a little help from a Court that ordered an interdistrict remedy). More communities should consider political remedies focusing on metropolitan regionalism—the coordination of public policies and sharing of fiscal resources across municipalities that has the potential to breach continuing trends toward minority (and white) racial isolation.

Prior to the consolidation of the city and county districts, the Louisville school district, which was roughly though not absolutely co-extensive with the then-existing Louisville city limits, had approximately 45,000 pupils in 1973, half of who were African American. The Louisville district had experienced a high level of white flight in the years after it had been required to desegregate after Brown.

On the other hand, the Jefferson County school district, which included the remaining parts of the County except for one small independent school district, had approximately 96,000 students, only four percent of whom were African American. Consistent with this pattern, the majority of African Americans resided within the Louisville city limits, predominantly in one concentrated area in West Louisville, near the city's historically African American high school. The County outside of the city limits had one area of concentrated African American population, the Newburg area.

In addition to its policy of metropolitan regionalism, we commend the newly combined district for adopting a pro-integration policy. Such policies, of which voluntary student assignment plans are one form, are critically important because U.S. schools are becoming more segregated in all regions for African American and Latino students; because most minority students attending intensely segregated schools experience concentrated poverty and unequal educational opportunities; and because racial diversity in the school system is important to helping to ensure that students are prepared to enter a multiracial, multiethnic workforce.

Decades of research has established the educational benefits that accrue to children of different races and cultural backgrounds when they are educated together.

SEATTLE

The Seattle District, unlike Louisville, had never been segregated by law. However, due to Seattle's racially imbalanced housing patterns, if Seattle's children were simply assigned to the high schools nearest their homes, those schools would tend to reflect such imbalance. That is, the demographic profile of the individual high schools would not mirror the demographic makeup of the city's student population as a whole.

As part of its continuing efforts to prevent such imbalance and to promote racial diversity in its high schools, the District adopted an open choice plan instead of simply assigning students to the high schools nearest their homes. Pursuant to this system, each student could choose to attend any of the ten high schools in the city, so long as there was room available in that school.

The Seattle District is to be commended for its commitment to promote racial diversity through a pro-integration policy (here, they used an open choice plan). School officials' decisions to pursue racial integration as an educational policy should be encouraged. For example, a district might decide to implement a mandatory racial busing plan to address de facto segregation resulting from racial isolation in housing patterns.

The District's open choice plan provided for a multi-step application process. Each student was first asked to rank the high schools he or she would like to attend. If a student is not admitted to his or her first-choice school because that school is full, the District attempts to assign him or her to his or her second-choice school, and so on. If a student is not admitted to any of his or her chosen schools, he or she receives a mandatory assignment to a school with available space.

Not surprisingly, a significant problem arises when a school becomes "oversubscribed"—that is, when more students want to attend that school than there are spaces available [not unlike the No Child Left Behind student transfer problem in many parts of the country]. To resolve the dilemma of oversubscription, the District used a series of four "tiebreakers" to determine which students will be admitted to each oversubscribed school. The tiebreakers included a preference to students with siblings already attending the requested school, a preference based entirely on race, a preference based on distance, and a random lottery rarely invoked.

More Broadly
This is really about affirmative action and a challenge that's a lot broader than the narrow, but important, issues in a student assignment plan.

* We should consistently find ways t make white class privilege visible. We need to collect and distribute data about who gets what and how across all American institutions. While there is certainly an opportunity crisis, Americans across the board would be benefited by re-directing their angst at some of the more fundamental ways that opportunity is meted out selectively.

* While we are uncovering the way privilege and preferences really work, it would be useful to follow the money train behind these anti-affirmative action crusades to the wealthy right wing foundations that are financing this agenda. These anti-affirmative action initiatives and suits are often assumed to arise naturally from grassroots efforts; yet these campaigns are top-down enterprises that stoke resentment and misdirect anxieties in a way that benefit only a few.

* We need to mobilize professionals and others by revealing how tests are increasingly used as new barriers to opportunity.

* We should disabuse the public of the belief that attention to class alone will solve the affirmative action crisis. It has been popular of late to make the more politically palatable move of supporting class-based rather than race-based affirmative action. This makes for some interesting bedfellows among conservatives whose attention to class usually amongst to bashing the poor and progressives who have often seen race as a distortion from the "real" issue of class. But class does not capture the full extent to which race still misshapes participation in American institutions. And attending only to class will do little to address the re-segregation that follows the demise of affirmative action. Race is simply not a proxy for class, and to assume so is to embrace the myth that opportunity has been equalized along racial lines.

* We could each stand to improve our medial literacy by recognizing and contesting the many ways that coverage of social issues constitutes the narrow parameters of the debate. Interventions designed to retain affirmative action and other policies have to both broaden the scope of the debate and allow larger numbers of non-traditional voices to be heard in that debate.

* We should link contemporary issues to one another in our thinking and work. What can we discern about the likely future of millions of Americans by considering in to the retrenchment in affirmative action, the de-funding of public education, the upward redistribution of wealth, the retraction of the social safety net, and the unprecedented expansion of the prison industry, including the school to prison pipeline part of the equation? Plotting these trends over the next fifty years leads to a future that is considerably less rosy than the images promulgated by those critics anxious to get beyond the policies they consider to be divisive, expensive or counterproductive.

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Thinking About Voluntary Desegregation