School Segregation: What The Data Shows About Districts

While explicitly racist segregation of American schools has been outlawed, education across the country is still largely divided along racial lines. If they want, districts can rezone schools to either decrease — or increase — segregation.

The research may not be applicable or insightful for many Hudson Valley school districts for reasons including small size, according to research by Tomas Monarrez, a UC Berkeley economics PhD candidate. But residents may be interested in the topic, and how it plays out elsewhere.

To illustrate this research, Vox published an article this week demonstrating how school district policies across the country either increase, decrease or preserve the level of segregation already present in the community. Check out the article Vox published to see a visual presentation of your district's and other districts' policies.

More than 50 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that explicitly sending white and black students to schools segregated by race was unconstitutional. But sharp racial divisions persist in many of the nation’s school districts, and a recent report from the Government Accountability Office showed that levels of school segregation nearly doubled between 2000 and 2013.

Segregation has been an issue in Hudson Valley communities with diverse populations that are large enough to have more than one elementary school.

In 1961, the first case in the cause of school desegregation in the North was decided against New Rochelle. Taylor vs. Board of Education of the City School District was filed after parents of students at Lincoln Elementary School noticed that white pupils in Lincoln were being transferred to other schools.

The decision allowed any child in the Lincoln attendance area to register in any other public elementary school in the New Rochelle school system.

Ossining addressed the issue 40 years ago by embracing the Princeton Plan and turning its neighborhood elementary schools into district-wide grade-specific schools.

Most recent was the 1980s when Judge Leonard Sand ruled that Yonkers had intentionally segregated its schools by segregating housing. The fighting over the ruling lasted years. The creators of "The Wire" turned that story into an HBO mini-series in 2015 called "Show Me A Hero."

Across the country, most school districts slightly improve integration in the classroom compared to their neighborhoods, according to Monarrez, but they could do better. However, some districts sort their students such that their schools are even more segregated.

And, as the Vox article showed, many schools in the South in recent decades appear to be resegregating.

Alvin Chang, the author of the Vox article, said the data confirmed what he had long suspected: districts could go further — much further — if they value reducing segregation.

“I’ve always had this inkling that school districts don’t do much to actually reduce the amount of segregation,” he told Patch. “Despite essentially being given this tool [racially inclusive zoning] to desegregate, school districts are not doing it.”

Chang also said that while zoning to desegregate is an important strategy, it’s “weak, given the underlying geography.”

In other words, as long as racial divisions persist in our cities, communities and neighborhoods, desegregation will be a struggle.

There are some caveats to the data. Not every district participated in the federal survey of school zoning, so some data is missing. And the most recent data available is from 2013, so the Vox article doesn’t reflect changes made since that time.

Chang sees his article and the data as a “jumping-off point” for communities to begin discussing these issues and take a closer look at what is going on in their own neighborhoods.

Benjamin Scafidi, director of the Education Economics Center of Kennesaw State University, praised Chang’s article.

“The new research he cited is impressive,” Scafidi said.

But Scafidi offered a somewhat more optimistic take on the potential for desegregation than Chang presented.

“Most public school segregation is across districts, not between,” said Scafidi. And on that front, Scafidi notes that overall, neighborhoods and communities in the United States have gotten less segregated — not more — in recent decades. And by the measure of neighborhood segregation levels, the Southeast and West are more racially inclusive than the Midwest and Northeast.

While there are efforts that could reduce segregation further — Scafidi argues for expanding school choice — he also said that the trends are heading in the right direction. As neighborhoods and communities become less segregated, schools may soon follow.

“In all respects of life, we’re becoming more integrated by race,” he said. “Public schools are what’s lagging.”

Story by Cody Fenwick

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images