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NPR

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The 50 Most Segregating School Borders in America

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The 50 Most Segregating School Borders in America

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NPR

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The grass is greener ... if you're a student in Detroit, looking across your school district's boundary with the neighboring Grosse Pointe public schools.

Nearly half of Detroit's students live in poverty; that means a family of four lives on roughly $24,000 a year - or less.

In Grosse Pointe, a narrow stretch of real estate nestled between Detroit and Lake St. Clair, just 7 percent of students live at or below the poverty line.

To recap, that's 49 percent vs. 7 percent. Neighbors.

Which is why a new report from the nonprofit EdBuild ranks the Detroit-Grosse Pointe boundary as "the most segregating school district border in the country."

The report, called "Fault Lines," doesn't stop there.

"What we did is built an algorithm that identified all 33,500 school district borders in the country ... and compared their school-aged child poverty rates," says Rebecca Sibilia, the founder and CEO of EdBuild.

From this comparison Sibilia's team compiled a list of the 50 most segregating school boundaries in the nation - in short, the district borders with the largest difference in child poverty rates from one side to the other. In this case, "segregating" is being used to talk specifically about class, not race, though the two often overlap, especially in America's large urban school systems.

Rounding out the top three on the Fault Lines list are the Birmingham City School District in Alabama and ... the Birmingham City School District in Alabama.

In fact, of Birmingham's 13 school district boundaries, six landed on EdBuild's list of the 50 most segregating. That's because the poverty rate of Birmingham's students is 49 percent, while the district is surrounded by several far smaller, far more affluent districts: Vestavia Hills (6 percent child poverty), Mountain Brook (7 percent), Trussville (10 percent), to name a few.

Birmingham's district lines weren't always a story of haves and have nots, at least not this glaring. Most of the affluent districts now bordering the city's schools were once part of the larger Jefferson County School District. But over the years, they have seceded, using their considerable property tax wealth to create new minidistricts.

Interestingly, Birmingham stands out not only because of its multiple appearances but because Alabama is the only Southern state on the list (unless you count Kentucky or Missouri). One reason for this, says Sibilia, is that in much of the South, county borders do double duty as school district borders, "and so there is less opportunity for intentional segregation."

In fact, Sibilia says, she and her team "were shocked. We honestly believed we were going to see a lot of this in the South and very little in the North."

Instead, the vast majority of states on EdBuild's list were Northern, with segregating school lines heavily concentrated in the Rust Belt, particularly Ohio. Dayton's schools have two borders on the list. Ditto Youngstown. Cleveland has four. As manufacturing jobs disappeared, so too did families that could afford to move, creating intense pockets of student poverty.

What can be done about it?

There are no easy fixes, owing in part to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1970, the NAACP sued the state of Michigan; its lawyers argued that Detroit's schools were still unofficially segregated more than 15 years after Brown v. Board of Education because of discriminatory housing policies meant to keep African-Americans out of the suburbs. The proposed remedy: a forced desegregation plan involving dozens of surrounding school districts.

But in one of its most controversial decisions, Milliken v. Bradley in 1974, the court ruled that these largely white, affluent suburban districts could not be forced to desegregate because their boundaries were not deliberately discriminatory. Or had not been proved so.

"The court said that the school district as a concept is basically untouchable," says Ben Justice, an education historian at Rutgers University's Graduate School of Education.

Justice calls the Milliken decision "ridiculous" because, he says, "to argue that where people live, particularly by the 1960s, was not the result of racist government policy was simply a lie. Public policy and private industry conspired to create neighborhoods where people could or could not live." And, Justice says, school district lines were (and remain) an extension of that discrimination.

Fast-forward more than 40 years after that ruling. One of the school borders at the heart of that case tops EdBuild's new list: the jagged curve that today separates Detroit's schools, where half of all students live in poverty, from those of Grosse Pointe, where poverty is blissfully uncommon.

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The 50 Most Segregating School Borders In America

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The grass is greener ... if you're a student in Detroit, looking across your school district's boundary with the neighboring Grosse Pointe public schools. Nearly half of Detroit's students live in poverty; that means a family of four lives on roughly $24,000 a year - or less.

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Try This One Trick To Improve Student Outcomes

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Try This One Trick To Improve Student Outcomes

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NPR

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"Millions of poor, disadvantaged students are trapped in failing schools."

So said President Trump at the White House recently. It's a familiar lament across the political spectrum, so much so that you could almost give it its own acronym : PKTIFS (Poor Kids Trapped In Failing Schools).

Where there's no consensus, however, is on the proper remedy for PKTIFS.

The Obama administration's signature proposal was the School Improvement Grant. This was a $7 billion attempt to turn around struggling schools with some combination of replacing personnel, overhauling the curriculum, renewed teacher support and other practices.

It was one of the largest federal education grant programs ever created. There was just one problem. As a department-commissioned independent review concluded just as Obama was leaving office, it didn't work. "Overall, across all grades, we found ... no significant impacts on math or reading test scores, high school graduation, or college enrollment."

President Trump, and his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, are largely focused on the T for "trapped" part of the problem. They talk about creating escape routes, largely by expanding charter and voucher programs.

Richard Kahlenberg has spent decades stumping for a third way. His idea: Create public schools that are more integrated. He helped innovate the use of social and economic indicators to do that - instead of race and ethnicity, the use of which is prohibited by a 2007 Supreme Court decision.

His strategy could be summed up as: Give poor kids the opportunity to attend school with not-so-poor kids.

The organization where he's a senior fellow, the Century Foundation, keeps track of 100 districts and charter schools around the country that are currently trying various integration strategies. The foundation recently released a paper with nine case studies: New York; Chicago; Dallas; Hartford and Stamford, Conn.; Jefferson County, Ky.; Eden Prairie, Minn.; Champaign, Ill.; and Cambridge, Mass.

[ The integration strategy in Jefferson County is challenged by a new bill in the state legislature.]

Though it may seem quixotic, Kahlenberg says there's reason to be optimistic about integration policies. After all, we've tried everything else.

"I was critical of [former Education Secretary Arne] Duncan when he proposed school turnaround and ignored segregation," Kahlenberg says. "When they announced federal turnaround efforts, Duncan bragged about the fact that in Chicago, 'We had the same kids but we changed the adults.'

"On one level I understand that," he continues. "Even in segregated environments, there are positive things you can do for kids. Yet, it seemed to be taking off the table this really powerful tool that 50 years of research suggest can make a big difference in students' lives."

NPR Ed talked to Kahlenberg about this body of research. First, about the case for creating schools that are both economically and racially integrated, and second, on how to go about that.
What's the educational case for integration?
There are three reasons: the kids, the parents and the teachers.

Kids who have big dreams and are expecting to go on to college are less likely to cause disruption, cut classes and are more likely to be academically engaged.

On average, those peers are found more often in economically mixed than in high-poverty schools.

It's also an advantage to be in a classroom where your peers are high-achieving. For example, children of professionals have bigger vocabularies on average than low-income students, and that will rub off.

As for the parents, again, not attaching any blame, but middle-class parents are more likely to be PTA members and volunteer in class. That parental involvement benefits every child in a school.

And finally, the teachers deemed more effective are more likely to be found in economically mixed schools. That has to do with those first two factors. It's easier to teach in a school with fewer discipline issues and with parents who are there to help out.
OK, but what about the middle-class students? Is there evidence that it won't hurt them to attend a more diverse school?
Yes, the research shows that middle-class students tend to do as well academically in economically mixed schools. But more than that, there's emerging research to suggest that, indeed, middle-class students benefit from both economic and racial diversity. As we become a majority-minority nation, more millennial parents are recognizing that it's a skill to thrive in diverse environments, and employers are looking for people who can get along with individuals from all different backgrounds.
That said, most of the criteria we use to judge school performance, like test scores, are tightly correlated with class. How do you get parents who are privileged to choose an economically mixed school?
I think it's an exciting moment for magnet schools. When magnet schools offer different themes and pedagogical approaches, they're providing things that are popular with enough parents that it opens the door to the reality of school integration in a way that's politically palatable.

[DeVos spoke recently at the Magnet Schools of America conference, where she highlighted the role of magnet schools in reducing segregation. This recent review of research on magnet schools shows both positive and null results on academic performance, although most studies support higher graduation rates at magnet schools.

When NPR Ed went looking for a school that had succeeded under the School Improvement Grant program, we profiled a magnet school.]
In New York City, where I live, as your report notes, 77 percent of students live in poverty. How do you create economically mixed schools if there aren't enough middle-class kids to go around?
I worked with Chicago Public Schools on their socioeconomic integration plan. The district is 85 percent low-income. My recommendation was not to ensure that every school was 85 percent low-income, because high-poverty schools are bad for students. In Chicago what they've done is to begin with magnet and selective-enrollment schools. You want to create a virtuous cycle where people can see examples of success.

[According to the recent report, Chicago's selective enrollment or "exam high schools" are much more racially balanced than their counterparts in Boston and New York City. And in those Chicago schools students from all backgrounds are keeping up academically and graduating at very high rates.]
It almost sounds like a chemistry experiment - you have to control the conditions very carefully and titrate your mixture until it hits that tipping point.
The long-term aspiration is that, as you develop more socioeconomically integrated schools, that the overall demographics of the public school system could shift. We saw that in Cambridge: Over time, more middle-class and white people came back into the district, stopped using private schools and stopped moving away once their kids got to be a certain age.
How good are the chances of seeing more districts try integration in this policy climate?
Most of the focus around choice has been on charter schools, and I think now, maybe after an election that revealed these tremendous divisions by race, class and gender, there's an opportunity to harness the interest in choice for a program that will actually bring kids of different backgrounds together, and heal some of those divisions that we saw come out during the election.

Now, at a programmatic level, there's lots of reasons for someone like me to be depressed, because DeVos and Trump haven't talked [much] about the benefits of school integration. But you can see lots of progress on the issue of school integration that isn't directed by the feds. ... So, rather than continuing to pound our heads against the wall in finding new ways to make separate but equal work, we could rediscover this other approach that actually is having really strong results.

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Try This One Trick To Improve Student Outcomes

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"Millions of poor, disadvantaged students are trapped in failing schools." So said President Trump at the White House recently. It's a familiar lament across the political spectrum, so much so that you could almost give it its own acronym : PKTIFS (Poor Kids Trapped In Failing Schools).

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Beyond Brown : Pursuing the Promise . Long Road Ahead . Are you Gifted? Summary| PBS

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The Promise and Peril of School Vouchers

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The Promise and Peril of School Vouchers

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NPR

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Wendy Robinson wants to make one thing very clear.

As the long-serving superintendent of Fort Wayne public schools, Indiana's largest district, she is not afraid of competition from private schools.

"We've been talking choice in this community and in this school system for almost 40 years," Robinson says. Her downtown office sits in the shadow of the city's grand, Civil War-era Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. In Fort Wayne, a parking lot is the only thing that separates the beating heart of Catholic life from the brains of the city's public schools.

In fact, steeples dominate the skyline of the so-called City of Churches. Fort Wayne has long been a vibrant religious hub, home to more than 350 churches, many of which also run their own schools.

While the city's public and private schools managed, for decades, to co-exist amicably, that changed in 2011, Robinson says. That's when state lawmakers began the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program, a plan to allow low-income students to use vouchers, paid for with public school dollars, to attend private, generally religious schools.

Six years later, Indiana's statewide voucher program is now the largest of its kind in the country and, with President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos openly encouraging states to embrace private school choice, the story of the Choice Scholarship - how it came to be, how it works and whom it serves - has become a national story of freedom, faith, poverty and politics.

Our story begins in Fort Wayne, where the state now spends $20 million a year on voucher students, more than in any other district.

This year, $1.1 million of that $20 million went to one private, K-8 school: St. Jude Catholic School.
The story of St. Jude
St. Jude opened its school doors in March of 1929. By 2011, when the state unveiled its voucher program, the school enrolled 479 students. That first year, a small number received vouchers: just 28.

Then something happened to the program that began a remarkable shift, not only at St. Jude but across the state.

Father Jake Runyon saw it happening and told his parishioners.

"We've been seeing some financial troubles here at St. Jude Parish," Runyon said in a formal presentation that was recorded in 2014 and posted on the church's website. The parish was in its third straight year of financial losses.

One big reason for the losses: The church was pouring money from its offertory into the school and neglecting repairs to its steeple and cooling system.

Then, Runyon shared the good news: After an attempt by the state teachers union to kill the young voucher program, Indiana's Supreme Court had found it constitutional, allowing families to spend public school dollars in private, religious schools. Not long after, the program was expanded dramatically to include children who had never attended a public school. Suddenly, many St. Jude students qualified.

All they had to do was apply.

"The effect on that this year," Runyon told parishioners in 2014, "it would have been $118,000 of money we just left there, that the state of Indiana wanted to give me, and we weren't able to take advantage of it."

Runyon's presentation - since taken down from the church's website - was a pitch for a new way of distributing financial aid to St. Jude students, one that would maximize the money coming in through vouchers and allow the parish to use more of its offertory elsewhere.

When word of the plan reached beyond St. Jude, though, it appeared to confirm the greatest fears of public school advocates: that vouchers were a giveaway to the state's cash-strapped religious schools at the expense of struggling public schools.

This year, according to state data, nearly two-thirds of St. Jude's students now receive public dollars to help pay for their private school tuition.

Runyon, who is still Pastor at St. Jude, declined repeated interview requests.
In the beginning
"Social justice has come to Indiana education," Gov. Mitch Daniels said in 2011 after the state made several big changes to its education system. Among those changes was the new voucher program, capped at 7,500 children, to allow low-income students to use state education dollars to attend private schools. "The ability to choose a school that a parent believes is best for their child's future is no longer limited to the wealthy."

Of the children in that first voucher class, 2011-2012, most had two things in common: They were low-income and had attended public school.

"Public schools will get first shot at every child," Daniels said back then in a speech to the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. "If the public school delivers and succeeds, no one will seek to exercise this choice."

Daniels, who is now the president of Purdue University, predicted that the voucher program was "not likely to be a very large phenomenon in Indiana."

He was wrong.

In 2013, Mike Pence succeeded Daniels as Indiana's governor, and, within months, the now-vice president oversaw a dramatic expansion of the program. Lawmakers added new pathways for students to qualify, making the voucher more accessible to children who had never attended a public school. They also expanded the program's reach to include some middle-class families.

Voucher enrollment doubled in one year.

"It's actually grown almost exponentially as you look at the numbers," says the law's proud architect, state Rep. Robert Behning, a Republican.

It's also popular, according to a 2016 survey conducted by EdChoice, a group that advocates for vouchers and other forms of school choice. Today, more than 34,000 students are enrolled in Indiana's Choice Scholarship Program - 3 percent of students statewide.

To qualify, parents have to meet certain income limits. For a full voucher, worth 90 percent of what a state would spend in a public school, a family of four can earn no more than $45,000 annually, but students whose parents earn up to $67,000 can still qualify for a half-voucher. And for children already in the program, their family income can rise to nearly $90,000 annually.

The biggest headline from the program's growth is this: Today, more than half of all voucher students in the state have no record of attending a public school.

Exhibit A: Fort Wayne.

"We're not losing kids from our schools [to vouchers]," says Superintendent Wendy Robinson. "We're now just having the state pay for kids who were never going to come here anyway."

In fact, Father Jake Runyon alluded to this in his 2014 presentation:

"The vast majority of the people who qualify for the Choice Scholarships were already here," he assured his Fort Wayne parishioners after the voucher program expanded. "So it's not necessarily the case that we're getting tons of new students. But it's that a lot of the students are here."

Fort Wayne is a microcosm of what's happening statewide, with tens of millions of state taxpayer dollars paying for children to attend private schools without, as then-Gov. Daniels had suggested, giving public schools "first shot."

Behning, the law's tireless defender, argues that all parents deserve to choose their child's school, even those who have traditionally opted out of the public system.

"The intent of the program was to give parents choice," says Behning. The parents of children in private schools, he says, "are taxpayers just like the parents in a traditional public school."

This shift in the program's rules, begun by Pence in 2013, has led to a shift in student demographics as well. White voucher students are up from 46 percent that first year to 60 percent today, and the share of black students has dropped from 24 percent to 12 percent. Recipients are also increasingly suburban and middle class. A third of students do not qualify for free or reduced-price meals.

While the program was once premised on giving low-income, public school families access to better schools, this year fewer than 1 percent of voucher students used a pathway, written into the law, that's meant specifically for students leaving failing schools.

"When you look at that trend data, it is alarming," says Jennifer McCormick, the state's new Republican superintendent of public instruction, and a former public school teacher. She says of the old narrative that vouchers were largely meant to help low-income students escape underperforming public schools: "That's not necessarily the case" today.
Social justice
Kayla Massy-Charles fits the old narrative. And she believes that the voucher she has been using for three years has provided a bridge to new possibilities.

Kayla lives with her mother, Pauline Massy, in an apartment on the outskirts of Indianapolis. She attended public elementary and middle schools and wanted to stay in the system for high school, where she could join her neighborhood friends in show choir and color guard.

They live near a public high school, but it received a C rating from the state and serves more than 2,300 students. That was a problem for Kayla's mother.

"Me being from the Caribbean, I really have a hard time with big," Pauline says, sitting next to her daughter on their couch. She leans into the last word. "You know, everything big."

Pauline, who now works in nursing, attended a crowded public high school herself in Brooklyn, and she worried that Kayla, despite being a good student, would get lost in the crowd. So she attended an open house at a small, Catholic school nearly an hour away.

For a decade, Providence Cristo Rey has been housed in an old, public elementary school building near downtown Indianapolis. The wood floors creak, and the old water fountains hang at a first-grader's height. It's part of the national Cristo Rey Network, a chain of 32 private, Catholic high schools that serve low-income, minority students. In the case of Providence Cristo Rey, three-quarters of those students are not Catholic.

Pauline was impressed by the school's intimacy; it's one-tenth the size of Kayla's would-be public high school. It also has a better rating from the state, a B. She loved its emphasis on service and college completion and the fact that the school forges partnerships with local businesses and nonprofits to give students real-world work experience.

Annual tuition in excess of $13,000 made the school seem out of reach, but, with a state voucher and much of the rest of the cost covered by the school's unique work-study program, Pauline was told she could enroll Kayla for just $20 a month.

She was convinced. Kayla was not. She fought her mother over the move, calling other family members and begging them to change Pauline's mind. It didn't work.

Because the school is an hour-long bus ride away, Kayla needs to wake up early each morning. And that, she says, requires seven alarms: 5:30, 5:40, 5:45, 5:50, 5:55, 6. "And then 6:10 is my mom's phone call," she says through braces and a broad, infectious smile.

Pauline calls from the other bedroom, just across the hall.

"We don't even talk," Kayla says. "I see her picture pop up on my phone, and I'm like, 'Man, it's 6:10 already?' But I do wake up."

By 6:30, the 16-year-old is at the bus stop, ready for the long ride to a school her mother could not afford without the state's voucher.

"You could have dreamed of this opportunity but just never have it," Pauline says.

After three years of this, Kayla says she's happy and grateful for the move to private school. As proof, she points out that she is now a student ambassador for Providence Cristo Rey and knows just what to say to prospective students who seem as wary as she once was.

"I didn't think I would like a small school, but I like how everyone knows everybody," says Kayla, now a junior. "You're more open. You're more able to relate to somebody and have a one-on-one connection with them than if you went to a bigger school."

Kayla is studying business and ultimately hopes to start her own hair salon. If either mother or daughter has regrets now, it's Pauline. She says she was a passionate booster of Kayla's public schools and hated to withdraw her.

"I believe in the public school system," says Pauline. "But now I have to worry about my child. And that might be selfish. It feels selfish on some days when I think about it. But I have to do what will get her to where she needs to be."
The money question
It should come as no surprise that vouchers have become a cornerstone of Providence Cristo Rey's finances. Unlike many voucher-accepting private schools, it focuses on low-income, minority students with college ambitions. Nearly every student there receives a voucher. As a result, 31 percent of the school's total receipts last year came from vouchers, according to its annual report. This year it received $1.4 million from the Choice Scholarship program.

But vouchers have also had an important effect on more traditional private schools - and more affluent ones.

Roncalli High School, on the opposite side of Indianapolis, is named for Pope John XXIII (born Angelo Roncalli) and receives close to $1 million a year from the Archdiocese of Indianapolis. Its manicured campus includes a fine arts building and a gleaming stadium for its football team, the Rebels.

Roncalli, which received an A rating from the state, currently enrolls roughly 1,200 students. One in five qualifies for free or reduced-price meals.

"The overwhelming majority [of students] are middle class, suburban - I call 'em good, suburban rats," says Chuck Weisenbach, who has been Roncalli's principal for 22 years. He repeats the line with a smile, making clear he means it affectionately. "You know, they're just middle class, suburban rats."

Weisenbach says he fully supports the voucher program. Echoing Daniels, he believes giving low-income families access to high-quality schools like his is "one of the greatest social justice issues our country's facing - because we know education is also proven to be the most consistent avenue out of poverty."

While nearly every student at Providence Cristo Rey receives a voucher, a far smaller share of Roncalli students qualify: 30 percent. Still, given the larger size of Roncalli's student body, that adds up to about $1.5 million this year. And that money has allowed the school to scale back the financial aid it offers.

According to the school's vice president of finance, Dave Gervasio, the year before vouchers came along, Roncalli provided students with roughly $870,000 in financial assistance. For next year, it's budgeted to provide $420,000.

As a result of that $450,000 savings, Gervasio says, they've been able to put more money into teacher salaries, classroom technology and a special emergency fund in case the voucher program ends someday.

Today, roughly 40 percent of all private school students in Indiana receive a state voucher. The program has allowed many financially stable schools, like Roncalli, to save and invest elsewhere.

For schools that were financially strapped - and, with Catholic school enrollment plunging in recent years, there are many of those - vouchers have been a lifeline, not just in Indiana but also in Milwaukee, home to the nation's oldest voucher program.

In a recent study of Milwaukee's program, researchers found "vouchers are now a dominant source of funding for many churches" and that parishes "running voucher-accepting schools get more revenue from vouchers than from worshipers."

Also, it's important to consider not just where the money is going in Indiana's voucher program but where it's coming from: a state education budget that, because of its unusual dependence on sales tax, has never fully recovered from the Great Recession. According to Indiana University's Center for Evaluation and Education Policy, Indiana spends less per pupil, after adjusting for inflation, than it did in 2009. Meanwhile, it's spending $146 million on private school vouchers this school year - compared to a projected $6.8 billion in its public schools.

Rep. Behning points out that the state spends less on a voucher student than it would if that student were in a public school. What's left, he says, particularly the money a district raises locally through property taxes, "stays in the public school system."

But, in Indiana, most of a school's day-to-day classroom funding comes from the state. Local money is generally limited to covering things like building maintenance, debt and transportation. Those are not incidental costs, but when a public school loses a student to the voucher program, it loses thousands of dollars that help pay for teachers and classroom costs.

The state has also created so much new demand for limited resources that, last summer, its Department of Education, then under Democratic control, released a report that Republican lawmakers dispute. It suggested that in subsidizing so many students who had never attended public school, the voucher program had actually created a $53 million deficit.

In the early years of the program "there was a small savings" to the state, says Molly Stewart, a researcher at CEEP. "But the last two or three years, since they expanded the pathways, it's been in the negative $50 million range - more state money going to education costs."

The state requires little financial transparency from private schools that benefit from vouchers, and, in rare cases, the lack of oversight has allowed them to mismanage state funds.

In 2015-2016, a small, private Indianapolis school was approved to continue receiving voucher payments despite an investigation by the state attorney general's office and multiple lawsuits alleging it had not paid teachers and defaulted on loans. And in 2014, 80 Catholic schools returned $3.9 million to the state after a financial review by the Indiana dioceses found errors in calculating the cost of voucher scholarships. They cited "misinterpreted complex guidelines" for the errors that were not uncovered by the state.

Lawmakers also scuttled a recent effort to require voucher-accepting private schools to submit annual financial reports, in part because of Behning's opposition.

"I look at voucher schools, when it comes to financial issues, in a very similar way that I think the state should look at any vendor we do business with," Behning told the IndyStar. "If we receive services, we should give them a payment. How they handle that payment, as long as they're not doing something illegal, is not in the state's jurisdiction."

Robert Enlow believes there's a double standard at the bottom of this transparency debate.

"I will argue that voucher-receiving schools are far more transparent [than public schools]," says Enlow, the president and CEO of EdChoice, a school choice advocacy group. He calls the Choice Scholarship program "rigorously accountable" and complains that "just getting a cost-benefit statement from a traditional public school district is impossible."

Enlow also points out that, when it comes to academic accountability, Indiana stands out among voucher states. Its voucher-accepting private schools are accredited and required to administer the state test. They must also submit to the state's A-F system, which grades schools based on various benchmarks, including test scores and graduation rates.

Private schools can even be prevented from accepting new voucher students if they receive a D or F rating for two consecutive years, though lawmakers recently agreed to let these struggling schools apply for a waiver that would allow them to continue.
Turning kids away
Unlike voucher programs in some other states, participating private schools in Indiana have the freedom to do what they've always done: admit or reject students based on their own guidelines, even if those students are using taxpayer-funded vouchers.

Behning defends that decision, saying it was important that schools retain their ability to be selective. "The one reason we let schools have some admissions criteria is we did not want to change the very fiber of those schools."

What qualifies as fiber?

A spokesperson for the Indiana Department of Education, Adam Baker, says "a private school can deny a student based on past academic performance or prior disciplinary action," among other criteria.

Some schools post GPA requirements on their websites. Struggling students need not apply. Ditto students with a suspension. This has raised fears among the state's public school leaders that private schools are cherry-picking.

"Anecdotally, yes, we hear that schools can cherry-pick," Baker says, but he insists that the state has "never received a formal complaint from a parent."

Behning's "fiber" isn't limited to academic performance or behavior. Some private schools also require parents to certify that they are members of the church that manages the school or to sign a statement of faith.

In its online admissions packet, Lighthouse Christian Academy in Bloomington lays out its expectations of students. It lists "behaviors prohibited in the Bible" to include "homosexual or bisexual activity or any form of sexual immorality" and "practicing alternate gender identity or any other identity or behavior that violates God's ordained distinctions between the two sexes, male and female."

The school then makes clear that, "in situations in which the home life violates these standards, LCA reserves the right, within its sole discretion, to refuse admission of an applicant or to discontinue enrollment of a student."

Lighthouse received $665,400 in state voucher dollars this year.

The 2011 voucher law prohibited the state from regulating "curriculum content, religious instruction or activities, classroom teaching, teacher and staff hiring requirements, and other activities carried out by the eligible school."

When it comes to selectivity, private schools in Indiana enjoy considerable freedom - so much, in fact, that it might be more instructive to ask: For what reasons can they not deny a student admission?

Baker, the Department of Education spokesman, says private schools "cannot deny children based on race, color, national origin or disability" in accordance with state civil rights law.

Yet there is evidence that these protections are limited and open to interpretation.
"They do not have the resources to support the child"
Just outside the Indianapolis city limits, Carol Crawn sits at her breakfast table scrolling through Facebook. Behind her, in the living room, the Today show plays quietly on a television over the fireplace. Her 12-year-old daughter, who is on the autism spectrum, sleeps quietly on the sofa, her hair an explosion of ringlets.

Crawn is a special education teacher by training and an advocate for people just like her - parents of children with disabilities who are trying to navigate a state education system that doesn't always have their child's interests in mind.

Case in point: Crawn points out a recent Facebook thread among a community of Indianapolis parents. It begins: "How do school vouchers work?"

"I'm not clear on the details," says one commenter, "but I do know that private schools do not have to provide accommodations for students with special needs."

This, says Crawn, is a common concern among parents of students with disabilities. They're not sure why the system isn't working for their children, but they're sure it isn't working.

A part-time advocate with Family Voices Indiana, Crawn tries to connect these parents with resources. When she first noticed the Facebook thread, she posted, in part: "What happens in private schools frequently [is that they] will not accept a child with a disability into their school because they do not have the resources to support the child."

Crawn knows firsthand, even though her family does not qualify for a voucher.

"I had asked for an in-face meeting to discuss options, and they refused," Crawn says of one private school where she had tried to enroll her daughter. The school rebuffed her after seeing her daughter's Individualized Education Program, or IEP, a public school document that outlines a student's special needs.

"They said, 'Send us her IEP via email,'" Crawn remembers. "And then they said, 'No, we're not equipped to handle her.'"

Some schools, like Roncalli High, the Catholic school in Indianapolis, do have the resources and are more inclusive. Among its offerings for special-needs students is what Principal Chuck Weisenbach calls its Life Academy. The program includes academics, work study and time spent in a mock apartment where students cook for themselves, budget and do their own laundry.

But it's a very different story at Kayla Massy-Charles' private school, Providence Cristo Rey.

"Public schools can work with a special ed. kid and provide wraparound services because they receive [extra] dollars from the state," says Emil Ekiyor, a school spokesman. "Well, we don't receive that so, if we take that student, we'd be doing an injustice to that family because we just can't provide all the services they need."

According to state data, Providence Cristo Rey did not enroll a single student this year who requires special education services.

Liberty Christian School's two campuses, in Anderson, received more than $1.5 million this year in state vouchers but include this caveat in their admissions policy:

"Liberty Christian School may not possess the resources to provide for students who have ... a physical handicap, which would impair the learning process under normal educational conditions" or "a learning disability for which our program is not staffed."

This year, 8 percent of Liberty Christian's 521 K-12 students receive special education services. That's higher than many voucher-accepting private schools but well below the state average, 14.5 percent.

This is key to understanding Indiana's voucher program. Public schools are required to accept all students, regardless of disability. Voucher schools are not. In many cases, it's not the students who choose the schools but the schools that choose the students.

"That is discrimination," says Robinson, the Fort Wayne superintendent.

What does the law say? Most students are protected from school discrimination by the federal Americans with Disabilities Act. But private, religious schools are exempt from the ADA, and most voucher schools in Indiana are religious.

Voucher schools argue that they're not discriminating; they're simply being honest. And the state appears to agree with them. The Indiana Department of Education says it encourages these schools to be upfront with families about their limitations. If they don't believe they can serve a student with special needs, they should say that. The parent doesn't have to choose that school.

When NPR pointed out that some private schools are, indeed, discouraging and even turning away special education students, the department said it has never received a formal parent complaint of discrimination.

Baker, the Department of Education spokesman, wants to be clear, though: The state's new, Republican superintendent, Jennifer McCormick, would like to see change. Her administration believes any school "that receives public dollars should be held to the same standard. We've made that known," Baker says. "Unfortunately, that's not in our hands to make that change. That's a legislative decision."

In other words, lawmakers created the program. Only they can change it.

In the meantime, Robinson, the Fort Wayne superintendent, says state data prove that special education students are being turned away:

"Just look at the records. The gen. ed student is in a private, parochial school. The special ed student's [in public school]."

NPR did look at the records. Here's what we found:

In Fort Wayne, Robinson is right: Students who receive special education services are much more likely to attend public schools, where federal law guarantees they will get a free, appropriate education.

More than 15 percent of the city's public school students are considered special education. But the average special education rate at private schools now being used by Fort Wayne voucher students is less than half that, 6.5 percent.

And Fort Wayne is the rule, not the exception. Seventeen percent of public school students in Indianapolis receive special education. In private, voucher schools used by Indianapolis students, the rate is 7 percent. It's the same story in Evansville (16 percent in public schools vs. 7.5 percent in voucher schools) and Gary (14.5 percent vs. 3.5 percent) and, in fact, most other school districts across the state.

It's easy to forget that these data are built of human stories, like Ashley's. She's a mother in the Indianapolis area who used vouchers to enroll her two daughters in a local, private school affiliated with their church.

"Without the voucher," Ashley says sitting at her kitchen table, "we wouldn't have been able to do that. And we're really grateful that we had that choice."

Her 8-year-old son, Isaac, who is on the autism spectrum, giggles in the other room. He loves being tickled by a visiting therapist who specializes in what's known as applied behavior analysis.

Out of concern for her children's privacy - and because Ashley wants to maintain a cordial relationship with her church and daughters' school - we are using her first name only.

Ashley hoped that Isaac could attend private school alongside his sisters, and she reached out to the principal of her daughters' school.

"But [the principal] didn't feel that she could offer Isaac what he needed, and so that was kind of, uh, where that stopped," she says, clearly hurt but also not wanting to hurt the school her daughters love. "I think every special-needs parent goes through periods of grieving, sometimes when your expectations don't meet reality. Or you don't have the opportunities that you had hoped to have for your child. And I think, in my mind, I had a very optimistic view of him being alongside his sisters."

"I don't think there's any question that private school choice programs are not set up to take students with disabilities," says Julie Wright Halbert, legislative counsel for the Council of the Great City Schools. "And I think it's extremely concerning."

This phenomenon even came up earlier this year, in a heated Senate hearing:

"Many of us see this as the potential for turning our public schools into warehouses for the most challenging kids with disabilities or other kinds of particular issues," said Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, whose son has cerebral palsy.

Enlow, of EdChoice, argues that the way Indiana funds its voucher program, giving private schools less money per student than it gives to public schools, makes it difficult for voucher schools to serve high-need students.

"If we're really talking about equity here," Enlow says, "we're actually saying that you should fund a kid based on what they need, not worry about what school it is."

He also questions the expectation that every school be able to serve every child.

"One size fits all doesn't actually fit anyone," Enlow says. "We need to have a fairly honest conversation about how do we serve all kids at the school that serves them best - not, how does every single school serve all kids."
Choice desert
To understand school choice in Indiana, it's also important to look where choice isn't available.

In central Indiana sits the small, rural town of Eminence. It's home to a gas station and convenience store where farmers gather each morning for coffee and conversation, a post office, bank and Indiana's fifth-smallest school district.

Here, life revolves around the district's only school.

"Everything starts at the school," says Sarah Finney, Eminence Community Schools' PTO president. "We have community events there. People who can't afford to have funerals, have funerals there."

Memorials to former students ornament the school's walls. A cabinet packed with basketball trophies sits across from class photos dating back to 1901.

Finney always planned for her sons, ages 5 and 8, to attend the one-building district with about 375 students, from pre-K through 12th grade. Her husband's family has for generations.

"Our kids know everybody," Finney says. "The parents know everybody."

While much of the state focuses on private school choice, this tiny district fights its own battles. Chief among them? Enrollment.

About 1 in 6 students has left in the past five years. When an Eminence student leaves, so does roughly $6,870 in state funding. Officials say a recent property tax hike, grants and a new tuition-based pre-K program have kept them from going in the red.

Yet dropping enrollment can't be chalked up to private school choice, like elsewhere in the state. There are no private schools nearby.

"I've never come across one family looking for a voucher for private," says Corey Scott, Eminence principal. "Most of them are in this community just trying to stay afloat."

It's a common sentiment across rural Indiana. Small populations mean few private schools - and little incentive for new ones to open.

The closest private schools that accept vouchers are a 40-minute drive from Eminence. Pushes from state and national politicians for private school choice aren't relevant to the area, Scott says.

"To be completely honest, I just ignore everything they say and do," she says. "They're going to make decisions regardless of anything that we have to say."

Indiana lets students hop borders to attend other public schools. That has created some problems for Eminence, a C-rated district, though students aren't leaving because of academics. According to several school officials, the main reason parents cite for leaving is sports.

Eminence is too small to field a football team.

Still, Scott worries that decisions made on the national stage could trickle down to her district. As the Trump administration's education priority centers on school choice, she has one question:

"What do you do with the rest of us?"
What the research says
While it's clear that many children have been left out of Indiana's voucher program - because of geography, grades or special needs - 34,000 students are now enrolled. For them, it's important to ask: Are they better off academically?

Researchers Mark Berends of Notre Dame and R. Joseph Waddington of the University of Kentucky have spent years studying Indiana's voucher program and its impact. While they've not yet released their statewide results, they have published a narrower view - of Indianapolis kids in grades 3-8.

The numbers aren't promising.

Students in Indianapolis who left public schools to attend private Catholic schools, for example, experienced no benefit in reading but "moderate and statistically significant average annual losses in mathematics compared with the gains they experienced while attending traditional public schools," the report says.

Berends adds that's "roughly like students moving from the 50th percentile down to about the 44th percentile" in math. And, he says, that's the effect over the course of one year.

"So, if this continues over multiple years," Berends warns, "you can see that that's a pretty dramatic drop in achievement. By analyzing additional years, we'll be able to see if further losses occur or not."

While it's not yet clear whether students performed similarly statewide, Berends says his Indianapolis results are consistent with studies of voucher programs in Louisiana and Ohio. A new review of the only federally funded voucher program in the country, in Washington, D.C., also found academic declines among students who used a voucher to attend a private school.

In 2015, Dennis Epple, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University, helped lead a bird's eye survey of voucher research. Of the "tightest" studies he reviewed, "the evidence from those studies with respect to achievement is something of a disappointment for people who are strong proponents of vouchers," Epple says. "Overall, the achievement effects ... were limited. There is some evidence that African-American students benefit from vouchers, but that evidence is quite limited and not robust."

As a result, Epple and his fellow researchers wrote that, while vouchers appeared to improve outcomes for some students in some settings, "the empirical research on small scale programs does not suggest that awarding students a voucher is a systematically reliable way to improve educational outcomes."

A 2017 review from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute came to a similar conclusion. Martin Carnoy of Stanford University writes, "extensive research on educational vouchers in the United States over the past 25 years shows that gains in student achievement are at best small."

One small, potential benefit from vouchers has shown up in multiple studies: a bump in public schools' performance as they compete with private schools.

"That is one of the more robust effects," says Epple. "Competition improves the performance of the public schools that are most closely threatened, for want of a better word, by the voucher program."

Epple points to public school improvement in Florida and Milwaukee. Researchers found similar evidence of a bump in Ohio.

Ironically, this suggests that one of the most consistent benefits of vouchers is enjoyed by students who choose not to use them.
What's next?
"I think Indiana is in an interesting situation right now," says Jennifer McCormick, the state superintendent. "Because we have six years that we've had the program. Our charge right now is, what is that next step?"

Her answer: Review the program and whether it's a wise use of taxpayer dollars.

"You know, we're spending roughly $146 million on a program and not really reviewing it," McCormick says. "That is irresponsible."

Superintendent Wendy Robinson, in Fort Wayne, doesn't need a review. She is emphatic that vouchers are "an assault on public education."

The program's architect, Rep. Behning, pleads patience. Six years, he argues, is still not enough time to judge the state's school choice experiment.

What's more, student performance is just one measure of vouchers' success or failure, Behning says. "Parents choose for a variety of reasons. It's not always academics ... I think the best judgment is parental choice."

In other words, for the program's defenders, choice isn't just the vehicle, it's the destination.

An EdChoice survey of voucher parents, conducted last summer, is instructive. Among the top-five reasons parents cited for enrolling their child in a private school, "better academics" ranked second, not first. At the top of the list was "religious environment/instruction."

"It is not the government's responsibility to tell me where to educate my children," says Weisenbach, principal of the private Roncalli High in Indianapolis. "That's not only my right, it's my duty. And I shouldn't have the government telling me based on some random, geographic location that I have to go to this public high school."

And Behning argues that the program can be judged a failure - or unnecessary - when parents stop choosing to use vouchers to leave the state's public schools.

The problem with that standard is that more than half of this year's voucher class didn't leave a public school - because they've never attended one.

What Gov. Mitch Daniels said in 2011, that "public schools will get first shot at every child," is simply not true anymore.

And this gets to the question at the heart of the debate over school choice in Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, Eminence and nationwide. What is the purpose?

If it's to give parents more options, then Indiana can check that box. After all, 34,000 students are now using the voucher program.

If the purpose is to help low-income children find schools where they're more likely to learn, grow and succeed, that's happening for some of those 34,000, to be sure. Just ask Kayla Massy-Charles.

But research suggests that vouchers may also be doing more harm than good for many students - and are not opening doors for children with expensive special needs or low grades or who don't have parents like Pauline Massy to make sure they catch the bus every morning and finish their homework every night.

As the nation looks to Indiana as one model for private school choice, one thing is clear: Choice is in the eye of the beholder.
Peter Balonon-Rosen covers education for Indiana Public Broadcasting. Eric Weddle reports for WFYI Public Media in Indianapolis.

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The Promise And Peril Of School Vouchers

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Wendy Robinson wants to make one thing very clear. As the long-serving superintendent of Fort Wayne public schools, Indiana's largest district, she is not afraid of competition from private schools. "We've been talking choice in this community and in this school system for almost 40 years," Robinson says.

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PBS

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Are school vouchers good for education? That debate is playing out in Indiana

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Audio: How the Systematic Segregation of Schools is Maintained By 'Individual Choices'

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Audio: How the Systematic Segregation of Schools is Maintained By 'Individual Choices'

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NPR

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Sixty-three years after the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, many schools across the country either remain segregated or have re-segregated.

Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that when it comes to school segregation, separate is never truly equal.

"There's never been a moment in the history of this country where black people who have been isolated from white people have gotten the same resources," Hannah-Jones says. "They often don't have the same level of instruction. They often don't have strong principals. They often don't have the same technology."

Still, when it was time for Hannah-Jones' daughter, Najya, to attend kindergarten, the journalist chose the public school near their home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, even though its students were almost all poor and black or Latino. Hannah-Jones later wrote about that decision in The New York Times Magazine.

For Hannah-Jones, sending Najya to the neighborhood school was a moral issue. "It is important to understand that the inequality we see, school segregation, is both structural, it is systemic, but it's also upheld by individual choices," she says. "As long as individual parents continue to make choices that only benefit their own children ... we're not going to see a change."

Hannah-Jones adds that her daughter is thriving at school. "I know she's learning a lot," she says. "I think it is making her a good citizen. ... It is teaching her that children who have less resources than her are not any less intelligent than her or not any less worthy than her."

Interview highlights
On why she chose to send her young daughter to the public school in her neighborhood

The original mission of public schools ... is this understanding that no matter where you come from, you will go into the doors of a school and every child will receive the same education.

One of the things I've done in my work is kind of show the hypocrisy of progressive people who say they believe in inequality, but when it comes to their individual choices about where they're going to live and where they're going to send their children, they make very different decisions, and I just didn't want to do that. So for me it was a matter of needing to live my values, and not being someone who contributed to the inequality that I write about.
On the importance of having students from different races and income levels in the public schools
The original mission of public schools ... is this understanding that no matter where you come from, you will go into the doors of a school and every child will receive the same education.

And no, my daughter is not going to get an education that she would get if I paid $40,000 a year in private-school tuition, but that's kind of the whole point of public schools.

And I say this - and it always feels weird when I say it as a parent, because a lot of other parents look at you a little like you're maybe not as good of a parent - I don't think she's deserving of more than other kids. I just don't. I think that we can't say "This school is not good enough for my child" and then sustain that system. I think that that's just morally wrong. If it's not good enough for my child, then why are we putting any children in those schools?
On the history of school desegregation since the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education
Brown v. Board happens, and the way that we're taught it or the myth about it is immediately our nation repented and went into an integrated future together. That's not what happened. There was massive resistance, and we don't see real desegregation occurring in this country until 1964, and really most rapidly from 1968 on. ...

Then you see pretty rapid desegregation particularly in the South, but then that changes, and in 1988 we start to go backwards. So we reach kind of the peak of schools integrating, of black students attending majority white schools at the highest rates that they ever have in the country, and then we start to see school districts re-segregating, which means black students are starting to go to schools that are more and more segregated. And school districts that had had a degree of integration are losing that integration. ...
On American resistance to desegregating schools and housing
When I started what I kind of call the segregation beat about five years ago ... I think we had stopped talking about this as a problem. If you look at No Child Left Behind, which comes out of the Bush administration, that was all about giving up on integration in schools and just saying, "We're going to make these poor black and Latino schools equal to white schools by testing and accountability."

So no one was discussing integration anymore. I think it's because ... we never really wanted this. ... It's always had to be forced, and as soon as ... our elected officials and our courts lost the will to force it, most white Americans were just fine with that. ...

One of the things that I really try to do with my work is show how racial segregation and racial inequality was intentionally created with a ton of resources. From the federal government, to the state, to city governments, to private citizens, we put so much effort into creating this segregation and inequality, and we're willing to put almost no effort in fixing it, and that's the problem.

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How The Systemic Segregation Of Schools Is Maintained By 'Individual Choices'

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Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones says school segregation will continue to exist in America "as long as individual parents continue to make choices that only benefit their own children."

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The Benefits of Socioeconomically and Racially Integrated Schools and Classrooms

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The Benefits of Socioeconomically and Racially Integrated Schools and Classrooms

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The Century Foundation

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The Benefits of Socioeconomically and Racially Integrated Schools and Classrooms

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Research shows that racial and socioeconomic diversity in the classroom can provide students with a range of cognitive and social benefits. And school

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Who knew? Integrated Schools Can Benefit All Students

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Who knew? Integrated Schools Can Benefit All Students

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Education Week

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Who Knew? Integrated Schools Can Benefit All Students - Education Week

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There are solid educational reasons why integrated schools benefit students and society, says Willis D. Hawley, professor emeritus of education at the University of Maryland.

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Report finds segregation in education on the rise

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Report finds segregation in education on the rise

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OC Register

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WASHINGTON - Six decades after the Supreme Court outlawed separating students by race, stubborn disparities persist in how the country educates its poor and minority children.

A report Tuesday by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found deepening segregation of black and Hispanic students at high-poverty K-12 public schools. These schools often offered fewer math, science and college prep classes, while having disproportionally higher rates of students who were held back in ninth grade, suspended or expelled.

"Segregation in public K-12 schools isn't getting better. It's getting worse, and getting worse quickly," Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia said. The analysis, he said, confirmed that America's schools are largely segregated by race and class, leaving "more than 20 million students of color now attending racially and socioeconomically isolated public schools."

"This report is a national call to action," said Scott, the House education committee's top Democrat and among the lawmakers who requested the study. Its release coincided with the 62nd anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which declared segregated schools unconstitutional.

"While much has changed in public education in the decades following this landmark decision and subsequent legislative action, research has shown that some of the most vexing issues affecting children and their access to educational excellence and opportunity today are inextricably linked to race and poverty," the report said.

GAO studied three school districts in the South, Northeast and West. Each took steps to increase racial and economic diversity in the schools but were hampered by transportation issues and getting support from the parents and the community.

In a separate paper, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA said New York and Illinois have been "at or very near the top of the list" of states where African-American and Latino students have been most severely segregated. It found that "residential resegregation" in some parts of Maryland spilled over into the schools and that in California, the percentage of Hispanics was increasing as the overall school population declined.

"We need to create schools that build a society where the talent of all is developed and students of all races-ethnicities are prepared to understand and live successfully in a society that moves beyond separation toward mutual respect and integration," the group said.

The GAO report found that in the 2013-2014 school year, 16 percent of the nation's public schools had high concentrations of poor and black or Hispanic students, up from 9 percent at the start of the millennium. The student body at these schools were at least 75 percent black or Hispanic and poor - and in some cases 100 percent. The findings were based on an analysis of Education Department data.

These schools tended to provide fewer math courses, with calculus and seventh and eighth grade algebra seen as particularly lacking. In science, they had less biology, chemistry and physics courses than their more affluent counterparts with fewer minority students.

Less than half of the mostly poor, mostly minority schools offered AP math courses. Looking at all public schools, low-income and minority students were far less likely to enroll in these more rigorous courses.

Hispanic students at these schools tended to be "triple segregated by race, income and language," according to specialists and educators who were interviewed by the GAO.

Education Secretary John B. King, Jr., said one big reason for the disparities is money.

Inequitable resource distributions "are shaping inequitable opportunities for students," King said after the report was released. He said President Barack Obama has asked for more education dollars, including money for grant programs to support districts with community-developed plans that increase socio-economic diversity in schools.

Nancy Zirkin, executive vice president and director of policy at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said, "We must focus on fixing resource disparities that have plagued students of color and low-income students for generations."

Other findings:

* Students at these high-poverty minority schools were 7 percent of all ninth grade students in the country, but were 17 percent of all students held back that grade.

* Students at these schools accounted for 12 percent of all students nationwide, and represented 22 percent of all students with one or more out-of-school suspensions and 16 percent of all students expelled.

* In the 2013-14 school year, Hispanic students were the largest minority group in schools - 25 percent Hispanic students, compared to 16 percent black students. Both groups have poverty rates two to three times higher than the rates of white students.

The report recommends that the Education Department more routinely analyze its civil rights data to identify disparities that need to be addressed. At the Justice Department, the GAO auditors suggested more monitoring of open federal desegregation court cases.

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Report finds segregation in education on the rise

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WASHINGTON - Six decades after the Supreme Court outlawed separating students by race, stubborn disparities persist in how the country educates its poor and minority children. A report Tuesday by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found deepening segregation of black and Hispanic students at high-poverty K-12 public schools.

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School choice blamed for segregating schools

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School choice blamed for segregating schools

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ABC

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School choice blamed for segregating schools

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An Escambia County School board member is shining a light on a school policy she said may be creating segregation in schools. Linda Moutlrie who represents District 3 has noticed a trend in lower funded, lower-performing schools in her district. She said some are becoming mostly made up of minority and low income students.

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WNYC

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When it came to choosing a school for her daughter, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones decided on a segregated, low-income school several miles from home. "This was the hardest decision I've had to make for my child.... I hoped, like many parents, to be able to put her in a truly integrated school."

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Segregation still woven into America's public school system2,400 views

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Segregation still woven into America's public school system2,400 views

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CBS

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Segregation still woven into America's public school system

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This week marks 62 years since the U.S. Supreme court outlawed segregation in public schools. But a recent study ordered by the U.S. government discovered the percentage of schools comprised of mostly black or Hispanic students has more than doubled since 2000.

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Brown v. Board of Education: 60 years later segregation still widespread

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Brown v. Board of Education: 60 years later segregation still widespread

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CBS

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Brown v. Board of Education: 60 years later segregation still widespread

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Studies show that even though 60 years have passed since the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v Board of Education decision, segregation remains widespread in the U.S. One school in New York is trying to buck that trend. Elaine Quijano reports.

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America is more diverse than ever, but its schools are growing more segregated

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America is more diverse than ever, but its schools are growing more segregated

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LA Times

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America's school-age population is more diverse than ever before, reflecting the demographic shift rapidly taking place in our country. America's schools, however, are more segregated than they have been for decades.

During the two decades between 1970 and 1990, the nation made steady progress toward school desegregation, particularly in the South. At peak, 40% of black southern students attended a formerly all-white school, while less than a third of all black students attended black schools.

Since the 1990s, that progress has been reversing in Southern public schools, while the largely intractable segregation of the Northern cities has intensified. Nationwide, nearly 75% of black students attend so-called majority-minority schools, and 38% attend schools with a white population of 10% or less. Similar statistics apply to Latino students: 80% and 40%, respectively. Both black and Latino students are much more likely than white students to attend a school where 60% or more of their classmates are living in poverty, as measured by the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch programs.

Separate remains unequal as schools with concentrated poverty and racial segregation are more likely to have less-experienced teachers, high levels of teacher turnover, inadequate facilities and fewer classroom resources.

The cost of school segregation and white racial isolation is immense.

Legal constraints have much to do with this backward momentum. Some 60 years after Brown vs. Board of Education, a series of key Supreme Court decisions have dramatically reduced the number of implementation methods available to communities engaged in school desegregation. They have eliminated strategies such as cross-district busing, dismantled local court supervision of desegregation plans, and limited use of race-based admissions to ensure diversity in magnet school programs.

According to an analysis by the UCLA Civil Rights Project, the number of intensely segregated schools with zero to 10% white enrollment has more than tripled as these options for desegregation have been curtailed. Students are, once again, predominantly assigned to public schools based on where they live - and to the extent that neighborhoods are segregated, the schools remain so. The persistence of residential segregation now ensures continuing school segregation.

Is that a national concern? Apparently not for most people.

A 2017 poll found that while 70% of parents would like to have their child in a racially diverse school, 57% prefer proximity over diversity. That is, they would rather send their child to a less diverse school in the neighborhood than a more diverse school farther away. Only 25% think diversity would be worth a trip.

The obvious solution is to diversify neighborhoods, but that's elusive. Contemporary surveys of racial attitudes among whites indicate that the larger the hypothetical black population in an area, the more likely white respondents are to express discomfort about living there. Sociologists Douglas Massey and Jonathan Tannen report that high levels of black-white segregation have remained relatively unchanged for the last 40 years. A similar pattern is visible among Latino families in the country's two largest Latino communities - New York and Los Angeles, where nearly 20% live in extremely segregated, or what researchers call "hypersegregated," neighborhoods.

Such continuing segregation helps explain the 2013 American Values Survey finding that 75% of white adults have entirely white social networks, without the presence of any people of color.

The cost of school segregation and white racial isolation is immense. As long as children of color remain trapped in under-resourced schools, many won't have the opportunity to develop their talents - a loss not just for those children and their families, but the whole country. Meanwhile, white children won't have sufficient opportunities to develop the skills needed to engage effectively in a multiracial society. Racial isolation means that experience of "the other" is too often rooted in well-worn stereotypes, rather than in knowledge nuanced by ongoing engagement. Fear and anxiety about the unfamiliar are the common result.

Colleges and universities have a role to play in changing course. More and more young people are making the choice to pursue higher education; even Harvard University has reported that for the first time in its history students of color make up more than 50% of the entering class. For many students, regardless of racial background, the higher education environment will be the most racially diverse learning environment they have experienced in their lives. It is incumbent upon educators to provide the scaffolding needed to help students engage effectively across lines of difference.

Proximity alone will not be sufficient. Because of both lack of direct contact and repeated exposure to cultural stereotypes while growing up, cross-group interactions can be uncomfortable. Even genuine efforts at friendship can be derailed by awkward interactions and unconscious bias. But institutions that create meaningful opportunities for structured interactions such as cooperative learning and intergroup dialogue have a chance to change our social trajectory.

Students who had the most diversity experiences during college continued that pattern of cross-racial interaction - in their neighborhoods and at work - several years after their college graduations. These young people have the potential to finally interrupt our well-established patterns of residential segregation and can perhaps begin to make the ideal of the Brown ruling a reality in this century.
Beverly Daniel Tatum, president emerita of Spelman College, is a psychologist and author of "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? and Other Conversations About Race." Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook

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America is more diverse than ever before, but its schools are growing more segregated

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America's school-age population is more diverse than ever before, reflecting the demographic shift rapidly taking place in our country. America's schools, however, are more segregated than they have been for decades. During the two decades between 1970 and 1990, the nation made steady progress toward school desegregation, particularly in the South.

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PBS

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Beyond Brown : Pursuing the Promise . Long Road Ahead . Did you Pass? Summary | PBS

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Co.Design

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Eric Fischer saw those maps, and took it upon himself to create similar ones for the top 40 cities in the United States. Fisher used a straight forward method borrowed from Rankin: Using U.S. Census data from 2000, he created a map where one dot equals 25 people. The dots are then color-coded based on race: White is pink; Black is blue; Hispanic is orange, and Asian is green.

The results for various cities are fascinating: Just like every city is different, every city is integrated (or segregated) in different ways.

Washington, D.C., for example, has a stark east/west divide between white and black:

Detroit, meanwhile, is marked by the infamous Eight Mile beltway, which serves a precise boundary for the city's black and white populations. Integration is almost non existent:

However, other cities present better pictures of racial integration. The San Francisco Bay, for example. While the northern part San Francisco proper is very, very white while the other parts are relatively segregated, the outlying bay communities such as Oakland have fascinating patches of integration - perhaps partly because in those areas no one minority totally dominates:

That's not the case with New York, however: There are ultra-dense areas of extreme racial concentration. But the sheer number of people in those areas means that the boundary areas become intensely rich areas of cross-cultural ferment:

L.A., meanwhile, is sort of the opposite. Because no part of the city is particularly dense, you get blended neighborhoods which are at times larger than the racially homogeneous ones:

Meanwhile, here's what San Antonio looks like - a city which demographers and political scientists often point to as the future of the post-race Southwest, where whites and Hispanics live together without boundaries. While you can see there's a predominance of Hispanics near the city center, you can also see that Hispanics are fairly evenly integrated throughout the rest of the city - there's really no such thing as a rich, whites-only enclave (the large version in particular bears this out):

Fascinating, right? Originally, Rankin created the mapping methodology because he was frustrated with the way racial boundaries continue to be mapped. Usually, ethnic neighborhoods are shown as homogeneous, sharply bounded swathes of color. But obviously, living in a city tells a much different story - and the nature of the boundary areas are at least as important to the identity of any city as the so-called ethnic centers.

[H/T: Datapointed via Flowing Data]

See more Infographics of the Day

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Infographics of the Day: How Segregated Is Your City?

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Eric Fischer saw those maps, and took it upon himself to create similar ones for the top 40 cities in the United States. Fisher used a straight forward method borrowed from Rankin: Using U.S. Census data from 2000, he created a map where one dot equals 25 people.

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PBS

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Beyond Brown : Pursuing the Promise . Long Road Ahead . It's About Money Summary | PBS

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ProPublica

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Jones didn't waste time setting the boisterous class to task. The AP exam was approaching. Students who didn't score high enough wouldn't get college credit for the class. Even though the 17 girls and boys gathered in front of him made up Central's brightest, their practice essay about a poem hadn't gone so well.

D'Leisha raised her hand, her brow furrowed. How many kids had made the cutoff last year? she asked. Only two students had, but the teacher dodged the question. "I really do believe all of you can make those scores," he said.

He passed out an essay question about D. H. Lawrence's novel The Rainbow. As the students began to write, a girl sitting to his left scrunched up her nose and raised her hand. She couldn't spell a word she wanted to use in her essay. Jones told her to look it up in one of the heavy red dictionaries in the baskets below their desks.

"You know what I don't understand?" the girl said, a pen poised at her lips. "You always tell us to look up the word. How are we supposed to look a word up if we don't know to spell it?"

Jones stopped. His eyes scanned each of the 17 brown faces looking expectantly back at him. Then he gave an answer that seemed to sum up their educational experience. "What do we say about struggling?" he asked. "You have to work through the struggle."

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Sixty years after the Supreme Court declared an end to "separate but equal" education, many Southern school districts have moved back in time, isolating poor black and Latino students in segregated schools. ProPublica investigates Tuscaloosa's city schools, which are among the most rapidly resegregating in the country.

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Why schools still can't put segregation behind them

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Why schools still can't put segregation behind them

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Business Insider

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US Army

A federal district court judge has decided that Gardendale - a predominantly white city in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama - can move forward in its effort to secede from the school district that serves the larger county. The district Gardendale is leaving is 48 percent black and 44 percent white. The new district would be almost all white.

The idea that a judge could allow this is unfathomable to most, but the case demonstrates in the most stark terms that school segregation is still with us. While racial segregation in U.S. schools plummeted between the late 1960s and 1980, it has steadily increased ever since - to the the point that schools are about as segregated today as they were 50 years ago.

As a former school desegregation lawyer and now a scholar of educational inequality and law, I have both witnessed and researched an odd shift to a new kind of segregation that somehow seems socially acceptable. So long as it operates with some semblance of furthering educational quality or school choice, even a federal district court is willing to sanction it.

While proponents of the secession claim they just want the best education for their children and opponents decry the secession as old-school racism, the truth is more complex: Race, education and school quality are inextricably intertwined.

Rationalizing Gardendale's segregation

In some respects, Gardendale is no different from many other communities.

Thirty-seven percent of our public schools are basically one-race schools - nearly all white or all minority. In New York, two out of three black students attend a school that is 90 to 100 percent minority.

Shutterstock.com

In many areas, this racial isolation has occurred gradually over time, and is often written off as the result of demographic shifts and private preferences that are beyond a school district's control.

The Gardendale parents argued their motivations were not about race at all, but just ensuring their kids had access to good schools. The evidence pointed in the other direction: In language rarely offered by modern courts, the judge found, at the heart of the secession, " a desire to control the racial demographics of [its] public schools " by "eliminat[ing]... black students [from] Gardendale schools."

Still, these findings were not enough to stop the secession. As in many other cases over the past two decades, the judge conceded to resegregation, speculating that if she stopped the move, innocent parties would suffer: Black students who stayed in Gardendale would be made to feel unwelcome and those legitimately seeking educational improvements would be stymied.

Simply put, the judge could not find an upside to blocking secessionists whom she herself characterized as racially motivated.

As such, the court held that Gardendale's secession could move forward. Two of its elementary schools can secede now, while the remaining elementary and upper-level schools must do so gradually.

The problem with conceding to segregation

Unfortunately, there's no middle ground in segregation cases. No matter what spin a court puts on it, allowing secessions like Gardendale's hands racism a win.

AP Photo, File

While it's true that stopping the secession may come with a cost to members of that community who have done nothing wrong, our Constitution demands that public institutions comply with the law. That is the price of living in a democracy that prizes principles over outcomes.While it's true that stopping the secession may come with a cost to members of that community who have done nothing wrong, our Constitution demands that public institutions comply with the law. That is the price of living in a democracy that prizes principles over outcomes.

In this case, the constitutional principles are clear. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court held that there is no such thing as separate but equal schools: Segregated schools are "inherently unequal."

Rather than stick to these principles, the judge in the Gardendale case seemingly tried to strike a bargain with segregation. As long as Gardendale appoints "at least one African-American resident" to its school board and does not do anything overtly racist moving forward, the court will allow the city to pursue its own agenda.

The sordid roots of school quality - and inequality

The ruling in Gardendale is a step toward reinforcing an unfortunate status quo in Alabama.

Alabama is one of a handful of states that amended its state constitution in an attempt to avoid desegregation in the 1950s. The amendment gave parents the right to avoid sending their kids to integrated schools and made clear that the state was no longer obligated to fund public education. Alabama preferred an underfunded and optional educational system to an integrated one. Courts quickly struck down the discriminatory parts of the new constitution, but the poor state education system remained.

Today, student achievement in Alabama ranks dead last - or near it - on every measure. Most communities don't have the resources to do anything about it. Funding is relatively low - and unequal from district to district. Even after adjusting for variations in regional costs, a recent study shows that the overwhelming majority of schools in Alabama are funded at ten percent or more below the national average and another substantial chunk is thirty-three percent or more below the national average.

Parents trapped in under-resourced schools understandably feel like they need to take action. But rather than demanding an effective and well-supported statewide system of public schools, parents with the means often feel compelled to isolate their children from the larger system that surrounds them.

And while whites and blacks struggle over the future of Gardendale's schools, the real culprits - the current state legislature and the segregationists who gutted public education in Alabama decades ago - go unchallenged.

AP Photo/Nati Harnik

The path forward leads through equal public education

The education system in Alabama, like in so many other states, is rigged against a large percentage of families and communities: Those with less money tend to get a worse education. Until these states reform their overall education funding systems, the inequalities and inadequacies that they produce will continue to fuel current racial motivations.

The lawsuit in Gardendale was a poor vehicle for fixing Alabama's education system: The state's overall education system was not on trial. The only issue before the court was a racially motivated district line in one small community.

But our small communities are connected to larger education systems.

In my view, we cannot fix those systems by way of more individual choice, charters, vouchers or school district secessions. The fact is, educational funding is down across the board, when compared to a decade ago. If we want all students to have a decent shot at better education, we need to recommit to statewide systems of public education. Only then will our base fears and racial biases begin to fade into the background.

SEE ALSO: The Supreme Court outlawed segregation in schools 62 years ago - and now it's on the rise

NOW WATCH: This is what separates the Excel masters from the wannabes

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Why schools still can't put segregation behind them

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A federal district court judge has decided that Gardendale - a predominantly white city in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama - can move forward in its effort to secede from the school district that serves the larger county. The district Gardendale is leaving is 48 percent black and 44 percent white.

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U.S. Department of Education

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Ben and Jerry's

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No Longer "Separate but Equal"?

Way back in 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the concept of "separate but equal" education was unconstitutional. The much-celebrated Brown v. Board of Education decision addressed and repaired a glaring injustice, and segregation was forever banished from American schools.

That's the story most of us learned, anyway.

The reality is much more complicated.

The Problem that Never Went Away

Desegregation didn't really get going for almost a decade after Brown, but then it finally started to take hold, reaching a peak at around 1988. And guess what? Integration worked. The achievement gap, for example, between white kids and African American kids closed- dramatically.

But desegregation faltered in the face of massive "white flight"- when whites moved out of cities all around the US (especially in the Northeast) rather than keep their kids in integrated schools. And it ran up against the seemingly intractable legacy of racist zoning policies and racist mortgage lending that created segregated (and often impoverished) communities in our cities and suburbs.

A Failure of Will

Why did desegregation fail? Look to politics, leadership, and the courts-you'll see shifting priorities and a failure of will.

And so here we are, right now, with school segregation at 1968 levels. Separate was never equal, not decades ago and not today. This unjust and unfair system continues to put African American and Latino children at a severe disadvantage. Indeed, the kinds of schools most white children attend may as well be located in a different world.

Preschool is for Rainbow Art, Not Racism

The problems show up as early as preschool. Remember preschool? Learning to write your name, playing with dolls and blocks, jumping in puddles. That's the preschool experience. Also part of the experience? Racism. It turns out that a disproportionate number of African American families lack access to high-quality preschool. And that when their kids do go to preschool, they're treated unfairly: black students are much more likely to be suspended from preschool than white students.

Why is this? Does anyone really believe that black preschoolers are simply more terribly behaved?

A Suspicion of Guilt

A recent study might shine some light on what's going on. Although it doesn't cover preschool-age children, it found that black boys as young as 10 are routinely perceived to be significantly older and less innocent, when compared to white boys of the same age.

In our society, this suspicion of guilt follows people of color throughout their lives.

The Story Continues in K-12

Sadly, you won't be surprised to discover that the news doesn't get better for K-12 kids. Let's run through some of the data released by the US Department of Education in 2014:

When black students and white students commit similar infractions, black students are suspended and expelled three times more often than white students.

Black students make up 16% of student enrollment, but represent 27% of students referred to law enforcement and 31% of students subjected to arrest. White students, on the other hand, make up 51% of enrollment, 41% of students referred to law enforcement, and 39% of those arrested.

Call the Cops

The "school-to-prison pipeline" is what some have taken to calling the way school discipline increasingly involves law enforcement and channels students into the criminal justice system (where people of color can expect unfair treatment as a matter of course). When a simple altercation at school leads to an arrest for assault, something has gone terribly wrong.

"So Maybe I'll Just Drop Out"

Repeated suspensions and expulsions also eventually convince many students to drop out, and a huge number of those leaving school are African American, Latino, or Native American. A 2004 study found that only about half of African American, Latino, and Native American students graduate high school. Think about that: only half!

Wildly Underfunded

The racial wealth gap in America is huge, and systemic racism is responsible both for its creation and its persistence. Those zoning laws and mortgage practices we mentioned earlier have not only kept cities and communities segregated, they've ensured that people of color are unable to accumulate and pass on wealth in the way that white families can. The poverty in these communities means that schools attended predominately by people of color are chronically underfunded.

Kids who attend these schools regularly have inexperienced and even unlicensed teachers. Their academic performance suffers as a result, which can lead many to drop out, while putting the dream of college at risk for those who remain.

Desegregation Works

Our segregated education system is a mess-it's bad news all around, no doubt. So what can we do? Lots of people are clearly worried about it. Education experts suggest new programs every year and write dozens of op-eds touting their supposed benefits, all while neglecting one solution that, when tried, actually worked:

Desegregation.

Desegregation really worked.

Integrated schools result in:

Higher student test scores

Higher college enrollment rates

Lower dropout rates

A reduction in racial achievement gaps

And beyond that, going to school with a racially diverse student body can actually reduce racism, counter stereotypes, and lead to a greater appreciation and understanding of people who are different than we are. All of which sounds like something we desperately need.

Be Part of the Solution

Systemic racism is a corrosive and widespread problem in our society, at all levels, and we all need to do a better job of confronting it-in our neighborhoods, at our schools, and in ourselves.

Want to be part of the solution? Here's how you can take action:

Watch the amazing video below from our friends at Demos about how racism has been used to create inequalities.

Sign this very important petition to restore the Voting Rights Act, ensuring that voting is accessible to every American.

Start a conversation. Once you know the truth, it's hard to keep it to yourself. So tell a friend, a sibling, a roommate, your kooky uncle...that systemic racism is real, and we all need to fight to end it.

Take an implicit bias test, and see if you have any implicit attitudes regarding race that you don't even know about.

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School Segregation Is Still A Thing, And You Won't Believe How Common It Is

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Way back in 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the concept of "separate but equal" education was unconstitutional. The much-celebrated Brown v. Board of Education decision addressed and repaired a glaring injustice, and segregation was forever banished from American schools. That's the story most of us learned, anyway.

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How do we solve stubborn segregation in schools?

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How do we solve stubborn segregation in schools?

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PBS

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How do we solve stubborn segregation in schools?

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Despite a historic Supreme Court ruling outlawing segregated schools, today huge numbers of students remain in separate and unequal schools, most in inner cities. Special correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault talks with Pedro Noguera of the University of California, Los Angeles, about the consequences of such inequality and what can be done.

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MSNBC

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In an iconic image painted after the Supreme Court's historic Brown v. Board of Education decision, Norman Rockwell depicted a solitary black girl, dressed in a crisp white dress, walking to class on what is obviously her first day at a newly desegregated school. What sears the image in our memory are her surroundings: four federal marshals, assigned to protect her as she makes her way through a hostile crowd.

Were the painting done today, it might show law enforcement acting in a very different capacity. Instead of leading a black child safely into school, the image might very well be of police officers escorting a child out.

Sixty years after the Brown decision, de facto segregation persists because of a complex web of factors rooted in our nation's long history of discrimination. But segregation is only one of the issues faced by students of color. Increasingly, minority children are drawn into the so-called school-to-prison pipeline - the phenomenon in which draconian disciplinary policies force students out of the educational system and into the criminal justice system.

This extreme approach - which includes the overly strict enforcement of zero-tolerance policies, the use of suspension and expulsion at younger and younger ages, and increasingly turning students over to law enforcement - has resulted in a skyrocketing number of students receiving harsh punishments. Much of the increase is the result of heightened concerns over school violence, even though research shows there is no safer place for kids than in school. Another factor is the persistent misperception that students of color are inherently more dangerous.

Whatever the cause, the effects of the pipeline are both damaging and unfair. These policies have contributed to the criminalization of the classroom, whereby small infractions that would in the past have led to a trip to the principal's office and a sharp warning or detention, now become the basis for out-of-school suspension, expulsion, or, increasingly, a trip to the police station. While white children have become victims of the school-to-prison pipeline, it is students of color who feel its effects most harshly.

"The transformation of schools from institutions of learning to places more reminiscent of prisons exacts a daily toll on all students."

Dennis Parker, ACLU Racial Justice program director

The clearest indication of this criminalization has been the proliferation of law enforcement in our schools. Police officers have become a regular and growing presence in schools across America, particularly in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. Instead of investing in guidance counselors and librarians, school districts are pouring money into school resource officers to patrol schools, permanent metal detectors and state-of-the-art surveillance systems. Often students must submit to regular and invasive searches of their bags, coats and lockers from police officers. A place that should be a safe and enriching environment has increasingly taken on the air of a penal colony. The result has been a corresponding increase in kids being pushed out the school-house door and through the prison gates.

Fifteen-year-old Kyle Thompson is one such victim. A year ago, the black freshman got into a playful tug-of-war with his teacher over a note. When Kyle saw the situation had turned from lighthearted to serious in a flash, he dutifully handed the note to his teacher. The incident got Kyle placed in handcuffs, then put on house arrest, and ultimately expelled from all state public schools for a year because of Michigan's zero-tolerance laws - laws which take kids like Kyle and harshly punish them regardless of the circumstances.

The impact on students like Kyle is severe and long-lasting. Pushing children down the school-to-prison pipeline by taking them out of school and placing them in the criminal justice or juvenile detention system all but eliminates their chances of getting into college or even graduating from high school.

These policies, statistics show, disproportionately affect black students.

In the United States, 16% of all students enrolled in U.S. public schools are black, while 51% are white. Nevertheless, black students are suspended and expelled at three times the rate of white students, according to data recently released by the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights. More damning is the fact that black students account for 31% of all school-related arrests when they make up only one-sixth of the public school population. In other words, there's a one-in-three chance that every time a police officer leads a student out of school in handcuffs, that student is black.

The harmful impact is not limited to those students actually expelled from schools. The transformation of schools from institutions of learning to places more reminiscent of prisons exacts a daily toll on all students. Children get the message, and it angers them and tears at their self-esteem. They feel the stigma of suspicion and lower expectations that comes with schools that feel more like cell blocks patrolled by guards than safe places administered by teachers who care about them and their future. "They're treating us like criminals, like we're animals," one New York City public school student told ACLU researchers a few years ago.

In 1954, the problems of racial discrimination were explicit. Today they are subtle and structural. The Supreme Court in Brown may have put an end to de jure segregation, but the school-to-prison pipeline is once again teaching children of color that they are indeed separate, and certainly not equal.
Dennis Parker is the director of the ACLU's Racial Justice Program.

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In an iconic image painted after the Supreme Court's historic Brown v. Board of Education decision, Norman Rockwell depicted a solitary black girl, dressed in a crisp white dress, walking to class on what is obviously her first day at a newly desegregated school.

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PBS

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In 2004, the juniors at North Hollywood High School's Highly Gifted Magnet program each wrote a letter to PBS/KCET and the directors of this documentary regarding the inaccurate portrayal of the highly gifted magnet program. The students are still waiting for a response...

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ADAM ZYGUS

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The Return of School Segregation in Eight Charts

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The Return of School Segregation in Eight Charts

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FRONTLINE PBS

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It was 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate but equal schools were unconstitutional. The landmark decision put an end to legal segregation, but 60 years later, racial divides are back on the rise inside America's public school classrooms.

So what happened? Changing demographics is one factor at play, while another has been a string of controversial court rulings that have made it easier for states to win release from federal integration orders. For many school districts, this has meant a return to levels of integration last seen during the Johnson administration. Here is a brief overview of the landscape:

1. Gains achieved by black students in the south are gone

In the wake of the Brown decision, the percentage of black students in majority white southern schools went from zero to a peak of 43.5 percent in 1988. But those changes have reversed in recent years, with data from UCLA's Civil Rights Project showing that by 2011 that figure was back to 23.2 percent, just below where it stood in 1968.

The UCLA researchers attribute the decline to legal attacks on desegregation orders under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, as well as the 1991 decision in Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell. By a 5-3 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that a school district can be freed from an injunction to desegregate if it can demonstrate compliance with the order and also show that it will not "return to its former ways."

The south today is still the most integrated region in the nation for black students, but the trend has increasingly been away from integration. As the Civil Right Project has warned, "the direction of change ... suggests that things will continue to worsen."

BLACK STUDENTS IN WHITE SCHOOLS IN THE SOUTH

2. Court oversight increasingly faded during the 2000s

Between 1990 and 2009, courts released 45 percent of school districts under court oversight, according to research from Stanford University's Center for Education Policy Analysis. The nationwide study, which focused on districts with at least 2,000 students, found that the pace of releases went from about seven per year in the 1990s, to roughly 15 per year during the 2000s. The year with the most releases was 1998, when 21 schools in Indiana alone were removed from oversight.

SCHOOLS RELEASED FROM DESEGREGATION ORDERS

3. Segregation tends to rise without court oversight

One way researchers have measured integration is by turning to what's called the "dissimilarity index." The scale runs from 0 to 1, with 0 showing a school with balanced integration and 1 representing complete segregation.

When the Stanford researchers looked at what happens when districts leave court oversight, they found schools typically climb back toward 1, or more segregation. Schools released from integration plans saw the gulf between whites and blacks grow by 24 percent after 10 years as compared to schools still under court order. The split between white students and Latinos grew by 10 percent after a decade.

This is not to say that segregation reverts to where it was before Brown v. Board of Education - when the index was at 1 - "but segregation does increase substantially relative to levels attained under the court orders," note the researchers.

SEGREGATION AFTER RELEASE FROM COURT OVERSIGHT

4. Integration is struggling to keep up with enrollment trends

The widening divide in America's school system has taken place despite a dramatic shift in enrollment trends. Consider that from 1968 to 2011, enrollment among white students fell 28 percent, but grew by 19 percent among black students and a whopping 495 percent among Latinos. By 2011, Latinos had become the most segregated minority group in U.S. schools, even though they accounted for roughly 25 percent of the nation's 48.7 million public school students. The typical Latino student now attends a school that's nearly 57 percent Latino, more segregated than blacks and Asians.

CHANGES IN U.S. PUBLIC SCHOOL ENROLLMENT

5. Whites have the least exposure to students of other races

While Latinos are the most segregated minority group, white children have the least exposure to students of other races, according to the UCLA researchers. Today's typical white student attends a school that is nearly 75 percent white, but only one-eighth Latino and one-twelfth black. Put another way, in a classroom of 30 students, the average white student has 21 white classmates, two black classmates, four Latinos, one Asian and one "other." Conversely, the typical black or Latino student would have eight white classmates and at least 20 minority classmates.

EXPOSURE TO OTHER RACES AT SCHOOL, 2011-2012

6. Segregation is as much about poverty as it is about race

The UCLA research also found strong connections between poverty and segregation, with blacks and Latinos representing more than half of children in schools with the most poverty, and just 11 percent of students in the least impoverished schools. For many black and Latino children, this can often mean less qualified teachers, as well as shoddier facilities and materials.

"In many respects, the schools serving white and Asian students and those serving black and Latino students represent two different worlds," say the researchers.

MINORITIES IN POOR SCHOOLS VS. WEALTHY SCHOOLS

7. Integration boosts the odds of high school graduation

Integration doesn't just mean access to better schools, it can also mean a better chance of earning a degree. Rucker Johnson, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, has studied the life trajectories of students born between 1945 and 1970, focusing on the effects that exposure to court-ordered desegregation had on their lives. In one study, he found that for every year a black student attended an integrated school, their likelihood of graduating went up 2 percentage points. The longer that student stayed in school, the greater his odds. (In the chart below, the vertical axis represents a student's probability of graduating, based on Johnson's models). Johnson found that the difference is tied to the fact that schools under court supervision benefit from higher per-pupil spending and smaller student-teacher ratios.

PROBABILITY OF HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION FOR BLACKS WHO ATTENDED DESEGREGATED SCHOOLS

8. Integrated schools can lead to a healthier financial future

Another benefit of attending a school under court oversight is higher wages later in life, and a smaller chance of experiencing poverty, according to Johnson. His research found that the average effect among blacks of a five-year exposure to court-ordered desegregation was a 15 percent increase in wages. That probability, represented below along the vertical axis, amounted to an extra $5,900 in annual family income, and an 11-percentage point decline in yearly incidences of poverty. Johnson also found that while desegregation led to clearly positive outcomes for blacks, it caused no statistically significant harm for whites.

WAGES FOR BLACKS FROM DESEGREGATED SCHOOLS

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The Return of School Segregation in Eight Charts

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It was 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate but equal schools were unconstitutional. The landmark decision put an end to legal segregation, but 60 years later, racial divides are back on the rise inside America's public school classrooms. So what happened?

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Modern-Day Segregation in Public Schools

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Modern-Day Segregation in Public Schools

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THE ATLANTIC

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Modern-Day Segregation in Public Schools

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The Department of Education has branded "tracking"—designating students for separate educational paths based on their academic performance—as a modern day form of segregation.