School Integration, 65 years after Brown by Peter Piazza

Sixty-five years after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, the school integration movement is at an inflection point, defined in mathematics as the place on a curve where it begins to change shape, often from a low point to a high point. Similarly, the movement for school diversity is caught between a contemporary low point in federal and state support for integration and a high point in expanded public attention to the benefits of integration. On May 10^th 2019, leading scholars took stock of progress and challenges in the  contemporary school integration at Brown@65, a conference at Penn State that was co-hosted by the Center for Education & Civil Rights (CECR), and the university’s Africana Research Center. Panels featured nine leading scholars on school integration. New York Times writer and McArthur Genius Award winner, Nikole Hannah-Jones, delivered a stirring keynote, in which she discussed the moral imperative for school integration. The keynote will be the topic for a separate article. This article, instead, reviews the essential facts, trends, and changes AJE readers should know from this conference and the most up-to-date research about the pressures and challenges to desegregating America’s public schools sixty-five years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education. 

To garner a movement, we then need to keep talking about segregation, reach a broader audience, and find ways to realize the promise of Brown after all these years.

Brown@65 Opening

CECR released a new report with the UCLA Civil Rights Project, which sounds a frustratingly familiar alarm about the pace of school resegregation (Frankenberg, Ayscue & Orfield, 2019). CECR Director Erica Frankenberg used the report to frame the conversation for the day. In particular, she noted:

• Across the country, the percent of intensely segregated schools tripled between 1988 & 2016, from 6% to 18%
• White students are the most isolated demographic group in the country

These trends have all occurred as diversity has increased among US schools on the whole. As you can see in the chart below, white students – for the first time ever – do not constitute a majority in US public school enrollment.

Panel I: Policies and Practices Perpetuating Racial Inequality

The first panel used the new report as a backdrop to ask: How did we get here? And how do the numbers and resegregation trendlines affect students in America’s K-12 schools? Listed below are the need-to-know points from each presentation:

• Ansley Erickson, Associate Professor of History and Education at Columbia University – (@ATErickson). Dr. Erickson opened the panel with a broad look at how we use historical analysis in contemporary school integration advocacy. In particular, she noted:
  • Historical work focuses on causality, with specificity and evidence; one powerful mode of resistance to integration has been to deny this causality. New advocacy for desegregation and equity needs a clear, detailed sense of the causal origins of the problem, at both national and local scales.
  • Contemporary desegregation advocacy has to confront rather than avoid the complex and paradoxical history of desegregation, including the ways desegregation replicated or worsened some inequalities and the ways that black educational history cannot be fully characterized through the lens of desegregation.
• Janelle Scott, Distinguished Chair in Educational Disparities at University of California, Berkeley – @janelletscott. Dr. Scott talked about the failures of “neo-Plessyism,” or a contemporary version of the “separate but equal” doctrine that is often funded by high-profile donors. She focused in particular on segregation as seen in
  • School closures – Closures, consolidations and transfers disproportionately affect Black students and continue the harmful historical legacy of firing and laying off Black teachers.
  • School choice – She notes, “Here we see a retreat of federal enforcement for desegregation, and the embrace of schools with harsh discipline for Black and Latinx families.”
  • School discipline – “Black children represent 18% of preschool enrollment, but 48% of preschool children receiving more than one out-of-school suspension.”
• Preston Green III, Professor of Educational Leadership and Law at University of Connecticut – @DrPrestonGreen. Although there is wide awareness of the role that charter schools play in school resegregation (e.g., Archbald, Hurwitz & Hurwitz, 2018; Ayscue, Nelson, Mickelson, Giersch & Bottia, 2018), there is, perhaps, less discussion about what this means for the students in those schools. Dr. Green talked about how complex financial arrangements in the charter sector may further divert money from the students they ostensibly aim to serve. Specifically, he addressed the problem of
  • Related-party transactions – when the same individual or company is in charge of the non-profit charter school as well asthe for-profit property group that leases land to their own charter school.
  • His presentation called for greater oversight of charter school finances, including “forensic analysis of related-party transactions” by auditors.

Panel II: The Role of the State Today

The second panel focused on barriers and opportunities for positive state intervention for integration.

• Elizabeth DeBray, Professor of Educational Administration and Policy at University of Georgia – @EDeBray. Dr. DeBray discussed an ongoing research project that uses interviews with federal administrators and legislative staffers to understand how federal policymakers have approached school integration policy in the transition from the Obama administration to the Trump administration. She notes that:
  • The executive branch missed a window of opportunity to do something about segregation and inequity in how it approached Race to the Top (e.g., ignoring segregation and promoting charter expansion).
  • The federal landscape for civil rights has, of course, become more inhospitable in the Trump Administration. As a result, “more is up to locals/states, which vary widely in commitment.”
• Derek Black, Professor of Law at University of South Carolina – @DerekWBlack. Building off the previous presentation, Dr. Black outlined a framework for positive state intervention towards school integration, especially:
  • Adding integration goals to Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) compliance, enforcing diversity requirements for charter schools, increase funding for magnet schools, implementing regional solutions to educational inequity, and seeking appropriate places for school district consolidation.
  • His presentation noted that we are at a critical moment in the fight for public education, but pointed toward the widespread teacher protests last year as a major source of hope: “if they’re [school privatizers] coming after you [public school advocates] individually, then that’s scary; but, if you have 10 thousand people behind you, then there’s less reason to be worried” [paraphrased]
• Gary S. Stein, Special Counsel, Pashman Stein Walder Hayden. Justice Stein was on the New Jersey Supreme Court for its many decisions in Abbott, the state’s landmark funding equity case. He’s now chair of the New Jersey Coalition for Diverse and Inclusive Schools, which filed a lawsuit, last year, on the 64th anniversary of Brown, against the state of New Jersey for policies that promote school segregation in the state (Otterman, 2018). His talk touched on the following:
  • The legal strategy behind the lawsuit, especially a relatively new trend of pursuing integration in state court, as opposed to federal court.
  • The importance of remedies that “do no harm” to traditionally under-served students. This part of his presentation picks up directly from Dr. Erickson’s, learning from the difficult truths of past desegregation efforts, to advocate for contemporary policies that do not unfairly burden non-white students and families.

Panel III: Growing Critically Conscious Teachers

The last panel went beyond policy discussions of school integration to talk about what is an essential, if not the essential, goal of school integration: preparation for thoughtful participation in a multi-cultural democracy. The panelists talked about what this means in their work and research.

• Brandi Hinnant-Crawford, Assistant Professor of Educational Research at Western Carolina University – @BNHC1984. Dr. Hinnant-Crawford discussed the factors that best nurture the growth of a critically conscious teacher, which she defined as an educator “who can imagine a better world.” Based on her experience and research, she used the metaphor of a plant to highlight important elements of critically conscious education:
  • School climate and culture (which are two different things) combined are the soil, providing essential nutrients and a foundation for healthy growth.
  • Induction and professional learning is the water, which needs to be consistent in order to have its optimal impact.
  • Parental and community engagement are the the sunlight, which catalyzes the latent potential found in the soil and water.
• Tiffany Pogue, Assistant Professor of Teacher Education at Albany State University – @TiffanyDPhD. Dr. Pogue provided a close look at what integration means for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and the role of the barriers that these organizations face in their efforts to support their students. Dr. Pogue, who teaches at an HBCU, noted that
  • HBCUs are a major vehicle for preparing teachers of color, but their efforts are restricted by a lack of resources, onerous state accreditation policies, and high teaching loads (e.g., 5 classes per semester) for instructors that could otherwise be playing an important role in informal student support and development.
  • Even small and relatively inexpensive changes could make a major difference for the students that she works with: “If we are talking about preparing critically conscious teachers, it doesn’t have to be expensive but it does have to be deliberate.”
• Valerie Kinloch, Renée and Richard Goldman Dean of the School of Education at University of Pittsburgh – @ValerieKinloch. Dr. Kinloch is the first female African American Dean of any college at the University of Pittsburgh. Her presentation focused on how she pursues culturally responsive education in her role of Dean at Pitt, especially:
  • Examining institutional practices, such as hiring; workplace climate and culture as well as how we cultivate critically conscious leaders.
  • Situating justice as a framework “to examine how oppression, privilege, and unequal power relations operate to maintain hierarchies, and to reject these hierarchies in advocating for universal human rights and educational justice.”

School segregation is a sweeping and multi-faceted problem, and, as such, there is a lot to talk about with different avenues for action. For those looking to make an impact, the task of desegregating our schools can become complicated and overwhelming. Nonetheless, in the Q&A sessions after the first panel, Policies and Practices Perpetuating Racial Inequality, there was a hopeful and grounding sense, as summarized by Dr. Tiffany Pogue on twitter: 

If people created these problems, we as people can fix them…@janelletscottgave me my new mantra for 2019. #Brown65@psu_civilrights

@TiffanyDPhD

Addressing school segregation does not need to be more complicated than this. We can make integration a priority in how we structure policy and how we approach educational practice. To garner a movement, we then need to keep talking about segregation, reach a broader audience, and find ways to realize the promise of Brown after all these years.

Peter Piazza is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Penn State University Center for Education and Civil Rights. His work is oriented towards understanding how public education can best prepare citizens for thoughtful participation in a multicultural democracy. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction from Boston College. Peter writes about contemporary school integration at the School Diversity Notebook.

References

Archbald, D., Hurwitz, A., & Hurwitz, F. (2018). Charter schools, parent choice, and segregation: A longitudinal study of the growth of charters and changing enrollment patterns in five school districts over 26 years. education policy analysis archives, 26, 22.

Ayscue, J., Nelson, A. H., Mickelson, R. A., Giersch, J., & Bottia, M. C. (2018, Janurary). Charters as a Driver of Resegregation. UCLA Civil Rights Project-Proyecto Derechos Civiles. Retrieved from https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/charters-as-a-driver-of-resegregation/Charters-as-a-Driver-of-Resegregation-012518.pdf

Frankenberg, E., Ee, J., Ayscue, J., & Orfield, G. (2019, May 10). Harming Our Common Future: America’s Segregated Schools 65 Years After Brown. UCLA Civil Rights Project-Proyecto Derechos Civiles.Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/23j1b9nv

Otterman, S. (2018, May 17). New Jersey Law Codifies School Segregation, Suit Says. New York Times.Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/nyregion/new-jersey-school-segregation-suit.html