Brown@65 | Introduction to a special online issue about contemporary school segregation by Peter Piazza and Heather Bennett*

In the 2019 Democratic Primary debates, school integration resurfaced in the national policy discussion, after a long period of absence. The short exchange between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden at the June 27^thdebate sparked extensive media attention and analysis in the weeks that followed. At the second round of debates on July 31^st, moderators reprised the skirmish between Harris and Biden, and other candidates rushed quickly to call for action on contemporary school segregation and racial injustice. This renewed national attention is long overdue, especially in light of research illustrating that the percent of intensely segregated schools tripled between 1988 & 2016, from 6% to 18% (Frankenberg, Ayscue & Orfield, 2019).

As the discussion expands, however, so does the proliferation of inaccurate narratives about the causes of, and solutions to, contemporary school segregation. Among those misconceptions: the notion that few have been active on this issue after the Civil Rights Era and the related sense that we do not know how to solve these problems. Both narratives were debunked earlier this year at the Brown@65 conference, held to commemorate the 65^th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. 

Hosted by Penn State’s Center for Education and Civil Rights and the university’s Africana Research Center, Brown@65 featured panel presentations from scholars, activists and lawyers who have been working urgently for school integration in the time that it had faded from the national spotlight. The conference keynote was delivered by New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones,a major national leader in the conversation about school segregation. This article builds on a previous AJE forum post that summarizes key points from each of the panels (Piazza, 2019). In particular, we highlight themes that cut across the keynote as well as articles submitted by panelists for a special online series presenting select conference proceedings. 

Prioritizing integration and racial justice

As in the keynote, the papers posted in the coming weeks highlight the importance of intentionally foregrounding integration and racial justice from the highest levels of policy down to the work conducted at the classroom level. Speakers at the Brown@65 conference noted that, across these spaces, we – as a society, as policy makers, as educators – know what works to promote integration, and we need the will and courage to make it a priority.

Next week’s post, from Elizabeth DeBray, Erica Frankenberg, Kathryn McDermott, Janelle Scott, and Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, highlights the consequences of policy that lacks political will for integration. Their article traces changes in federal policy on school integration from the Obama Administration up to the present day. They note that, although the Obama Administration improved civil rights enforcement and issued key guidance on voluntary school integration, it missed a major opportunity by omitting school integration from the Race to the Top competitive grant program.

As the authors illustrate, much has changed at the federal level in the last several years. In the waning days of the Obama Administration, under Education Secretary John B. King, the Department of Education launched a competitive grant initiative to help fund local level voluntary integration efforts. However, the Trump Administration pulled that program, along with key Obama-era guidance on school integration and civil rights enforcement. Currently, the Trump Administration is considering revisions to the “disparate impact” standard, which requires that plaintiffs show that a policy’s impact is disproportionate regardless of what its original intention might have been. If this standard was to be changed to require proof of intentionality, it would be a major blow to federal civil rights enforcement. 

In light of the federal government’s inaction on contemporary school segregation, DeBray and colleagues call on researchers, activists and legal scholars to make integration and racial justice a priority in their work. If the federal government has taken the spotlight off these issues, then the school integration movement must turn that light back on. Along these lines, their article concludes with several sources of hope, including the recent removal of “anti-busing” provisions in the federal budget, diversity initiatives maintained by career staff at federal Equity Assistance Centers, and contemporary youth activism for school integration. They note that these efforts “set the context for the potential for counter-currents to the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back civil rights.” They argue that, by prioritizing integration and racial justice, these efforts make progress where possible and keep hope alive for more impactful civil rights work after the end of the Trump presidency.

On September 9th, Ansley Erickson, an educational history professor at Teachers College, notes the importance of historical analysis that focuses on the causality of segregation and that foregrounds the undue burden that desegregation often placed on the Black community. Erickson writes that “starting in the mid-1970s, legal efforts to limit desegregation claimed and gained strength from the idea that segregation’s causes couldn’t be known.” She calls on historians and contemporary legal advocates to connect segregation to the “nameable, consequential, enduring policy choices” that gave rise to it, noting that if we claim not to know what caused a problem, we can’t even begin to solve it. 

In addition, Erickson criticizes a common element of the historical narrative about desegregation: namely, “the potent anti-blackness visible in the conceptualization and the implementation of desegregation.” Because Black schools were framed “as the problem that desegregation was to solve,” Black people bore a widely disproportionate burden in the response and proposed solutions in the forms, for example, of long bus rides and the mass firing of Black educators because desegregation efforts centralized white children and communities. By conceptualizing the problem differently – perhaps as a debt owed to Black people after generations of discriminatory policy – we may begin to build political will for a different kind of solution, that lifts up, values, and centers Black educational experiences.

On September 16th, Brandi Hinnant-Crawford, a professor of educational research at Western Carolina University, notes the importance of prioritizing racial justice in teacher professional development and support. Comparing school leaders to careful gardeners, Hinnant-Crawford highlights the conditions that must be in place to nurture the growth of critically conscious teachers. In particular, school climate and culture (which, she notes, are different) compose the soil that “can either enhance their development as a critically conscious teacher or detract from that development.” Meanwhile, professional development focused on the “craft of teaching” as well as “students and their socio-political realities” is the water that promotes growth when administered regularly and in appropriate quantities. Lastly, in her analogy, sunlight takes the form of “the knowledge and expertise of parents and the community,” which can be “used to illuminate the learning and operational processes within the school.” Hinnant-Crawford argues that leaders can learn a lot from meaningful community engagement and that they “must be willing to use their light as guidance.” Although the context is very different, there’s a clear parallel here with the paper from DeBray and colleagues: as with school integration policy making, many educational leaders know how to make racial justice a priority in their work, but we need the will to do so more broadly.

Speakers at the Brown@65 conference noted that, across these spaces, we – as a society, as policy makers, as educators – know what works to promote integration, and we need the will and courage to make it a priority.

In addition to his previously published summary of the panel presentation, Peter Piazza summarizes the conference keynote in the fourth paper for this series on September 23. In a rousing one-hour address, Nikole Hannah-Jones’ conference keynote provided a coda for the day’s most prominent themes and a call to action. Her talk covered the history of race in America since the first enslaved people arrived on this continent, a theme later elaborated in the 1619 Project published recently in the New York Times. She argued that we must make integration and racial justice a priority, because others have been working for a long time on the opposite – the maintenance of an unequal racial caste system. Segregation, of course, did not arise from passivity. The will to preserve white supremacy persists in America, beginning with early myths about Black inferiority used to justify slavery and continuing through contemporary reforms that aim to reproduce “separate, but equal” education.

Hannah-Jones argued that, because segregation was intentional, we must be intentional about working towards integration. She asked audience members to consider their personal “skin in the game” for meaningful racial integration. In the forthcoming article, Piazza summarizes her call to action in the following questions:

• If your child’s not worth a perceived sacrifice (i.e., to attend low-rated schools), then whose child is?
• Do you think other children deserve the same opportunity as your child?
• Do you need to do something with your own child to challenge America’s long-standing racist caste system?

The final paper in this series comes from Tiffany Pogue on September 30th, a professor at Albany State University (ASU), who writes about the role that Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) can play in responding to the nationwide shortage of Black teachers. Her message was particularly appropriate for an audience composed largely of educational leaders and scholars from Pennsylvania, where more than half of all districts in the sate have no teachers of color. Pogue writes that because HBCUs have long nurtured the development of teachers of color, they can be a resource for educator preparation programs across the country. In particular, HBCUs have been instrumental in pioneering methods for recruiting and retaining Black pre-service teachers.

Despite their potential, however, teacher preparation programs at HBCUs face a number of compounding challenges, including declining enrollment, significant budget cuts, and barriers to entering the teaching profession, such as increased costs associated with teacher certification. Writing from an HBCU, Pogue offers guidelines for potential ways forward. In particular, given ASU’s recent merger with a Predominately White Institution (PWI), there is much to learn in this case about partnerships that “draw upon these institutions’ specialized knowledge for preparing Black teachers.” Consistent with the other papers in this series, Pogue illustrates that, due to the long history of HBCUs in teacher pre-service development, we know what it takes to recruit and support teachers of color; however, policy makers need to make teacher diversity a priority. As she argues, without more support for HBCUs, we are shortchanging one of the most important “existing programmatic and institutionalized structures that create the Black teachers that can serve students in desegregated spaces.”

Regardless of whether the national spotlight has been focused on it, activists, scholars and school leaders have remained active on school integration, with competing forces pulling in dramatically different directions. We are at a critical moment now. School integration rates are plummeting as racial tensions rise inside and outside of schools. Despite the 65 years since Brown, we have a long way to go towards realizing its promise – integrated education that prepares students for thoughtful participation in a multicultural democracy. What we do now will determine whether we can come closer to that ideal in the next 65 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.

Heather N. Bennett is the director of equity services at the Pennsylvania School Boards Association (PSBA). She received her Ph.D. in educational leadership at Penn State University where she conducted research in and programming on K–12 and higher education equity issues across Pennsylvania. She also earned her Juris Doctorate from Penn State, Dickinson School of Law, and is licensed to practice law in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Bennett previously taught high school social studies in Fulton County, Ga.

*The views in this piece should not be taken as the views of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association.

References

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

Piazza, P. (2019, July 8). School segregation, 65 years after Brown. AJE Forum. Retrieved from http://www.ajeforum.com/school-integration-65-years-after-brown-by-peter-piazza/