Factors Contributing to Resegregation
#1 - The School Choice Movement
Reframing public education: From public good to private entitlement
A 2018 Washington Post article shows the destructive transition from defining education as a public good, created for the purpose of strengthening our democracy, to a private good where the concerns of the individual outweigh the good of all. This often informs the decisions of upper and middle-class parents who advocate for school choice.
Affluent white parents can pay for test prep to get their kids into better charter schools. They can move to the suburbs to get into wealthier districts. They can advocate getting their kids into honors classes. You don’t have to stand at the schoolyard door or attack buses anymore. You can just quietly use your money and education to leverage structural inequality in your favor.
— Valerie Strauss, “Back to the future: A new school district secession movement is gaining steam” (Washington Post, 2018)
In The New White Flight, UNC School of Law Professor Erika Wilson notes that when given the choice, white parents tend to choose mostly white schools “even when school quality is controlled for, meaning that whites tend to choose predominately white schools even when presented with the choice of a more integrated school that is of good academic quality.” School choice becomes a vehicle for white flight from integrated schools at the expense of the taxpayer.
One of the most significant forces in the school choice movement is the system the state uses to evaluate schools, which is used by families to decide where to live and enroll their children. Statistically speaking, test achievement scores are more strongly correlated with the demographic make-up of the school (family resources, parental level of education, etc.) than with the quality of the education being provided in its classrooms. North Carolina’s A-F School Performance Grades formula is 80% achievement and 20% growth, one of the worst in the country.
In addition, North Carolina is one of a dozen states that does not include the performance of subgroups such as Black or Hispanic students in the grade. In School Performance Grades: A Legislative Tool for Stigmatizing Non-White Schools, Kris Nordstrom and Luke Tillitski explain that this means North Carolina “provides schools with no incentive to address opportunity gaps, and the SPGs fail to provide stakeholders with useful information on the equitability of outcomes.” This graph from their report demonstrates the strength of the correlation between school letter grade and racial segregation.
In fact, as Noliwe Rooks proposes in Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education (2017), the school choice movement is not just about private entitlement, it is also about private interests exploiting the education marketplace for profit. Even well-intentioned enterprises, Rooks notes, are misguided and miss the mark for our students from underserved communities.
Government, philanthropy, business, and financial sectors have heavily invested in efforts to privatize certain segments of public education; stock schools with inexperienced, less highly paid teachers whose hiring often provides companies with a ‘finders’ fee’; outsource the running of schools to management organizations; and propose virtual schools as a literal replacement for—not just a supplement to-the brick and mortar education experience. The attraction, of course, is the large pot of education dollars that’s been increasingly available to private corporate financial interests…Charter schools, charter management organizations, vouchers, virtual schools, and an alternatively certified, non-unionized teaching force represent the bulk of the contemporary solutions offered as cures for what ails communities that are upward of 80 percent Black or Latino.
— Noliwe Rooks, Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education (2017)
Recommendations for promoting education as a public good:
- Focus on controlled choice plans that include traditional and year-round base schools and other magnet options to attract diverse student populations across districts
- Enact stricter regulations and accountability measures to prevent private interests from causing harm in the pursuit of profit
- Replace the A-F School Performance Grade system with one that deemphasizes test score achievement and includes a variety of data on school quality and equity
- Establish minimum and maximum percentages of Economically Disadvantaged students assigned to each school when drawing school assignment zones
- Fully fund the Leandro Plan based on WestEd Report recommendations for underserved student populations so families do not feel the need to find other options that may cost money or require transportation/meals
Charter school growth and issues of regulation
According to Stymied by Segregation, North Carolina charter schools tend to be more racially and economically imbalanced than the school districts in which they are located. A 2017 study by UCLA showed that nationwide charter schools are more segregated than traditional public schools and the share of minority charter students has declined over time. In addition, the burgeoning numbers of charters drive increasing amounts of segregation in traditional public schools, as more middle-class white students leave their district schools.
A bill passed in June 2018 by the NC General Assembly gave four Mecklenburg County towns the authority to start and run their own charter schools. Further, SL 2018-3 / HB514 allows the cities to levy taxes for charter schools, a change in how taxes raised by cities have been used. The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law along with several other parties including the Charlotte-Mecklenburg branch of the NAACP challenged the constitutionality of HB514, but did not win the lawsuit.
Recommendations for reforming charter schools:
- Use weighted lotteries with a diversity plan to ensure the racial and socioeconomic makeup of charter schools “reasonably reflect racial and ethnic composition” of the areas in which they are located
- Require public charter schools to offer resources needed to ensure equitable access to the school: free and reduced lunch, safe and reliable transportation, full special education services, and English language support
- Create more robust systems of transparency and accountability for charter schools to prevent corruption, mismanagement, and discrimination
"Opportunity Scholarship" voucher program
The North Carolina Opportunity Scholarship program provides vouchers, which are upfront dollars that families can use toward paying the tuition of a private school. One of the shortcomings of school vouchers is that they increase segregation in private schools along racial, religious, and socioeconomic lines. Research by Halley Potter from the Century Foundation shows that white families tend to use vouchers to move their children to predominantly white private and faith-based schools. The NC General Assembly has made the voucher program universal, with no income requirements, and has budgeted billions of taxpayer dollars toward the program over the coming years.
Private and religious schools are not required to serve free/reduced lunch, offer transportation, or provide special education services—and they can select the students they admit and remove students who do not meet their obligations and expectations. Almost 90% of voucher students in North Carolina attend religious schools, which are allowed to contradict state curriculum and have wide latitude to discriminate against students who do not align with their beliefs. Based on NCSEAA data from 2014-2021, the number of Black students using vouchers has leveled out while the number of white and Hispanic students using vouchers has grown.
Recommendations for reforming the “Opportunity Scholarship” voucher program:
- Restore limits on voucher eligibility, expenditures, and marketing so private interests do not drive demand
- Require schools that receive voucher money to report more specific accountability data for voucher students to show they provide a “sound, basic education”
- Require schools that receive voucher money to meet basic state curriculum and nondiscrimination guidelines
#2 - Segregation and inequity within schools
Persistent issues with racial discrimination within school walls has caused some Black families, and in increasing number of Hispanic families, to seek other options. Early in the school choice movement, this trend was called “Black flight”.
Discipline disparities
Research shows that Black and Hispanic students face greater rates of suspension, expulsion, and arrest than their white classmates. The majority of teaching staff is white and research shows that white teachers of Black students punish these students for misbehavior two to four times as frequently as teachers who were the same race as their students.
Recent debate over the prevalence of School Resource Officers and the school-to-prison pipeline is relevant to the issue of segregation, as students of color are more likely to removed from the classroom than their white peers. Proponents of positive school discipline and restorative practices that focus on building relationships and facilitating communication prioritize keeping students in school and in the classroom as much as possible. Principal James Duran explains, “Our approach is to keep the kids in, to do some kind of restorative approach, and maintain the attitude that ‘you’re going to school and you’re going to learn.’”
In light of these realities, families of color in some districts seek schools with teaching staff and a student body that is representative of their children. ‘Black flight’ is a term used to define the phenomenon in certain districts where families of color are constantly relocating or changing schools, “searching for a place where their child would not be subjected to excessive school discipline.”
Recommendations for reforming discipline practices:
- Revise school policies or punishments that result in racially or socioeconomically imbalanced outcomes (especially those that separate students from their peers)
- Invest in programs to establish positive and restorative practices
- Reduce the role of zero-tolerance policies and School Resource Officers to avoid the school-to-prison pipeline
- Create systems and procedures to help mitigate the implicit biases of teachers and administrators such as disciplinary panels made up of a diverse group of educators, parents, students, and administrators to discuss issues and review policies, complaints, and appeals
Tracking students subjectively by ability or disability
Placing students in classes/tracks based on whether or not they are identified as gifted or having special needs can segregate populations within a school and give an inaccurate representation of diversity. Because teachers continue to be overwhelmingly white, students of color can be underestimated in terms of ability or misperceived in terms of disability.
There is substantial research suggesting shortcomings with the traditional methods of identifying students for gifted programs and advanced courses. A study from Vanderbilt looking at the significant lack of Black students in the gifted programs found: “When high-achieving black children were taught by a Black teacher, they were just as likely to get assigned to a gifted program as similar high-achieving white children.” To reduce the underrepresentation of diverse learners, educators should ensure equitable identification procedures that take teacher biases out of the equation and are inclusive of a variety of “gifts and talents.”
Placement in special education is also influenced by race and ethnicity due to the subjective nature of some evaluation criteria. This is particularly relevant for segregation inside the school since it impacts the amount of time these students spend inside a regular classroom with their peers. It is also strongly linked to discipline disparities, as explained in the previous section. These national trends are also seen in North Carolina, according to data from the Department of Education’s OSEP Fast Facts website.
Recommendations for reforming gifted and special education placement:
- Include more categories of abilities to reflect a broader set of cultural values
- Screen all students, not just those recommended by a staff member or parent
- Evaluate assessments for racial, ethnic, or social class biases
- Analyze data on subgroups and reassess procedures to ensure progress toward greater equity
Lack of educator diversity
When schools began to desegregate, Black educators were forced out of the profession. Either they were not brought on as teachers of white students or they were subject to unfair treatment that caused them to leave. Black students stopped seeing Black educators in their schools and did not envision themselves in those roles in the future. There are very few educators of color in general, but especially Hispanic or Latino, compared to the overall population for a number of historical, social, and economic reasons.
In January 2021, the Developing a Representative and Inclusive Vision for Education (DRIVE) Task Force presented its report and recommendations to Governor Roy Cooper based on Executive Order 113. White teachers are overrepresented by over 20%, while Black and Hispanic/Latino teachers are underrepresented by 10% and 15% respectively.
Though the greatest imbalance is for teachers, there are also not nearly enough people of color working with students in classroom, administrative, and support roles.
The DRIVE report also summarized research that has shown numerous benefits of having a diverse educator workforce: higher test scores, smaller achievement gaps, more consistent attendance, fewer exclusionary disciplinary measures, greater diversity of students recommended for advanced coursework, and more positive student perceptions of school.
Extensive research has found that a diverse educator workforce is beneficial to all students, but especially students of color. Multiple studies have indicated that test scores improve in both math and reading in early grades when students are taught by an educator who reflects their racial identity; this is especially true for Black students who are considered low-performing…Having one Black educator in third, fourth, or fifth grade leads to a decrease in dropout rates among Black males and an increase in likelihood that they will aspire to attend a four-year college.
— DRIVE Final Report and Recommendations: The Imperative: Why Having a Diverse Educator Workforce Matters (2021)
Recommendations for improving educator diversity:
- Invest in educator prep programs at HBCUs and community colleges
- Provide substantial mentoring and support networks for educators of color to increase their retention and longevity rates
- Implement anti-racist and culturally responsive practices in every aspect of curriculum and resource development, teacher training and evaluation, administrative and disciplinary methods, hiring and human resources management, etc.
#3 - Neighborhoods and Property Values
Since the beginning of the desegregation era, neighborhood segregation and school funding based on local property values have been a major obstacle to progress. After Supreme Court decisions in the early 2000s ended integration era busing policies, districts that wish to pursue diversity goals must consider other factors like socioeconomic status.
Low-wealth areas
One of the main factors causing parents to transfer their children to a new school is the lack of school resources needed to meet their child’s specific needs—from academic enrichment, special education services, and counseling support, to smaller class sizes and more personalized instruction.
Additional state funding is needed for low-wealth, often rural counties in North Carolina to meet students’ constitutional right to a “sound, basic education.” If proper support was provided by the state, fewer families in these areas would feel the need to pull their children from traditional public schools into charters, private schools, or homeschooling.
Because of the historical, geographical, and economic ties between poverty and race/ethnicity in North Carolina, This is why the ongoing Leandro case (1997-present) is of such significant importance for public education and civil rights.
Following recommendations from the WestEd Report and Leandro Action Plan commissioned during the ongoing Leandro v State case would fortify public schools across North Carolina and slow the exodus of their underserved student populations (children with disabilities, limited English proficiency, economically disadvantaged, living in a low wealth county, at-risk for dropout).
Recommendations from the Leandro Plan to serve students in low-wealth areas:
- Adjust the funding model to compensate for the smaller tax base of lower-wealth counties as well as declining enrollment
- Prepare and adequately fund programs and incentives to attract, prepare, and retain highly qualified, diverse teachers and leaders in high-poverty schools
- Provide comprehensive supports, including academic specialists, nurses, counselors, psychologists, and social workers
- Provide universal breakfast and lunch programs
- Expand access to high-quality Pre-K for all four-year-olds with academic risk factors, including children with disabilities
- Fully fund teaching assistants in K-3 classes
- Eliminate caps on English Learner (EL) and Special Education (SpEd) funding for schools whose student population needs exceed the average
Urban neighborhoods and gentrification
In many areas, years of policies such as redlining have resulted in concentrations of minority residents. Richard Rothstein, author of the book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, points out:
Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, racially explicit policies of federal, state and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. Today’s residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but of unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States.
— Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (2017)
Kris Nordstrom suggests that policies at the state level need to be implemented to put affordable housing in areas where “good schools” exist. In 2019, Michael Hobbes details the difficulty of rapidly growing cities to accommodate, or even meaningfully debate, affordable housing: “Most of the existing density restrictions contributing to the housing crisis in cities were in fact put in place as a result of lobbying efforts by homeowners seeking to preserve their home values.”
Data from the Child Opportunity Index (COI) reveals the lasting inequality of living conditions for children of different races and ethnicities in U.S. cities. Children living in Low or Very Low Opportunity Neighborhoods are negatively impacted across a number of educational, health, environmental, social, and economic variables.
For cities experiencing heavy gentrification, the ability to opt out of the neighborhood school increased the likelihood that a mostly Black or Hispanic neighborhood would see an influx of wealthier residents. Research by Helen Ladd at Duke University found that white parents in North Carolina were most likely to transfer out of their assigned public school if the Black population of the school was greater than 20 percent. Other studies have found that:
As school choice expands, the likelihood that low-income communities of color experience gentrification increases. The effects were substantial: a predominantly non-white neighborhood’s chance of gentrification more than doubles, jumping from 18 percent to 40 percent when magnet and charter schools are available.
— Matt Barnum, School choice is pushing wealthy families to gentrify neighborhoods but avoid local schools (2018)
A study of Charlotte schools in 2018 showed that housing prices increased in neighborhoods when parents were given the choice to opt out of Title I schools with charters and vouchers. While the same school choice programs that contribute to segregation can encourage residential integration, it still leaves a community disconnected and disinvested from its schools.
Recommendations for urban housing policies and gentrification:
- Make affordable housing a priority in all areas of the school district, especially when building or renovating new schools
- Build more magnet schools near population centers that have easy access to buses
- Use realtor outreach initiatives to help improve the perception of public schools in gentrified areas
- Invest in continued research on the impact of gentrification on school diversity and displaced students
School district secessions and gerrymandering
Property values do not just impact where families can live, since a significant amount of local school funding comes from property taxes. Wealthier schools attract the best teachers because they can offer higher local supplements, better resources, higher achieving students, and parents with greater resources to invest in the school. In areas with a significant urban-suburban-rural divide, there is often a debate over how to distribute resources by either consolidating or segmenting local school districts.
Authors Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, Erica Frankenberg, and Sarah Diem have studied school resegregation and secession and note that the secession of whiter, wealthier districts from larger, more diverse districts, has been gaining popularity again since 2000. By 2019, 73 districts had successfully seceeded nationwide. Researchers from UNC School of Education found that districts that secede are less diverse and have more resources than the districts they leave behind.
This ability to literally game the system for fiscal and demographic advantage shows that the court in Brown was able to articulate a vision, but unable to define the mechanisms by which that vision would be realized, nor able to anticipate the myriad pathways school leaders would take to resist or defy accepting the burden of that vision.
— Eric Houck and Brittany Murray, Left Behind: District Secession and the Re-segregation of American Schools (2019)
One of the driving factors of school district and school attendance zone gerrymandering is the perceived quality of schools in a real estate market. According to Philip Tegeler and Michael Hilton from the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, “Ranking of systems based on overall test scores deters higher-income families from purchasing in ‘lower-ranked’ school zones, depressing housing values and tax base and exacerbating racial transition and neighborhood segregation.” Given that these report card letter grades are featured prominently in real estate listings and directly impact property values, the system amounts to modern-day redlining.
On a positive note, however, when it comes to school district and attendance zones gerrymandering is not always a negative practice. It was used widely by districts under desegregation orders to increase racial balance in the 1970s-1990s and can be used now to increase socioeconomic balance. Given the historical tendency for this practice to be used segregatively rather than affirmatively, it is essential to collect data and implement accountability measures indefinitely.
Recommendations for school districts and attendance zones:
- Establish mechanisms for collaboration between boards, departments, and agencies that make decisions about education, housing, zoning, and transportation
- Promote changes to the formula NC uses for its School Report Card grades so that growth is given more weight.
- Push back against the secession of predominantly white and wealthy communities from their school districts
- Design strategic school assignment options that provide transportation for economically disadvantaged students
There are major legal and political barriers to overcoming de facto segregation in our school systems, so we must at least speak out against policies that exacerbate resegregation trends.
Share Your Story!
In 2024, North Carolina schools are less integrated than they were in the1970s when court orders and busing were required to desegregate our school systems. We must push back on policies that fuel this pattern of resegregation by race and social class. Help us convince voters and policymakers that school diversity is worth fighting for!
PSFNC is looking for North Carolinians to share their stories about school diversity in NC over the years including the eras of segregation, desegregation, integration, and/or resegregation.
- We would love to hear from current or former students, educators, parents, or leaders representing all backgrounds and perspectives from all over the state.
- There are different options for how you can share to fit your preferences and time commitment.
- If you know someone who has an important story to share, please share this form with them.
- We would also welcome any recommendations for historical people we can learn more about online or with a submitted resource.
Resources
The ABCs of Systemic Racism short video and interactive online booklet by Nancy Snipes Mosley of PSFNC, 2024
School Integration vs Resegregation: A Battle Worth Fighting PSFNC webinar with Jerry Wilson of CREED and James Carter of the Urban Institute, 2023
The webinar is also embedded below. The first 23 minutes is historical overview followed by guest speakers focusing on case studies from Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Wake County.
References
by Nancy Snipes Mosley,
PSFNC staff member and former high school Social Studies teacher
Last updated 8/7/2024