Last fall, 553 social scientists from more than 200 institutions across the country signed a social science statement which summarized decades of research about: 1) the benefits of integrated schools for students and communities; 2) the harms of segregated schools; and 3) what is known about the efficacy of race-neutral student assignment plans. From that social science statement, we have put together a sheet of summarizing these findings: http://www.naacpldf.org/content/pdf/voluntary/social_scientists/SSSTalkingPoints.pdf.
For anyone interested in more detail or looking for some summer reading material, the social science statement (with citations to research on each of the points above) can be found here.
This social science statement, incidentally, is the fifth filed in school desegregation cases considered by the Supreme Court. The first statement was filed in the cases that led to the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which cited social science evidence in footnote 11.
Friday, June 22, 2007
Social Science Findings about School Integration
Monday, June 11, 2007
Summary of Amicus Briefs in Support of School Districts
Click here for a summary of the 50 amicus briefs filed in support of the school districts in the Seattle and Louisville school integration cases.
Can Integrated Schools Fight Crime?
For anyone who's been following the voluntary school desegregation fight, the oft-repeated message from the Louisville and Seattle school districts and their supporters is no doubt familiar: a diverse student body is an important educational tool for teaching tolerance, cultural competence, and practice dealing with people from different backgrounds in the real world. As important as all of these skills are, their relative intangibility can make them hard to appreciate; their complex role in measurably improving test scores or college or job prospects can make them seem like a luxury rather than a necessity. According to law enforcement experts, however, integrated schools provide more than an education in interacting with others. For many Black and Latino students, an integrated school may be their best shot at getting an education at all.
Studies have shown that whether or not a student attends a racially-isolated school with a high concentration of minority students is a good predictor of whether that student will drop out or graduate. While the overall graduation rate nationwide is 68%, students in segregated urban school districts such as Oakland, CA, and Cleveland, OH have graduation rates of only 30%. Meanwhile, in school districts like St. Louis, MO, where segregated schools contribute to the below average Black graduation rate of 60%, a voluntary integration program has raised African-American rates of graduation in two participating schools to 87% and an astounding 100%. Beyond graduation, minority students who attend integrated schools are also much more likely to go on to attend college as well.
At the same time, whether or not a student completes high school is in turn a good predictor of whether or not a young person will become involved in crime. High school dropouts account for a majority of the nation's prisoners, and a third of all male high school dropouts will have spent some time in prison before they turn 25. The median income for high school graduates is close to double the median income for those who did not finish high school, due in part to the fact that high school dropouts face much higher rates of unemployment. Students who have attended college are even less likely to be incarcerated and more likely to have well-paying jobs. Research shows that increasing the average level of education by only one year can reduce arrests by as much as 11%. In these cases, it is not only the students who benefit -- a mere 1% increase in high school graduation rates in 1990 might have saved 400 victims of murder in that year alone. Society as a whole pays the costs of this preventable violence, both in money -- processing offenders through the court system and housing them in correctional facilities -- and in lives.
To learn more about education and crime prevention, go to http://www.naacpldf.org/content/pdf/voluntary/both_parties/Joseph_Brann_et_al._(Law_Enforcement).pdf
Racial Diversity's Major League Benefits
This year marks the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's first game playing with the Brooklyn Dodgers, an event now widely accepted as having profoundly changed not only the face of baseball and professional sports in America, but the course of the civil rights movement as well. Before the military or the nation's public schools were forcibly desegregated by law, the Dodgers' voluntary signing of Robinson signaled that black players were as skilled and valuable as white players, but more importantly, that the national pastime could no longer function divided with players by race into different leagues. Robinson proved his worth immediately with a stellar season, hitting .297, playing more games and scoring more runs than any other Dodger, stealing more bases than any other player in the National League, and being named Rookie of the Year by The Sporting News. His performance ushered in a wave of other black players on other teams the following season, with the effects of baseball's integration spreading to the National Football League, which began recruiting African-American players by the late 1940's, and the National Basketball Association, which recruited African-American basketball players from college from the days of its inception in 1949.
Robinson's success affected far more than the fates of other black athletes, however. During his first season, the Dodgers played to sold-out stadiums where ever they traveled, with Chicago's Wrigley Field packing in 47,000 fans -- 10,000 more than maximum capacity -- when the Dodgers came to visit. By the end of the season, Robinson had helped lead the Brooklyn Dodgers to the National League pennant and helped the Dodgers set a new attendance record, drawing over 1.8 million fans—the highest single-season attendance in history atEbbets Field. Robinson’s presence and popularity also drove the total attendance for the National League above ten million fans—the highest single-season total to that date. Robinson’s success on the field and at the turnstiles demonstrated beyond any doubt to millions of Americans that African-American players were capable of competing with and working in harmony with the Caucasian players in the Major Leagues.
That the integration of baseball had such an overwhelmingly positive effect not only on black players, but on the popularity and level of competition of the sport as well was much of the reason that the Dodgers voluntary inclusion of Robinson was so monumental. Baseball was the most universally embraced sport in America at the time, and Robinson's highly visible presence was a powerful catalyst in the larger battle for equal opportunity and civil rights. At the same time, athletes on the newly integrated teams and their fans were getting the chance to interact with people of a different race, and finding the experience to be illuminating. As African-American player Ed Charles noted, "It gave us a chance to know each other better. Once you get to know someone, you’re not going to feel as threatened...Any forum that brings people together can lift the cloud of ignorance from all of us." It also brought millions of Americans of different racial backgrounds together across National League cities, in person and in spirit, to root for the same team of players and to learn that they could co-exist with fellow citizens across the color line.
Local communities such as Louisville and Seattle are hoping to harness this same potential in their voluntary integration plans. Children who go to school with one another may share the joys and challenges of growing up, learning, working and playing to an even greater degree than teammates on the field. Additionally, integrated schools bring about integrated sports teams. Like their professional counterparts, student-athletes in integrated settings tend to display a higher level of academic, professional, and athletic success, as well as showing greater levels of teamwork, racial tolerance, and achievement both on and off the field.
Reflecting on the unique power of sports to foster tolerance and multiculturalism, the NCAA states that "Numerous studies have found that sports provide key social contexts for students of different backgrounds to interact “(1) as equals, (2) in a cooperative way, and (3) with shared goals." Of course, integrated elementary, middle, and high schools as a whole provide very similar opportunities for children, as illustrated by the following quote from social scientist T.F.Pettigrew, and cited by the NCAA: "The athletic arena is a domain that requires positive group-based interactions in order for team members to experience success, and in fact is one of the few realms in which all of the essential conditions for reducing prejudice are met. Specifically, the contact occurs between individuals with equalized status in the situation, the contact entails purposeful activity toward common goals fostering interdependence, the contact is cooperative, and the contact is socially sanctioned." The athletic arena is certainly a realm in which all of these conditions are met, but I can think of another.
For more information on the importance of racial integration in sports, check out the NCAA amicus brief at http://www.naacpldf.org/content/pdf/voluntary/both_parties/NCAA_and_NBRPA_Brief.pdf
Saturday, June 9, 2007
With resegregation, Charlotte, North Carolina has witnessed a critical loss in intercommunity cooperation and support for public schools
Charlotte’s experience underscores why communities that value robust public support for public education should avoid racial polarization within a school system. Readers can read about Charlotte’s story in the Brief of the Swann Fellowship, filed in Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education and Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 by sixteen individuals and a non-profit called the Swann Fellowship. These seventeen amici include former members of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Board of Education, current Charlotte-Mecklenburg students and parents, and religious organizations that make up the Swann Fellowship, which advocates for a quality, equitable, integrated public school system. Together, these amici have over 40 years of direct experience with de jure segregation, court-ordered desegregation and, after unitary status was declared in 2001, resegregation.
In their brief, the Charlotte amici describe the monumental changes that happened in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools during the era of desegregation. As thousands of parents involved themselves in their children’s newly integrated schools, the public emerged as an unanticipated force in school affairs. Schools benefited from the advocacy of integrated PTAs, bi-racial grassroots advocacy helped tilt school board policies toward more equitable outcomes for African American and less affluent white students, and the business community reversed itself to become a major source of support for an integrated school system. Before 1972, no African American had ever been elected to school board. After 1972, a majority white electorate repeatedly cast winning votes for an integrated school board and no anti-busing candidate was elected to the school board for the next eighteen years.
To the degree that desegregation in Charlotte-Mecklenburg provided a new context for increased racial, social and political cohesion, this cohesion likely would not have materialized if integrated schools had failed to serve the educational needs of CMS students. The evidence shows that CMS students benefited both academically and socially from racially diverse schools. After desegregation the performance of both African American and white students improved, with African American students experiencing the most dramatic progress.
In the 1990s, a new superintendent, explosive population growth, and pressure from new arrivals to Charlotte’s suburbs (who often did not share in the sense of civic investment in Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s successful experience with desegregation) prompted the district to move away from the use of busing as a means to integrate its schools and to rely more on the use of magnet school assignments. Schools became more racially identifiable during this period. Still, only 4% of Black students attended 90-100% minority schools in 1995. Soon, that number would skyrocket.
After a parent challenged the district's race conscious magnet admissions policies in 1997, his lawsuit ultimately resulted in a 2001 decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit that Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools had achieved unitary status, a decision opposed by Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s Board of Education. The school board responded to the loss by adopting a “race-neutral” plan in 2002 that sent most students to neighborhood schools. In the very first year of neighborhood assignments, the number of schools with minority enrollment of 91% to 100% more than doubled, and the number of racially identifiable schools jumped from 47 to 81 schools. Two years later, 87 (out of 150) schools were racially identifiable.
Public support for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools soon began to unravel and the discord continues to this day. Predominantly white, middle- and upper-middle class schools are effectively closed to non-white students who live outside of privileged neighborhoods. Achievement data showing inferior academic outcomes in inner city, minority schools has motivated parents of students in overcrowded, majority white schools to stay put and demand that the district prioritize new construction in the suburbs. Parents of students in majority nonwhite undersubscribed schools, angry over chronic low performance in these schools, have demanded that the focus be on addressing the academic crises in racially isolated schools. United only by their anger, voters from Charlotte’s segregated white suburbs and its segregated African American center city recently defeated $427 million in school bonds. Meanwhile, millions of dollars of reform efforts targeting academic performance in racially isolated minority schools continue to fail to achieve the targeted results.
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg experience provides a cautionary tale. The costs are high when school districts and communities ignore the connections between racial integration, public support for schools and quality educational opportunities for all students.
Friday, June 8, 2007
The Tangled History of Housing and School Integration
In 1954, right before the decision in Brown was issued, another integration drama was being played out in Louisville, Kentucky. Andrew and Charlotte Wade, who were black, were looking to purchase a house for their young family in the suburbs of Louisville. They were not having any luck. Although zoning ordinances forbidding the sale of property to African-American buyers had been struck down as unconstitutional years earlier, in practice local realty practices ensured that a couple like the Wades was unlikely to ever move into the neighborhoods they chose. Carl and Anne Braden, two white married journalists who were active participants in the growing civil rights protest movement, knew the Wades through friends. The Bradens offered to buy a house in the all-white suburb of Shively and then sell it to the Wades. On May 15, 1954, two days before the Brown decision, the Wades moved into their new home.
The response in Shively was as violent as any reaction to the Supreme Court decision. The Wades were constantly and dangerously harassed; a cross was burned in the front yard and shots were fired at the house, with several bullets entering through windows. A little more than a month after their arrival in Shively, the Wades' house was bombed while they were away from home. Badly shaken, the Wades returned to the city, fearing for their lives and those of their children. Instead of prosecuting the bombers, local law enforcement targeted the Bradens, whose two cars had been blown up in response to their actions. Amid claims that they were the masterminds behind a massive Communist plot to stir up racial unrest and violence, and thereby overthrow the government of the state of Kentucky, the Bradens were charged under state law with sedition. By the time the charges were dropped when the U.S. Supreme Court nullified state sedition laws, Carl Braden had already served 8 months in jail, and the Bradens continued to be shunned by many even within the civil rights movement.
During the current battle over school desegregation -- in Louisville, the hometown of the Wades and Bradens -- much has been said about the issue of "neighborhood schools." Opponents of voluntary integration extol the importance of a community centered around the physical home, where students can walk to school and play with their classmates on the streets where they all live. Certainly, "neighborhood" connotes something safe and comforting, familiar and intimate, almost like an extended family; no doubt the Wades' arrival in Shively was so disturbing to their close-minded neighbors for precisely this reason. Fifty years later, it is tempting to imagine that the "neighborhood" reaction in Shively was an anomaly, and that diverse neighborhoods could provide a backbone for local, integrated schools.
Unfortunately, the Wades' experience was not an isolated one. For decades after housing discrimination had become illegal, black families experienced a variety of difficulties in trying to move where they wanted. As suburbs developed after World War II, both the Veterans Administration and the Federal Housing Administration (which together financed almost half of all suburban homes in the 1950's and 1960's) initially endorsed the use of race-restrictive covenants and refused to underwrite loans that would introduce ‘incompatible’ racial groups into white residential enclaves. Blacks were systematically denied entrance to these neighborhoods as they formed, and the effect is still evident today. In fact, while cities like Louisville and Seattle have gradually become more integrated over the years, the concentration of isolated, black-majority census tracts in both cities has increased.
Even now, both private and government-sponsored policies and practices in the housing market continue to have a discriminatory effect on minority buyers and renters, and a segregating effect on America's neighborhoods. Public housing has been constructed without an eye to integration of neighborhoods, and indeed often with the intent of further segregating them. As a result majority of African-American public housing residents live in poor, racially isolated neighborhoods. In the last ten years in both the Seattle and Louisville metropolitan areas, more than 68% of Low Income Housing Tax Credit family units were located in census tracts with greater than average minority population. Section 8 tenant assistance program funds are spent disproportionately on affordable housing in racially identifiable, high poverty neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, in the private sector, real estate agents frequently steer people to different neighborhoods based on their race, an illegal practice that has persisted (in up to 15% of cases in which test subjects posed as comparable white, black, or Latino customers) in part because reporting of such methods rarely occurs. Real estate agents have also been shown to give white customers favored treatment over black customers 17% of the time, and Latinos 20% of the time. Mortgage lending and insurance redlining similarly contribute to residential segregation; lenders and insurers offer different terms and policies to minority homebuyers and deny their applications at disproportionately high rates. In both Seattle and Louisville, the rate of rejection of mortgage applications differs by 10% and 11%, respectively, between white and black applicants.
For cities like Louisville and Seattle to strictly maintain "neighborhood" schools, then, is to actively choose segregated schools. Without the countering effect of diversity and multiculturalism at school, most students will not be likely to seek out friendships and opportunities outside their largely homogeneous immediate surroundings. Rather than being safe havens of play and learning, neighborhoods will be incubators for distrust, fear, and intolerance. Conversely, school integration has been shown in studies to directly contribute to stable residential integration. Students educated in integrated environments go on to be far more likely to live in integrated neighborhoods. Families living in cities with integrated schools, especially those with school choice plans like Louisville and Seattle, can be more confident that their children will receive a high-quality education irrespective of where they live. Eventually, residential integration can pave the way to an eventual return – should the cities so choose – to true "neighborhood schools" where diversity will continue to thrive.
To learn more about the connections between integrated housing and integrated schools, read the Housing Scholars and Research & Advocacy Organizations' amicus brief in support of the school districts at http://www.naacpldf.org/content/pdf/voluntary/both_parties/Housing_Brief.pdf
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Amicus Briefs
Last fall, more than 1,000 organizations and individuals - including political leaders, historians, social scientists, educators, corporations, civil rights groups, former Department of Defense officials, former U.S. cabinet secretaries and many others - weighed in with the Supreme Court to support Louisville's and Seattle's voluntary efforts to integrate their schools.
These individuals and organizations filed more than 50 amicus briefs on behalf of the school districts. Some of the briefs highlight the benefits of integration, such as improved academic ability for all students, greater success once in the workplace, and lower drop out rates. Some briefs highlight the need for race-conscious integration of K-12 schools. Others review some of the key history related to integration, including the 14th Amendment’s inclusionary purpose and America’s difficulties in integrating schools.
Collectively, the briefs provide a broad and compelling picture of why America needs integrated schools. (And beyond making sense, many of the briefs also make great reading - something not usually said about legal documents.)
Soon, we'll highlight some of these amicus briefs in separate posts. We’ll also link to a summary of all the briefs. In the meantime, if you just can't wait, the briefs in their entirety can be found here.
[Note: The amicus briefs are pdf files.]