‏‏‏‏‏‏‎ ‏‏‏‏‎ ‏‏‎ ‏‏‎ ‏‏Season Opener:

have always been both at the forefront of people’s minds, and at the back. Striking statistics about debt, dropout rates and closures, teacher strikes, and of course, mass shootings routinely round out the news cycle. Yet, local politics around schools often fizzle out before attracting too much attention. This is especially true if the school in question is not in your neighborhood, or the policies don’t affect your child. But schools, much like our neighborhoods, are wrapped up in a complex history that is worth spending time to look at in-depth.

In this season, the URC will be looking closely at schools. Where are they built? Where are they not built? And who gets to go to what school? Schools are not a new topic for the URC. We have previously given brief mention to how schools were used as buffer zones to keep neighborhoods de facto segregated in Norfolk. Plus, any social justice work done in Norfolk is done in the courageous shadow of the ‘Norfolk Seventeen’, the first 17 black students who attended all-white schools in Norfolk while facing massive resistance. So why turn to schools now? The short answer is because schools now are more segregated than they were at least 30 years ago. And Norfolk is not exempt from this national trend. We are 65 years on from the landmark Brown v. Board of Education which ruled ‘separate but equal’ unconstitutional, thus outlawing school segregation. So how is it we have arrived at this point? And this is precisely what we are going to look at below.

So how is it that schools, particularly in the South, have arrived at a point of resegregating? First, we have to understand how is it that some kids end up in some schools and other kids end up in other schools. These policies vary from state to state, so let’s put aside all the private schools, religious schools, charters, and magnet programs for a second and take for example your basic public elementary school. Across the country, every child starting at the age of 5 is guaranteed access to free public education that is provided by the government. And when a child is of age to begin kindergarten typically they go to school closest to their home address. School zones, or school districts, are essentially the lines drawn around neighborhoods and counties that say which students go to which school. The West side of a town may be zoned for one school, and the East side of town may be zoned for another school. Every home address sits inside a school district that determines which school that child is zoned for.

So a home address is zoned for a school that is closest to their home address. So, the question becomes 'who draws the lines'? This is where the story gets tricky.

To understand how things got to where they are we need to go back to the summer of 1950 to Topeka, Kansas, where 13 African American parents tried to enroll their children in local white schools but were denied admission. These 13 parents, with the support of the NAACP, filed a class-action lawsuit against the Board of Education of Topeka. Oliver Brown, one of the parents and a pastor bore the namesake of the case Oliver Brown et al. v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. At the same time, in different parts of the country, four other lawsuits were being filed under similar circumstances: African Americans being barred admission into schools, each one supported by the NAACP. As the cases made their way to the Supreme Court in 1952, the court consolidated these five cases under the title of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The NAACP's Thurgood Marshall argued the case befoe the court. And in 1954 the Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling in favor of Brown.

From here on, 'separate but equal' was unconstitutional, and school segregation was illegal.

"We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. . ."

Now, Brown v. Board is an especially well-known case. Particularly in Norfolk, where massive resistance was organized against desegregating schools. Norfolk's history is something we will return to more in-depth later.

For now, there is another supreme court case that is not as well known that arguably had just as much impact as Brown. Milliken v. Bradley. Milliken v. Bradley was a 1977 Supreme Court case which saw the NAACP file suit against the state of Michigan for purposefully working to keep their schools segregated. In the 1970s, Detroit looked like urban centers across America- white families mostly living in the suburbs, and black families mostly living in the inner-cities. As Detroit grew bigger, the state began building new schools. However, those new schools were only being built within school districts that were zoned around the well-off white suburbs. Inner-city minority neighborhoods were not getting the same educational support. And, school zones in Detroit were being drawn around neighborhoods already segregated by segregationist housing policies. This left African American students with unequal access to public education. So, the NAACP sued Michigan, arguing that redlining and all the nefarious practices of housing policies contributed to neighborhood segregation, and this also led to segregation in schools. The judge agreed, and the NAACP won. But because the city was already racially divided by historic policies, re-drawing school zones would not make much a difference to desegregate schools. Instead, the judge ordered the state to bus inner-city minority children to suburban white schools. This practice, which became known as busing, did not sit too well with Detroit’s suburban parents.

The case eventually made it all the way to the Supreme Court. Michigan admitted ‘yes our neighborhoods and our schools are racially segregated, but it’s not our fault.’ The defendants argued that school district lines were not intentionally drawn to segregate schools, it just happened this way, and was not the product of de jure segregationist policies (which would have been illegal under Brown v. Board). At its core, Michigan's argument is that schools are segregated because our neighborhoods are segregated, school zones simply reflect the neighborhood geography. But education cannot be mandated to fix the problems of bad housing policies. That argument sat well with the Nixon-stacked court. Believing it impossible to hold anyone specifically responsible for intentionally drawing school districts along racial lines, the court ruled that Detroit’s suburbs were not at fault, and thus not responsible to make efforts to desegregate their schools. Meaning, the suburban white schools did not have to participate in any busing program. The only dissenting opinion was written by Thurgood Marshall, now a Supreme Court Justice, who said "the very evil that Brown was aimed at will not be cured but will be perpetuated.”

Brown declared separate but (un)equal schools unconstitutional. Milliken ruled that unless you could prove a school district was drawn up with explicit racial animus, courts could not penalize those districts. This left significant leeway for counties to draw up their own school districts while going relatively unchecked.

However, the real cancer at the heart of Milliken comes down to taxes. School districts are locally funded, oftentimes through property tax. This means that in school districts drawn around mostly white well-off neighborhoods, the tax base for the schools in that district is high, which means the schools are well funded, and teachers are well-staffed. In school districts drawn around poor minority neighborhoods schools are broke, and teacher retention is low. By all accounts, while schools may be 'desegregated' the money that funds schools is still segregated.

Despite Brown v. Board deciding school segregation to be illegal, America’s long history of racist housing policies meant that students zoned for schools nearest to them were by default going to be segregated. School zones simply reinforced the racist housing policies of the past. And any attempt to force cities to bus students into schools outside their own district was shot down with Milliken. ‘School zones simply follow the layout of a city, they are neutral,’ one might say. But if the layout of a city is dictated by a history of exclusionary housing policies, the neutrality of school zones is a dubious claim at best. To some education policy writers, this is not a problem. Here is National Review's Robert VerBruggen :

"It becomes ludicrous to keep a local community under the federal government’s thumb as punishment for the sins of people who ran the community decades ago. This remains true even if the community’s neighborhoods might bear the mark of those sins well into the future, thanks to the tendency of residential patterns to persist over time. Sometimes it is simply not possible to fully erase the consequences of a past wrong."

Let’s pause for a second here to address a lingering question. The policies that shaped neighborhood segregation years ago have ended (at least they are no longer on the books), and the URC just went on and on about gentrification: affluent folks moving back into inner-city minority neighborhoods. So, how can the crisis of gentrification and school re-segregation be happening at the same time? If all affluent white folks are moving back into inner-city minority neighborhoods, does that not offset school segregation and the segregated tax base? Indeed, it might look a bit paradoxical. Remember that graph above, about school segregation in the South post-Brown? Schools were indeed on an integration trend until at least the mid-1980s. This goes back to what I said earlier about how schools can be tricky to talk about on a national level, there are many factors at play here.

So why hasn't gentrification led to more integrated schools? There are a number of reasons, such as the availability of charter schools, private schools, and school choice programs- all things that we will dive into later on. But let's go back to Milliken for a second. Because schools district lines have relatively little oversight, white families moving to urban areas have created what are called 'island districts'. Island districts are predominantly white wealthy districts drawn in the middle of surrounding poorer minority districts, like walled-off islands. Or vice versa, rich districts drawn around poorer districts.

As is clear from the maps above. These island districts are drawn around either concentrated pockets of poverty, or within larger poor districts.

So what are the consequences we see today? Well, as we noted at the outset our schools, particularly in the South, are more segregated now than ever. We touched on the South above, but nationwide UCLA and the Center for Education & Civil Rights reports that, as of 2016, 40% ofBlack studentswere in schools with 90% or more students of color, nationwide. UCLA also reports that And this trend is growing. UCLA reports that between 1988 and 2016, the number of schools where less than 10 percent of the students are white has tripled from 6 percent to 18 percent. It is worth noting that part of the decrease in a white student body is related to factors such as private and charter school availability- something we will be diving into later on. But the existence of alternative schools does not negate the rising racial segregation among students.

And those island districts we looked at are also becoming more prevalent. In recent years, there is a steady trend of school districts seceding from other districts to become more isolated. Take Memphis, for example. When Memphis, a majority-Black city, consolidated some of its school districts into larger school districts surrounding the city, the move was going to offer more integrated schools. That is, until some cities seceded from their school districts, creating new zones for themselves. Six cities broke off to form new school districts that became more white than they originally were before the merger.

The pattern of resegregating districts leads to that often talked about ‘achievement gap’. Broadly, the ‘achievement gap’ is a catch-all term to refer to the disparity in national standardized test scores between racially different groups of students. It also includes things like college matriculation rates, graduation rates, disciplinary rates, etc…There are a lot of problems with using the achievement gap as a measure, not least of all because it is wrapped up in things like the dubious effectiveness of standardized tests, economic factors, parental education, access to food, and a safe home. Nationally, the achievement gap shows that African Americans are behind White students by about two grade levels when it comes to reading and math scores. This gap includes an adjustment for economic status as well, meaning poor whites are scoring higher than African Americans. The achievement gap does not only come down to economic mobility, but is directly tied to racial legacy of where school districts are drawn.

What about Virginia?

In Virginia as a whole, the student population is half black. Yet White students are 2.1 times more likely to be enrolled in advanced classes. While black students are 3.7 times more likely to be suspended compared to white students. The achievement gap is directly tied to what has been called the ‘school-to-prison pipline’. This term refers to schools who enforce disciplinary policy with police offers, rather than handling offenses themselves. as Richard Rothstein puts it, "Criminal Justice policy is Education Policy...students who are arrested by school police, or suspended by school officials, are more likely later to serve jail or prison time than students with similar offenses who are subject to less harsh forms of discipline."

We have previously looked at Norfolk’s own history of racially segregated neighborhoods. Norfolk’s own history of urban redevelopment, particularly the practice of redlining which barred black families form getting insured home loans, and slum clearance projects which concentrated black poverty in the St. Paul’s Area has led to similar school segregation. In the map below, Norfolk's predominantly Black schools are in predominantly Black neighborhoods, which have both some of the highest rates of poverty in the country and where high school graduation rates are 5 percent behind the national average, and 13 percent behind the state average.

Norfolk is unique in its history of school integration. When Norfolk was in the middle of its slum clerance projects after World War II, the Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board was decision. Originally, the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority planned to build public housing over all of its demolished slums. But when school segregation became illegal Norfolk pivoted. Instead of building public housing over its slums, which would have expanded mostly Black neighbrhoods, Norfolk built industrial parks and green-spaces to act as buffers to keep schools de facto segregated. If Norfolk could keep Blacks and Whites living far enough apart, the schools would stay de facto segregated- just like in Detroit.

Norfolk did not stop there. Rather than integrate their schools, Norfolk, under the leadership of Sen. Harry Byrd, organized a plan of 'Massive Resistance' to school desegregation. To resist school integration, Norfolk closed 6 of its schools rather than allow single Black student to attend class. Rather than integrate, Norfolk closed six of their schools: Maury, Granby, and Norview high schools; and Northside, Norview and Blair middle schools, were all closed for almost 5 months.

This story, Norfolk's history of where it built schools and how Brown changed our neighborhood landscape is a longer story we will be exploring this season. But the consequences Norfolk's history of racial segregation are still one we face each day. Take a look at the map below. This map shows Norfolk school districts brokwn down by race.

Poverty and racial segregation are concentrated along the St. Paul's Quadrant. This segregation is reflected in our schools as well. Take Booker T. Washington High School, located in the heart of the St. Paul's area where Norfolk purposefully concentrated poverty and racial segregation. Booker T. has over 750 Black students, and 60 White students.The graduation rate is about 13 percent below the state average, and students score more than 10 percent lower than Virginia's average on reading, writing, science, and math scores. Nearly 25 percent of Booker T's students are 'chronically absent'. Now compare this with Muary High School, where 855 students are Black, and 560 White. The graduation rate is only 6 percent below the state average. And student scores on reading, writing, science, and math are 10 percent above Virginia's average.

Nationally, federal segregated housing policies have solidified entrenched racial fault lines that play out in our schools to do this day. But rather than reflect the scars of the past, racial divisions among school districts reflect a wound of historical segregation that has never healed. And the ones that suffer the most are those least responsible. Children are forced to suffer the consequences of segregated schools. A history of racists housing policies continues to rob children, particularly Black children, of their future. Norfolk's history of segregationist housing policies has had lasting consequences on concentrating Black poverty in St. Paul's Quadrant. And the effect of Norfolk's history on our schools is apparent. Nearly 60 years after Brown V. Board our schools are still segregated, still separate, and still unequal.