| Amy Stuart Wells,
Anita Tijerina Revilla, Jennifer Jellison Holme and Awo Korantemaa
Atanda
excerpted from: Amy Stuart Wells,
Anita Tijerina Revilla, Jennifer
Jellison Holme and Awo Korantemaa
Atanda, THE SPACE BETWEEN SCHOOL
DESEGREGATION COURT ORDERS AND OUTCOMES: THE STRUGGLE TO CHALLENGE WHITE
PRIVILEGE, 90 Virginia Law Review 1721-1751, 1729-1751 (October,
2004)(26 Footnotes)
In the following sections we highlight some of the most powerful
cross-case themes to emerge from our study.
These themes illustrate the distance between the intent behind school
desegregation policy, to vindicate Fourteenth Amendment rights for
African-Americans and other minority groups, and the actual results
these policies achieved. In all of the six school districts we studied,
powerful whites were able to maintain their privileged status even in
the context of an equity-minded reform movement such as school
desegregation. In each of the six communities and schools in our study,
policy makers and educators tried to make desegregation as palatable as
possible for middle-class white parents and students. On a political
level, this made perfect sense. The idea was to stave off white and
middle-class flight, which would leave the public schools politically
and economically vulnerable. In concentrating on appeasing white
parents, however, school districts often disregarded the needs of both
students of color and poor students.
Across the school districts studied, we saw the disillusionment of
African-American and Latino advocates, educators, and students as they
gave up on a "remedy" they once thought would solve many
educational problems for students of color. While they acknowledged many
gains that resulted from efforts to
desegregate public schools and create more diversity within these
educational institutions, they voiced clear disappointment about how
little progress had been made overall and the price that communities of
color had to pay to accommodate the demands and threats of whites.
We realize that some of our findings are not "new" to the
literature on school desegregation. For instance, other authors have
highlighted many of the shortcomings of desegregation policy that we
address. We, however, are attempting to
add a new sense of"dual consciousness"
to the discussion. In other words, we think it is important to celebrate
the accomplishments of Brown and the role that public schools and the
courts have played in trying to right the wrongs of racial inequality in
our society, while being very clear about just how inadequate school
desegregation policy--as an isolated policy affecting but one of many
racially unequal institutions in our society--was in overcoming the
legacy of white privilege.
This is not to absolve the schools and educators of all
wrongdoing--rather, we are simply examining them within the broader
social context in which they were enmeshed and rethinking future policy
proposals in light of how desegregation proceeded after Brown. As one
Latino former school board member in Austin, Texas, explained to us,
desegregation amounted to "societal problems . . . being dumped on
the children."
A. What's in the Black Community
is Not Good Enough for White Children: How the Burden of Busing Was
Placed on Blacks and Latinos
As other school desegregation scholars and observers have noted,
usually the historically black or Latino public schools were closed once
districts were forced, either by judges, the federal government, or
other political pressure, to desegregate their schools. This meant that
black and Latino students were more likely to be riding buses longer
distances at younger ages than most white students in desegregating
school districts.
In five of the six school districts that we studied, at least one
historically black school was eventually closed. Furthermore, in five of
the six districts, black students, parents, and activists felt that
their communities bore the burden of achieving racial balance in the
schools. We learned from our data that this burden did not merely relate
to the issue of inconvenience, such as black students having to get up
early and get home late. Rather, the closing of black schools that
required students of color to bear the brunt of busing dealt a blow to
these communities' pride and dignity. It was as if white society were
saying that there was nothing of value in the black or Latino
communities.
In Austin, Texas, the first phase of school desegregation entailed
the closing of black schools on the east side of town and transferring
students out of those neighborhoods to other schools, many with large
Latino populations. One school that
was closed early on was Anderson High School, a historically black high
school with a long tradition and strong ties to the African-American
community. Prior to closing Anderson, the federal judge overseeing
desegregation in the Austin case made an attempt to reassign nearby
white students to the school. As one long-time district administrator
recalled, however, when the judge ordered that white students be
assigned to Anderson:
[Y]ou know, people [at the school] got revved up for that . . . the
black kids did a lot of work on trying to get ready for these [white]
kids. And, of course, the [white] kids didn't come. So, there was like
total flight, you know. Well, that was a downer as well. That was
another unfortunate situation that helped solidify an adversarial deal
because feelings were hurt. In other words, despite the pride members of
the black community had in Anderson High School and their attempts to
fix it up for the reassigned white students, the white families chose
not to abide by the court order. After this act of resistance, the judge
rescinded the plan that reassigned white students and ordered a new plan
that resulted in the closing of the black schools, including Anderson
High School, and the one-way busing of black students out of their
community.
The same Austin administrator noted that the alteration to the
desegregation plan was both a good and a bad step. The new plan was good
in that it was more effective in creating racially balanced schools, but
it was bad in that it reinforced
the idea that what the black community had to offer was not worthwhile
and that black schools were inferior. He said, "Well, when you tell
people that their schools are inferior to some degree you're telling
them they're inferior."
Many others spoke of the sense of shame and loss felt by members of
the black community when white students refused to attend black schools.
The manner in which Anderson High School was shut down was particularly
insulting. At the time of Anderson's closing, the Austin school board
committed to building a new "Anderson" high school in the
northwest and mostly white section of the city. Members of the black
community thought that the new Anderson should house the memorabilia of
its namesake school. But they soon learned that such memories of the
old, all-black Anderson High School were not welcome in the new,
predominantly white school. As one African-American community leader
explained, the people leading the new Anderson High School said that
they did not want the trophies or anything else from the old Anderson
school. He noted that the "new" Anderson was related to the
"old" Anderson in name only, which "insulted and
infuriated the Afro-American community, justifiably so."
In the 1970s, Austin also implemented majority-to-minority transfers,
a voluntary desegregation plan through which students of any race could
transfer from a school in which they were in the racial majority to a
school in which they would be a racial minority. This program did not
succeed in fully desegregating the
district, however, because no white students opted to transfer to
historically black or Latino schools. As one local Latino politician
noted, "The majority-to-minority transfer rule did not meet the
test of integration because all [of] the burden for moving was on the
minorities. No white guy would say, 'I want to go into a minority
school."'
Given the history of racial discrimination in cities such as Austin,
it is not surprising that white families did not want to send their
children to historically black and Latino schools. Most of these schools
were inferior to the white schools in terms of resources and facilities.
Furthermore, the communities in which these schools existed were more
likely to be poor and unfamiliar to whites, particularly the more
affluent whites. Still, we know from school desegregation history that
such schools, with a great deal of extra support and funding, can be
made more appealing to white families.
Other sites in our study were similar to Austin in not making such an
investment in black schools and thus closing the schools in black
neighborhoods, and putting black children on buses in larger numbers and
at younger ages than white students. For instance, in Pasadena, the
school desegregation plan paired black, Latino, and white elementary
schools so that all the students--black and white--from the two schools
went to one building for kindergarten through third grade and then to
the other school for grades four through six. But all of the
kindergarten-through-third-grade schools were in
the previously predominantly white schools in the white neighborhoods,
which meant the youngest students of color were always sent the
farthest. By fourth grade, many white parents had enrolled their
children in private schools to avoid sending them to schools in black or
Latino communities. As several people we interviewed noted, private
schools flourished in Pasadena.
In Charlotte, North Carolina, one of the most comprehensive school
desegregation plans in the country was implemented three years after the
1971 United States Supreme Court decided Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg
Board of Education. The Court held that,
if necessary to achieve racial balance, school districts should reassign
students to schools outside their neighborhoods and bus the students to
these schools. Thousands of Charlotte
students were bused every day to schools across town, but it was the
African-American students from the west side of town who were bused in
greater percentages, at younger ages, and for many more years on average
than most of the white students. This was partly because of the
demographics of the district and the high concentration of black
students in certain neighborhoods, but it was also the result of
deliberate choices made by the judge, lawyers, and school board to
appease white parents and stave off white flight.
According to one of the lawyers who represented the black plaintiffs
in Swann, the biggest problem with the plan was that those in charge
"compromise[d] and plac[ed] a greater burden on black parents than
we did on others." He said the
federal judge in charge of the case purposely decided to close the
kindergarten through third grade schools in the black neighborhoods and
put all such grade schools in the suburban areas of the county. This
plan was implemented, the lawyer argued, "so that white kids
wouldn't have to go to school in the inner city and that supposedly made
it easier for white parents to send their kids to school."
When asked if he would proceed differently if he had a chance to
negotiate the plan again, this particular civil rights attorney said he
was not sure, in the long run, that insisting on having elementary
schools in the inner city would have been the answer. Such a plan may
well have increased the rate of white flight. The attorney noted that by
leaving the white students in their own neighborhoods and sending the
black students out to the suburbs, the architects of the plan gained
broader acceptance of the court order. He noted, however, "we still
had white flight, and we may or may not have had as much white flight if
we had sent the white kids in to the elementary schools in the inner
city."
Thus, in Charlotte, as well as in Pasadena, Austin, Englewood, and
eventually Shaker Heights and Topeka, African-American and Latino
children were more likely to bear the logistical burdens of integration.
Meanwhile, black communities lost neighborhood schools in the name of
appeasing white parents who would otherwise flee the public system.
Often these white parents pulled their
children out of the public schools anyway, leaving African-American
parents, educators, and activists angry, hurt, and frustrated.
Ironically, the high school in Charlotte that we chose to study, West
Charlotte High School, is one of the few historically black schools that
survived the implementation of school desegregation by enrolling large
numbers of white students. Nevertheless, the story of West
Charlotte--the extra resources it received in order to attract the white
students as well as changes the school went through once the white
teachers and students arrived--provides some of the most solid evidence
that white privilege can assert itself even within the context of a
historically black school.
B. Together But So Far Apart: Uneven Knowledge of and Access to
High-Track Classes
The privilege and political power of white parents and students not
only influenced the way school desegregation plans were designed, it
also strongly influenced who had knowledge of and access to certain
classes within racially diverse schools. We recognize that there were
many factors affecting the resegregation of students within desegregated
schools, including the often unequal schooling that blacks and Latino
students had been receiving prior to desegregation, as well as the
higher poverty rates of their families, and even these students'
hesitancy to demand access to predominately white classes.
But we also have a great deal of evidence in our data to suggest that
white students were given more information about and easier access to
the upper-level classes.
From blatant tracking practices that labeled students as
"gifted" or "non-gifted" as early as kindergarten
and then channeled them through the grade levels in the
"appropriate" classes, to more subtle forms of sorting
students that used teacher recommendations to decide who got into the
best classes, the schools and districts we studied managed to create
incredible and consistent levels of segregation within each school. As
with the more frequent busing of black students, the preferred access to
upper-level classes given to whites was in part a strategy to appease
white parents. The timeframe we are studying is important in this regard
because it was the late 1970s when the Advanced Placement
("AP") program was just becoming prominent, especially in high
schools serving students from upper-middle-class backgrounds.
At all six of the high schools we studied, students talked about
seeing many of the same students in all of the upper-level classes.
"Schools within schools" was a phrase that was used often to
describe the special, predominantly white configuration of advanced
classes and students within desegregated schools. A white, 1980 graduate
of Shaker Heights High School noted that while it was not always the
exact same twenty students in every upper-level class, "it would be
very unusual to see somebody, like a new face in
one class that you didn't see in any other class."
At Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood, New Jersey, which was only
about 36% white by the time the Class of 1980 arrived, a high-track
white student commented that the more "academically stringent"
the class, the fewer black students there were enrolled. He noted that
in his AP biology class, there were one or two black students, and in
calculus there was only one, even though the school was almost 60%
black. When asked if the racial makeup of the upper-level classes was
something that students at Dwight Morrow talked about, this white
graduate stated that "there was like two societies going on at the
academic level."
The graduate also recalled that many African-American students in the
lower-level classes lacked the information they needed to go on to
college, including when or why to take the SATs. In contrast, white
students were very well informed regarding what it took to get into
college. The graduate commented: "There were people that knew that
you're gonna do this stuff, and they just kind of marched along and did
it, and there were other people who were totally out of it. Most people
were just not included in it." A powerful theme emerging from
Dwight Morrow was that the African-American graduates seemed to have
much less understanding of the tracking system overall. At the same
time, white students, whether they were in the most advanced classes or
not, tended to be more aware of where they and their classes fit into
the hierarchy.
The situation was similar at other schools in our study. For
instance, a Latina graduate of Austin High School noted that looking
back at her high school years, "I was never aware that there was
maybe like an advanced, upper-level class for those that made As, and
they were all predominantly white. I think they kind of put those
students all together; they were making all As, and they were going to
go with a certain instructor, and all be in the same room,
together."
While this lack of information about the tracking hierarchy on the
part of students of color and the lack of discussion regarding the
resegregation by classroom of desegregated schools were powerful themes
across the schools we studied, there were exceptions. For instance, a
white graduate of Shaker Heights, who recalled that her advanced classes
were about 95% white, remembered talking with one of the few
African-American students in her AP Government class during her senior
year. She said that she and the black student would walk home together
every day, and occasionally they would talk about how there "were
too many white males" in the AP classes:
I recall that there was a lot of discussion. . . about too many white
males in government, and we've got to change that, and whether it's
females or other races, we've got to change that. It was almost like we
felt . . . we knew we were on the cusp of being the next generation of
lawmakers or whatever we wanted to be, and we felt a great strength and
anticipation at the ability to
really be different and do something. . . I just really remember that,
we were all just so excited.
Despite such optimism, it was clear from our data that in many
instances students had been "tracked" into their gifted slots
well before they got to high school. As an English teacher at Muir High
School in Pasadena noted, the honors level classes were comprised of
mostly white students primarily because such within-school segregation
had existed in the middle school. Prior to the 1970s and court-ordered
desegregation, the students of color had not had the opportunity to
participate in the middle school honors program in large numbers. Thus,
the teacher at Muir noted, "it followed that they would not be in
the high school program for five years because you have to bring them
up, you know, through the rest of the levels of honors, so they're
prepared to do honors." But the teacher stated that after five or
six years, while she did begin to see more African-Americans in the
honors level classes, not many Latino students enrolled in them. She
added that today, students are still "grouped and tracked" in
the third grade into honors classes, a practice she referred to as
"criminal" because by high school, good students are hesitant
to take the honors classes if they have not previously been labeled as
"honors" material.
A former English teacher from West Charlotte High School told us
perhaps the most revealing story about tracking and race. When the
now-retired teacher was in her
first year at West Charlotte, the school was still all-black. This
teacher and a small cohort of colleagues were among the first white
teachers to be assigned to the historically black school. This teacher
talked about the students in the all-black honors classes at West
Charlotte as being very "bright," some of the best students
and the best classes she ever taught. She said that at the time the
school became desegregated the high-level black students were as good as
the high-level white students who came into the school and took the
black students' seats in those honors classes. The teacher said that she
often wonders, "[w]hat would have happened to those [high-achieving
black] students [without desegregation]? What did happen to them when
the school became integrated and the high-level classes were
predominately white?"
Across the racially diverse high schools in our study, at least two
separate and unequal academic spheres existed. While many students of
color felt that they did not have enough information about the different
academic options, many of the white students who had been identified as
gifted since they were in elementary school saw the upper-level classes
as their manifest destiny.
C. Colorblind Curriculum for Colorblind Schools: We Do Not Talk About
Race Here
Students of color were further marginalized within desegregated
schools by a commonly held belief that race did not matter and that the
goal of desegregation was to create
a "colorblind" society. This
ideology was promoted in at least two ways. First, the late 1970s
curriculum in the schools we studied endorsed a white, Eurocentric view
of the world, very close to the same curriculum that had been taught for
years in these schools when all but West Charlotte High School had been
predominantly white.
Second, neither the students nor the educators in these schools
talked about race or racial issues in their efforts to work with one
another on school activities or in less formal social interactions. The
absence of discussions of race meant that students and educators could
not learn from one another's experiences in confronting and resolving
racial concerns. The ability to learn from one another would have been
particularly useful given that many educators and students were working
and learning with people of different racial backgrounds for the first
time. Thus, while cross-racial tensions, concerns, and discoveries were
occurring all the time, no one was talking about them. Beyond what was
going on in the schools, the broader issues of racial inequality and
injustice that were (and are) rampant in these local communities were
not part of what students were grappling with during school hours.
Discussions of such racial conditions might have helped to build
important bridges across groups of students who were not only different
in terms of their racial and ethnic backgrounds, but in terms of their
social classes as well.
The lack of a dialogue about race combined with the maintenance of a "traditional"
Eurocentric curriculum became a de facto assimilationist project.
Students of color were required to "fit" into the norms of the
schools, including rules and understandings about what was right, smart,
and appropriate. Many African-American
and Latino students were left to feel that the teachers did not value
their input or perspective. When values, racial norms, knowledge, and
history go unchallenged, so does the privilege of one racial or ethnic
group over another.
1. Curriculum--Rarely a Multicultural Moment
One of the more surprising findings from this study was just how
little the curriculum in the racially mixed schools we studied had
changed during the 1970s, considering that the racial makeup of the
students had changed a great deal. For the most part, the schools
offered a white, Eurocentric perspective on the world. When changes were
made to the curriculum, they were usually marginal changes, such as the
addition of electives or a special assembly, in reaction to racial
unrest or specific demands by students of color. Even in Topeka, Kansas,
a city at the heart of the Brown v. Board of Education case, 1980
graduates do not recall learning much about race or racial inequality in
school. One Topeka High graduate who is now a lawyer noted that she had
no idea how important the Brown decision and the Topeka-based case were
until she went to law school many years later.
At Muir High School in Pasadena, the graduates and educators reported
that for the most part, the
curriculum did not reflect a diversity of perspectives. The lack of
diversity was the result of several factors, including the fact that
teachers at Muir had a great deal of autonomy in their classrooms and
there was no systematic effort at Muir to expand the core curriculum in
the 1970s to include nonwhite authors. Students' exposure to a more
multicultural curriculum was entirely dependent upon the individual
teachers and student experiences were thus not consistent. While a few
teachers made a concerted effort to include nonwhite authors and
perspectives, the vast majority of teachers were far more traditional.
As one former counselor at Muir said, "[a]s far as the teaching
goes, [desegregation] didn't really start to affect the canon until
about the mid-1980s, so we were still teaching the Dead White Man for a
long, long time."
The absence of overt discussions of race in the curriculum profoundly
affected many of the graduates of color we interviewed, particularly
those who had been taught different lessons in their homes and
communities. For instance, one African-American 1980 graduate of Austin
High School spoke about the difficulties he had accepting and relating
to his high school history teacher: "He was a good teacher, it's
just that I didn't believe in what they was teaching. Cause everything
was white. . .and I used to get so tired and frustrated. . .sitting and
listening what all these great white people[had done]." The lack of
diversity in the curriculum contributed
to the distrust that many students of color felt toward their white
teachers.
When the teachers did stray from their Eurocentric base to add
something more multicultural, they were often in uncharted territory,
which tended to leave them less certain about how to present and teach
the material. A good example of the difficulties many teachers had in
presenting multicultural materials was conveyed to us by an
African-American graduate of Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood. The
graduate recalled the time her white English teacher required them to
read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, a
story about a black girl who wants blue eyes. In the story, someone
tells the girl that if she killed a dog, she would be given blue eyes,
and the girl consequently kills the dog. The graduate recalled:
And so, you know, I raised my hand and I said, well, you know, when
she killed the dog she kind of killed her own beliefs in everything that
was ugly about herself and dah, dah, dah. [The teacher said] 'No, I
think you're reading it too deeply'. . . you know, I mean, and that was
the type of reactions that I would get out of this woman.
This particular graduate's mother had demanded that the school place
her daughter in the advanced classes after the student had been placed
in regular classes despite her high grades. Thus, this graduate was
often one of a very few African-American students in advanced classes.
Through her experience in these
classes, she quickly learned that race was a taboo subject, even though
so much of her daily experience was grounded in race.
2. Shhhhh--Don't Talk About Race!
Educators in the schools we studied were often bent on not talking
about race, either within their classrooms or as part of the
extra-curricular activities they were sponsoring. There were different
reasons given for this lack of discussion about race. For some
interviewees, it seemed as though talking about or acknowledging race
was bad in that it was un-American or racist. A former West Charlotte
teacher, a white woman, exemplified this: "[I]t just seemed like
color didn't seem to make a difference to anyone. We just, again, viewed
people as people. Not emphasizing, I guess would be the fact. . . I
mean, we emphasized the fact that we were not emphasizing color of
skin."
A white graduate of West Charlotte echoed the thoughts of this
teacher and many others whites interviewed for this study: "[A]t
West Charlotte we focused on how we were alike. . .That is one of the
reasons we didn't focus on cultural diversity." What is most
interesting about this insistence on "sameness" is that it was
often discussed by the same people who, in other parts of their
interviews, focused on how much they learned about people from different
backgrounds by attending racially diverse schools.
The lack of discussion about race was also due in part to a desire to
avoid racial conflict. In some
schools, most notably Topeka High School, Austin High School, and West
Charlotte High School, there had been a great deal of racial tension and
black-white fighting in the early and mid-1970s. In our interviews,
nearly every student and educator we interviewed from these schools
talked about the racial turmoil that preceded the Class of 1980's
arrival. School-level administrators and teachers were determined to
keep things calm. The idea of opening up issues of race or working
through racial differences with students was therefore not particularly
inviting.
A white English teacher from Austin High School explained that by the
late 1970s and 1980s, the initial controversies and racial animosities
had quieted down and no one wanted to stir the water. She recalled that
when African-American students first came to Austin High School in the
early 1970s after the old Anderson High School was closed, they were
extremely unhappy because many of them had been highly involved in
Anderson high school and in charge of extracurricular activities. When
they came to Austin High School, those clubs and offices were already
filled. The teacher noted, however, that by 1980, "everything was
all over, anything controversial or any unhappiness, you know, that was
all settled, and we were settled in as a school." Interviews with
the Austin High School graduates of color present different views on
this issue, but the point is that from the perspective of the educators,
there were no racial problems, and thus there was no need to deal with
racial issues.
While many white educators denied that race was an issue, some of the
same people, along with many other interviewees, particularly people of
color, also talked a great deal about just how salient race was in their
day-to-day experiences in these schools. For instance, as we noted
above, race clearly seemed to matter in terms of who ended up in which
classes. Furthermore, in two of the schools we studied, Topeka and West
Charlotte, there were fairly strict quotas regarding the racial make-up
of popular student awards and offices, such as homecoming courts,
student government, and cheerleading squads. There was an awareness of
such quotas, which in many instances benefited white students more than
black or Latino students, and an acknowledgment of their impact on
students' experiences in high school. As one white West Charlotte
graduate noted, although there were no explicit discussions of race in
her high school in the late 1970s, issues of race were everywhere. When
asked whether or not race was discussed in school, she replied:
"Discussed," like. . .like we discuss things now?. . . No,
there were no discussions of that. But, but was it a known fact that we
had three white candidates, three black candidates, and three at-large
[for student government elections]? Yeah! And--I don't even remember the
ballot, but the ballot probably said it! I mean, you know, I-I don't
know. But did we sit around and have round tables about. . . how to be
better people and like each other and live together in harmony and all
that stuff? No! No. But were there white
kids in the Gospel Choir? Yes!.. And we'd have, you know, the black guys
come to the Choir with cornrows, and [the African-American choir
teacher] would tell them. . . "get rid of those cornrows, you know?
Just because you're a black boy--don't be wearing those cornrows."
So. . . was there a discussion? No. But was race everywhere? Yeah!
Thus, while race was not regularly discussed in these schools, it was
lived in a very real and intuitive sort of way. With no forum or
dialogue in which to make better sense of the racial differences they
experienced every day, many of these graduates walked away from high
school with fairly superficial understandings of race and its role in
American society, understandings which would not lead one to challenge
the racial status quo.
D. The Self-Fulfilling Prophecies of Becoming a "Bad"
School: Challenge White Privilege and There Goes the School . . .
Finally, one more finding related to the way in which the promise of
Brown remained unfulfilled in the context of a highly unequal and
stratified society is that the reputations of the six high schools we
studied tended to rise and fall with the demographic changes of their
student bodies. Echoing the rationales for closing black schools in the
1960s and early 1970s, we found that the public's perception of racially
mixed schools tended to deteriorate as the
racial makeup of those schools became predominately nonwhite and the
enrollment of upper-middle-class students declined. This phenomenon was
particularly marked for the two schools in our study that had shifted
from majority white to majority nonwhite in the late 1970s: Muir High
School and Dwight Morrow High School. Two additional schools from our
study, West Charlotte High School and Shaker Heights High School, have
faced the same issues more recently because they have become majority
nonwhite schools in the last ten years. Austin High School, meanwhile,
has managed to maintain its majority white student population, though
barely. Topeka High School has been the most racially stable.
In this section, we will highlight the experiences of Muir and Dwight
Morrow because the white flight from these schools peaked during the era
we studied. We think the lessons learned from the experiences of these
two schools have a general relevance because, according to our
interviews, West Charlotte had similar experiences in the more recent
past, and both Shaker Heights and Austin High School appear to be facing
some of these issues today.
1. Increasing Racial Diversity, Declining Reputations
Both Muir and Dwight Morrow high schools had maintained reputations
as "good" and even "elite" schools as recently as
the early 1970s, before they began to lose their wealthiest white
students. For instance, both of these schools were more than fifty
percent white in the late 1960s, but they were rapidly
losing their white populations by the late 1970s. As the
African-American and Latino populations began to increase in the two
schools, people in the local communities began to question their
quality. Former educators and graduates of these schools talked about
these changing public perceptions and said that their schools had been
unfairly maligned by both the public and the media. Both educators and
graduates firmly believed that the declining reputation of their schools
had little to do with the quality of programs offered, since those had
not changed, especially for students in the upper-level classes. For
instance, Dwight Morrow High School shifted from a predominately white
student population in the late 1960s to a predominately African-American
student population by the late 1970s, and as wealthy white parents from
both the city of Englewood and Englewood Cliffs began to pull their high
school students out of Dwight Morrow, there was a real sense that the
quality of the school was in decline, even before the teaching staff,
course offerings, or Ivy League acceptances had changed. A former Dwight
Morrow teacher observed, "[a]s the population in the school
changed, that's when the reputation began to change. As there was a
change in the population then they said, 'Oh the quality of education is
not as good."' A Dwight Morrow guidance counselor, when asked why
this change in perception had occurred, noted:
I think a lot of it is just racism, I really do, because even--I mean
I was in Teaneck High School in 1959 and Teaneck and Englewood and
Hackensack had the only Black kids
in the whole area, and you'd always hear something about Teaneck,
Hackensack or Englewood. Now this is at a time when the schools were
academically superior schools, so it wasn't like you could point [to]. .
. the academic part. And I just think it snowballed until you had the
white flight and there was always this perception.
John Muir High School in Pasadena suffered similar public perception
problems as its African-American and Latino student populations
increased. Muir had once been the crown jewel high school of the
Pasadena school district, serving the children of wealthy white West
Pasadena and La Canada families. After La Canada seceded from the
district and built its own high school, Muir lost a large number of
white students, and at that point its reputation began to decline. Many
educators believed that this reputation was further hindered by the
school's geographic location in the heart of what was becoming a heavily
black area of Pasadena. As one former teacher explained:
Muir was known in the community as that school on that side of town.
Strictly racial. . . At one point if you drew a line down the middle of
this town. . . it was pretty much Black and White on either side. And in
those days there weren't a lot of Latinos. . .So [Muir] was pretty much,
you know, a ghetto school, if you will,--this was the mindset. There are
people in this community that still think that way.
According to another teacher who taught at Muir in the late 1970s,
there were a lot of rumors being
passed around Pasadena about what a dangerous school Muir was. He
recalled that people were saying, "[T]his is a very dangerous place
and people get knifed there all the time, they have shootings, they have
this--that wasn't true. If that was true I would have transferred to
another school. I mean, I'm not suicidal. . . And these stories just
passed through the community."
The rumors and perceptions of these schools were far removed from the
educators' and students' daily experiences. While many teachers and
students blame racism for the misperception, our respondents were also
quick to point out that the local media fed these misperceptions by
consistently covering minor racial incidents at these schools. The media
also ignored the positive things happening there, as well as the
problems in the more predominantly white schools.
2. The Media and Public Perceptions of Racially Diverse Schools
In Englewood, most of the educators and Class of 1980 graduates that
we interviewed spoke of the negative reporting by the local news
outlets, particularly the local newspapers. As a white graduate noted:
I think it was more this notion that the media was making [Dwight
Morrow] out to be a bad school, that it was a problem school, that it
was a dangerous school, and I just felt that it was being portrayed
inaccurately. While, I didn't deny that there were problems and there
were squabbles here and there, I
think they were minor and I think if it happened between two white
people in an all-white school no one would have made a big deal about
it. But because it happened between a black and a white person. . .
people read a lot more into it. . . I think things were being portrayed
inaccurately and the media was kind of fueling things, it wasn't giving
the school a chance to really kind of show how good it was and that
people really did get along.
A long-time African-American teacher at Dwight Morrow also found the
news coverage inaccurate, which reported that girls were raped and guys
carried knives at the school:
In the thirty years that I've been here I've never seen a guy
carrying a knife or a gun. I mean, there have been idle threats, people
have gotten beat up--that happens in any school--but to say that it was
a place that was violent, it's not true at all.
A white teacher at Englewood noted that the local newspapers not only
highlighted negative incidents in the community's schools, but
downplayed anything positive that went on there:
I remember one year our math club won the state championship, and it
was a paragraph on like page 28 of the [the local paper]. But on the
front page. . . was, "Student At Dwight Morrow Brings Knife to
School." And no one ever even acknowledged that this math club had
won the state championship.
Similar frustration with the media was expressed by the educators and
graduates of John Muir High School. They complained particularly about
coverage from the local newspaper, which they believed favored the high
school in the white area of town, Pasadena High School
("PHS"), over Muir. A black 1980 graduate of Muir, like many
of his classmates, observed that Muir always got a "really bad
rap" in the local paper. He argued that while his school received a
lot of negative publicity, most people did not hear about anything bad
that happened at PHS. A white graduate echoed these sentiments, noting
that "Any-any-any negative publicity that they could scrape up from
Muir, they would! And did!" Meanwhile the graduate's wife, also a
Muir graduate, said, "[i]f there was a fight at PHS, it was a small
mention. . .You know, in the back of the paper. If it was a fight at
Muir, it was front-page."
As an African-American former teacher noted, "I think Muir has
always gotten a bad rap" because of where it is located or because
it was more black and Latino than other schools. She told us that the
reports of violence and other disturbances were wrong:
I was never afraid to work here. . . There were some experiences that
maybe weren't so hot, like breaking up fights and making sure things did
not happen, but those are normal things connected with education, but as
far as it being the roughest and toughest, I don't think we had any more
incidents than the other high school, it was just that Muir was always
highlighted.
This teacher told us about a group of Muir teachers who went so far
as to have meetings with the local newspaper staff to try to convince
them to stop their negative reporting. The teachers were not successful.
3. Self-Fulfilling Prophecies Amid the Absence of White Privilege
Today, more than twenty years after the period we studied, our
interview data suggest that perhaps both Dwight Morrow and John Muir
have become more like the schools that newspapers were reporting them to
be in the 1970s: troubled by gangs and concentrated poverty. Total
enrollment in both schools is down, there are virtually no white
students left, and the range of course offerings has dwindled, leading
to a more watered down curriculum. Average test scores are also down,
leaving both high schools ranked very low on their state assessments.
Perhaps these two high schools, along with predominantly black West
Charlotte High School, stand as a testament to the old adage that
"green follows white." One of the primary motivations behind
pushing for desegregation was that schools with large percentages of
white and wealthy students are more likely to have resources, the best
teachers, and a more challenging curriculum. Either through parental
donations or political clout, such schools usually secure sufficient
resources to make their schools the very best. Once those white and
affluent families left, over time, predominantly black and Latino
schools too often came to resemble the poor reputations that preceded
their decline.
The greatest irony we learn from studies such as ours is that from
the perspective of African-American and Latino parents, students, and
educators, it is hard to live with white privilege and hard to live
without it. In other words, because white privilege pervades so many
aspects of our society, schools with large numbers of white and affluent
students are likely to be the most prestigious. When these schools also
have significant numbers of black and Latino students in them, they are
likely to be fairly segregated by classrooms, with white students
comprising the majority of the students in the upper-level classes. At
the same time, once the white students leave and upper-level classes
become more integrated, the reputation and eventually the quality of the
schools decline because the resources and status decrease.
Interestingly, the three schools from our study that have lost the
majority of their white populations were the three schools most likely
to challenge, albeit rather meekly, the automatic privilege of whites
and the status quo within their schools. For instance, of the six
schools that we studied, Muir and Dwight Morrow had moved further along
the path towards instituting multicultural curriculum than the other
four schools, and it was in Englewood and Charlotte that
African-American parents and activists challenged the tracking system.
In the end, such challenges appear to be pyrrhic victories, as these
three schools have lost not only
their white students but also the prestige and status in their
communities that they once enjoyed.
E. Racially Mixed Schools Need Much Attention and Care: Summing it
all Up
Putting these six racially mixed high schools from the late 1970s
into their broader social, political, and historical contexts has proven
to be a valuable exercise, one that helps us rethink the current, overly
simplistic debate about the "success" or "failure"
of school desegregation policy in this country. Indeed, rather than
portray the struggles of these schools as evidence that we have fallen
short of the ideal of a racially more equal and just society, we want to
point to these stories as evidence of both how far we have come and how
much further we need to go.
Much of the burden of righting the historical wrongs was placed on
the public schools, while much of the rest of the society, except for
the military, continued along its separate and unequal path. If white
privilege was not strongly challenged in other realms of our society, we
should not be at all surprised that it was barely challenged at all in
racially mixed schools. What we have learned from our six districts and
schools is that, despite what many adults thought back in the 1970s,
their journey toward equal educational opportunities was not complete
once white, black, and Latino students walked through the same school
doors; it had only just begun.
A white school district administrator in Charlotte, who was one of
the many principals of West Charlotte High School in the 1970s,
reflected on how different the understandings of the goals of school
desegregation were in the 1970s. He said that back then there was a
tension among liberal white educators who supported desegregation and
racial equality in theory, but who also wanted to teach the
predominantly white high-track classes. Many of these educators were not
ready to close the black-white achievement gap at that time. The
administrator noted:
Our moral issue [in the 1970s] was to get two groups of people
together who had never been together before, and let them succeed, or
let the institution succeed as a result of creating that kind of
grouping. I think the moral dilemma today is, you got to go deeper than
that. It's not enough just to put two groups of people together. Those
two groups of people had to be put together and come out on equal terms.
I don't think that was in our thought process at the time.
Another central paradox is that by the time educators began to figure
out how and what they could and should try to accomplish in racially
mixed schools, the number of such schools was declining. For instance,
shortly after we conducted our interviews, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg
schools ended their court-ordered school desegregation plan, and West
Charlotte High School, as we noted, is now predominantly black once
more.
. Professor of Sociology and
Education, Columbia Teacher's College.
. Assistant Professor of Women's
Studies, Univeristy of Nevada, Las Vegas.
. Post-doctoral Fellow, Graduate
School of Education and Information Studies, University of California,
Los Angeles.
. Senior Survey Specialist,
Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.
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