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January 24, 2006
By Chungmei
Lee
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The Denver Public Schools (DPS) provide a unique opportunity
to study the dynamics of school segregation within the context of
rapid demographic changes and key policy changes. In 1973, Denver
became the first northern school district ordered to desegregate
by the U.S. Supreme Court. Lawyers representing a group of Black,
Latino and White families filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court
charging that schools in the Park Hill neighborhoods were intentionally
segregated to keep White students separate from minority students.
Although efforts at ending official segregation of Latinos were
made at the state and local levels through the 1940s, 1950s, and
1960s, Keyes was the first Supreme Court ruling that recognized
the rights of Latinos to desegregation. Under Keyes, Denver
created a plan that desegregated both Black and Latino students
within the city in such a way that it became one of the few large
metropolitan areas during the 1970s where both Black and Latino
students became much less segregated from Whites.
Since the time of Keyes, one of the most dramatic demographic
changes in Denver Public Schools (DPS) has been the surge of Latino
enrollment. In 1980, DPS was already majority minority with 41 percent
White, 23 percent Black, 32 percent Latino, and 3 percent Asian
student enrollment. A little over two decades later, DPS became
majority Latino, with White students comprising only one-fifth of
the entire student body by 2003. Denver school growth was cut off
by a state constitutional amendment that prohibited incorporating
surrounding suburban communities into the Denver school district.
Approved by voters in 1974, the Poundstone Amendment prohibited
annexation except by the consent of the majority of the voters in
each county that was giving up the land. Specifically, the legislation
stated, “except as otherwise provided by statute, no part
of the territory of any county shall be stricken off and added to
an adjoining county, without first submitting the question to the
registered electors of the county from which the territory is proposed
to be stricken off; nor unless a majority of all the registered
electors of said county voting on the question shall vote therefore.”
At the time the amendment was passed, Denver was annexing lands
to the south and east following the suburbanization of White families.
Once these lands were annexed, the schools became part of Denver
Public Schools. While the announced goal of the amendment was to
prevent Denver’s growth from overwhelming the suburbs, the
effect was to limit the reach of the desegregation order into the
suburbs. Because Keyes only covered the schools within the 1974
boundaries of Denver and none of the other school districts in the
metropolitan area, the Poundstone Amendment effectively sealed off
Denver from the surrounding suburbs and severely curtailed its ability
to have any lasting and stable desegregation of its public school
students. As a result, Denver Public Schools now captures a shrinking
share of the total Denver metropolitan student population (from
21% in 1990 to 19% in 2003).
Amidst the context of major demographic transformation, in 1995
the court ended nearly two decades of court ordered school desegregation
in Denver schools (Keyes v. Denver School District No. I,
902 F. Supp. 1274 (1995)). As one of the few major school districts
with a history of desegregation of both Blacks and Latinos, the
implications of this reversal of Keyes are important to understand.
Policymakers and educators will be uniquely challenged to provide
education in a context that is both majority Latino and, as this
paper documents, increasingly segregated and unequal for its growing
diverse student body.
This paper, the first of two reports, focuses on the dynamics of
segregation, demographic changes, and implications for graduation
rates in the Denver Public Schools. I utilize the Common Core of
Data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)
to place the Denver Public Schools in both a national and regional
context. I begin with a demographic overview of the Denver-Aurora
Metropolitan Statistical Area (hereafter referred to as the Denver
Metropolitan Area) before focusing on the composition of Denver
Public Schools from 1990 to 2003. The relationship of the dramatic
demographic changes to segregation trends is examined by measuring
the average exposure of students to all racial groups, as well as
to each other and the concentration of students in racially isolated
schools during the five years preceding the 1995 Keyes
decision and in the eight subsequent years following. I use the
Cumulative Promotion Index to calculate graduation rates, a measure
of student promotion through successive school years designed to
offset some of the limitations of official dropout data.
To view the COMPLETE REPORT
and study conducted by The Civil Rights Project go to:
Denver Public Schools:
Resegregation, Latino Style (in PDF Format)
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