The Academic Consequences of Desegregation and Segregation: Evidence from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools
Introduction
For over 30 years, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg community has grappled with Swann’s (1971) mandate to provide equality of educational opportunities to black children—to all children—by ending segregated schooling. The legal foundation for that effort dissolved this spring when the U. S. Supreme Court denied certiorari to review the Fourth Circuit’s decision affirming the lower court’s judgment that the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School system (CMS) is now unitary. These are difficult times for those in Charlotte and across the nation who believe there are still reasons to require public schools to desegregate. Not only are the courts declaring still segregated school districts to be unitary, but the interracial coalitions of progressive citizens and their allies among corporate and civic elites that once supported desegregation also appears to the disintegrating. In the face of claims that desegregation does little to improve the educational outcomes of minority students while it inflicts heavy burdens on children and communities it is intended to serve, a number of former desegregationsupporters now embrace neighborhood schools or vouchers as reasonable alternative strategies for providing equality of educational opportunity to black students.
Aside from the philosophical, cultural, and legal reasons for desegregation, the central educational rationale for it rests largely upon claims that desegregated schooling improves minority youngsters’ access to the higher quality education more often provided to whites. Yet for the last decade or so critics have labeled it a “failed social experiment.” The empirical evidence that desegregation actually improves the academic outcomes of minority students has been, until recently, largely equivocal. Although the race gap in achievement has narrowed somewhat, it continues despite decades of desegregation. For many of desegregation’s critics, the narrowing of the race gap is easily explained by the upward social mobility of black Americans during the past 50 years, not their greater exposure to desegregated schooling.
This paper brings new evidence to bear on the question of whether desegregated schooling, in fact, improves the academic outcomes of those who experience it. Using survey data from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) collected in 1997, I examine (a) the academic consequences of attending segregated and desegregated schools, (b) how second generation segregation, in the form of tracking, diminished the potential benefits of school-level desegregation, (c) why desegregated learning environments are superior to segregated ones, and d) given the district’s new neighborhood schools pupil assignment plan, what do preliminary data suggest about racial and social class isolation and concentration in CMS’s 140 schools. The paper concludes with speculation as to what I anticipate will happen to race gaps in achievement, attainment, and racial antagonisms when the district returns to segregated neighborhood schools.
In many ways, Charlotte serves as a strategic case study. Aside from the school system’s historic importance for the desegregation movement, and its reputation as a successfully desegregated district, this study’s unique data and methodology advance desegregation research designs. Therefore, while the CMS findings are not are generalizeable, they are nonetheless, suggestive of the effects of desegregated and segregated schooling on achievement. They are also instructive about the broader theoretical and methodological issues with which all desegregation research must grapple: how to capture students’ varied experiences with different types of segregation and desegregation, and the necessity of examining the extent to which desegregation plans have been implemented before assessing their value as a school reform.
In compliance with the UC Open Access Policy, this report has been made available on eScholarship:
