The End of Keyes—Resegregation Trends and Achievement in Denver Public Schools
Introduction
On June 21, 1973, the Supreme Court delivered an opinion that dramatically shaped the future of both the Denver public schools and the country’s legal consideration of school desegregation. In its decision, Keyes v. Denver School District No. I( 413 U.S. 189 (1973)), the Court found that 1) Hispanic and Black students should not be considered as desegregating each other because the inequities they suffered from were similar, 2) proof of de jure segregation in a substantial portion of the school district is enough to assume that the entire district was similarly affected, and 3) the burden of proof should be on the school board to show that other portions of the city were not affected by similar policies (instead of the plaintiffs attempting to prove intentional segregation in each section of the district). In essence, Keyes afforded Hispanics in the Southwest the same kinds of rights to desegregation remedies as Black students had previously gained through other court decisions. For Denver, these decisions meant a directive to desegregate the District’s schools. For the country, it meant that desegregation was now mandated in the North and that it extended to whole districts, not just single schools (Orfield & Eaton, 1996). More than two decades later, the courts revisited Keyes, this time to a different end. In 1995, Judge Richard P. Matsch, who had presided over court supervision of Denver’s desegregation plan, declared that “the vestiges of past discrimination by the defendants have been eliminated to the extent practicable” (“Court oversight,” 1995), and, with his decree, ended mandated desegregation in the Denver Public Schools.
The legal and demographic shifts that have taken place in the Denver Public School District (DPS) over the last decade provides an opportunity to study the implications of key changes to desegregation policy on academic achievement as measured by test scores. In order to most clearly understand the relationship of the end of court ordered desegregation on academic achievement trends, researchers would ideally have individual-level longitudinal data on a variety of contributing factors, including, for example, the number of years a student had been in a desegregated school, the kinds of educational opportunities provided across schools (both before and after the end of court mandated desegregation), and the socio-economic status within the school by race, to name a few. Unfortunately, such data were not available for this study, but historic school-level data do enable us to look descriptively at the relationship of the end of Keyes to aggregate test scores under certain, limited conditions.
As a growing number of districts across the country face similar legal and demographic changes, the implications of Denver’s experiences have become increasingly salient. This paper describes the academic achievement trends of students in Denver’s elementary schools from 1994 to 2000. It begins with a brief introduction to the original 1973 Keyes decision and the path to its conclusion in 1995. It then presents a chronology of the standardized measures of academic achievement used by DPS and provides a descriptive longitudinal analysis of school-level Iowa Test of Basic Skills math performance (one of the standardized measures used by the district) for elementary schools in the district. The paper concludes with policy implications of the findings.
In compliance with the UC Open Access Policy, this report has been made available on eScholarship:
