Understanding How Resegregation Affects Schools: The Views of Wichita Teachers, Parents, and Students

 

The Wichita Public Schools decided several years ago to return to neighborhood schools, undoing a desegregation plan in part of the city. The district is to be commended that it has decided to ask outside researchers to look at what has happened. Too often I have found districts tend to ignore the schools after dropping their plans and just to assume that everything is going well.

 

I have been observing and studying schools and communities dealing with ending legally imposed segregation, dealing with desegregation orders and plans, and, in many cases, experiencing resegregation for more than a third of a century. As I look at the surveys and the statistics on Wichita schools I see familiar patterns. Since the U.S. Supreme Court authorized a return to neighborhood schools in the 1991 Oklahoma City (Dowell) decision, even in cities with a history of segregation, segregation has been increasing year by year for both black and Latino students across the country as the nation’s population of young whites has declined, blacks have increased gradually and the numbers of Latino youth have soared. In many cities the growing share of Latino and African American students, groups that have historically experienced the least success in American schools, have been increasingly concentrated in segregated schools of concentrated poverty even as the economy’s demands for more educated workers have intensified. Since schools that experience double segregation (race and poverty) or triple segregation (ethnicity, poverty and language) tend to produce far worse results than middle class integrated or white schools, these trends raise serious worries. In my research I have found that virtually every school district going to neighborhood schools expresses confidence that it can make the resegregated schools equal. I think that this often involves a sincere concern and sometimes a well-developed plan. But they never succeed beyond the occasional individual school. Segregation is still profoundly unequal in all of the cases I have seen. But the changes are gradual and usually no one pays much attention for a number of years or until the schools begin doing very badly on state and federal accountability measures. Then the blame is usually placed on the teachers and, sometimes, on the principal.

 

What I see in the statistics from Wichita is typical and should make local educators and community leaders worry. There is no visible crisis in the schools. The primary grade students (and their parents) still attending them see no significant problem and, in many ways, their views of their schools are similar of those students and parents going to the other surveyed schools. The reality, though, is that these schools are changing rapidly and moving steadily toward becoming segregated African American schools. Since that does not happen from a sudden departure of existing students but from a year by year change in who is enrolling in the school. It is not always visible to the students at any given point in time. Yet the reality is that if the entering classes change each year the school can be transformed dramatically by the end of five years without attracting much attention from outside. The reality in situations like this is that as a school becomes more and more segregated, families with children who are not African American become less and less likely to enroll or to move into the neighborhood. Many white families accept and value diversity but they do not want their children isolated in a resegregated school. As the school becomes more segregated, it also tends to show an increase in poverty and African American middle class families, who are now rapidly moving to suburbia in many parts of the country, tend to abandon such schools. Very seriously for the future of the schools, teachers in such schools tend to experience increasing demands from less prepared students and are often personally uncomfortable in resegregated schools, particularly white teachers without experience or training in African American schools. As accountability pressures grow, teachers are often tempted to transfer to schools where their work is less difficult and they feel more comfortable. Departure of well-trained and experienced teachers is a severe blow to a school’s future.

 

Segregation is a vicious cycle and it cannot be contained in one area by going to neighborhood schools. As the population grows, it spreads. Desegregated schools tend to produce more housing integration. Segregated schools tend to produce more segregation since it limits the families that will consider moving into an area. Historically segregation of schools and neighborhoods spread school by school, neighborhood by neighborhood. If a community does not want a future of spreading segregation and inequality in its schools it needs to have a plan to avoid it. Neighborhood schools are not such a plan; in fact they create conditions that facilitate the spread of segregation.

 

The clearest signs of immediate danger to the city schools in the surveys described in Prof. Frankenberg’s report are those reported by the teachers. These findings deserve immediate attention. Teachers see less safety and worse race relations in the resegregating schools, conditions very likely to speed resegregation, damage achievement, and foster loss of teachers. They see less positive relations with parents and more tension within the faculty and have less confidence in the ability of administrators to handle the situation. All of these things are very important to the future and success of these schools and the district should address them with urgency, with serious retraining and, in some cases, restaffing and a real commitment from the district to help solve the problems.

 

Magnet schools can be powerful forces for strengthening the reputation of schools and supporting neighborhoods or they can be failures. Magnet schools that do not draw voluntary transfers from other parts of the city for several years are not magnets in reality and they need to be critically reviewed and redesigned until they are actually magnetic. Prof. Frankenberg’s recommendations deserve attention.

 

Wichita is a small enough city and this is a new enough experiment that the problems can be alleviated with strong leadership. My word of caution is that time is of the essence. These problems will not go away, they will deepen and solutions will become more costly and less successful over time. Now is the time for local leadership.