"Your father works for my father": Race, class, and the politics of voluntarily mandated desegregation

Teachers College Record

Volumn 110, Issue 5, 2008, Pages 986-1032

  Smith, Stephen Samuel ^a   Kedrowski, Karen M ^a   Ellis, Joseph M ^b,c   Longshaw, Judy ^a  

^a WINTHROP UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE   (United States)

^c TEMPLE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 44849122659     PISSN: 01614681     EISSN: 14679620     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (105)

1. Asked about the cheer, a 2003 graduate of Northwestern responded: This is something that we've always heard was said publicly in the form of cheers, but my personal experience with the saying has been more on the level of an "urban legend." I cannot speak with any authority as to whether or not it was actually a chant. I have never heard it said at the football games before, but it's something that students are aware of (Howell Williams, personal communication, January 27, 2006) See also the comments of a member of the high school reassignment committee, Lonnie Harvey, cited below.
2. The county, York, in which RHSD is located contains four school districts. Officially, the Rock Hill school district is generally referred to as York 3 or Rock Hill School District Three. However, we will refer to it simply as RHSD.
3. Even with the surge in Hispanic school enrollment discussed below, the vast majority of RHSD's White students and White families are non-Hispanic Whites. For this reason and for expository convenience, we will use White as a proxy for non-Hispanic White, unless the context (e.g., quantitative analyses of enrollment trends) requires greater precision.
4. The board's seventh member, a Black, was not present at the meeting.
5. John Logan, Resegregation in American Public Schools? Not in the 1990s (Albany, NY: Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research, 2004), 15.
6. For claims of growing resegregation see Erica Frankenberg, Chungmei Lee, and Gary Orfield, A Multiracial Society with Segregated Schools: Are We Losing the Dream? (Cambridge, MA: The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, 2003)
7. and Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee, Racial Transformation and the Changing Nature of Segregation (Cambridge, MA: The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, 2006).
8. Kathryn Borman. Tamela Eitle, Deanna Michael, David Eitle, Reginald Lee, Larry Johnson, Deirdre Cobb-Roberts, Sherman Dorn, and Barbara Shircliffe, "Accountability in a Post-desegregation Era: The Continuing Significance of Racial Segregation in Florida's Schools," American Educational Research Journal, 41(3) (2004), 605-631;
9. Eric A. Hanushek, John F. Kain, and Steven G. Rivken, New Evidence About Brown v. Board of Education: The Complex Effects of School Racial Composition on Achievement, NBER Working Paper 8741 (National Bureau of Economic Research: Cambridge, MA, 2002);
10. Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, "Subverting Swann: First- and Second- Generation Segregation in Charlotte, North Carolina, American Educational Research Journal, 38(2) (2001), 215-252;
11. Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, "The Academic Consequences of Desegregation and Segregation: Evidence from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools," North Carolina Law Review, 81(4) (2003), 1513-1562;
12. Russell W. Rumberger and Gregory J. Palardy, "Does Segregation Still Matter? The Impact of Student Composition on Achievement in High School," Teachers College Record, 107(9) (2005), 1999-2045.
13. Throughout this article our use of the term working class accords with the frequent everyday meaning of the term as pertaining to blue-collar workers, not white-collar workers. Our usage elides many crucial issues contained in the voluminous literature on social class. But our discussion does not require greater precision, especially because it reflects the understanding of Rock Hill residents such as Leila Hicklin and Lonnie Harvey when they refer to Rock Hill High as the blue-collar school and Northwestern as the white-collar school or the school for doctors and lawyers in their comments cited below. We will also typically talk of desegregation as benefiting Blacks even though some Blacks opposed the board's reassignment plans, especially for the elementary schools. However, this opposition was limited. As indicated by the views of the board's two Black board members, the Black activists who pushed for SMD representation on the school board, and the support for the defendant- interveners in the lawsuit, RHSD's pursuit of desegregation had strong backing in the Black community. Moreover, polling data from early spring 2003 (after the elementary school reassignment was implemented but before the litigation was settled) also indicates strong support among Rock Hill Blacks for desegregation. For example, on a question about the importance of "bussing children to ensure racial balance," the modal Black response was the highest on the scale ("Extremely important"=38 percent), 78 percent of Black respondents were in the three highest categories, and only 13 percent were in the three lowest categories. In contrast, the modal White response was the lowest on the scale ("Not Important At All"=26 percent), and 50 percent of White respondents were in the three lowest categories on the scale. (Analysis by authors of data provided by Scott Huffmon).
14. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
15. Stephen Samuel Smith, Boom for Whom? Education, Desegregation, and Development in Charlotte (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004). Unless stated otherwise, our subsequent statements about desegregation in Charlotte all draw on this book.
16. In school desegregation law, the term unitary generally means that the vestiges of the Jim Crow era's state-mandated dual system have been eliminated to the extent practicable and that the district is entided to be released from court supervision.
17. Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, "Achieving Equality of Educational Opportunity in the Wake of Judicial Retreat from Race Sensitive Remedies: Lessons from North Carolina," American University Law Review 52:6 (2003), 152-184;
18. Smith, Boom for Whom?
19. Stephen Samuel Smith, Karen M. Kedrowski, and Joseph M. Ellis, "Electoral Structures, Venue Selection, and the (New?) Politics of School Desegregation," Perspectives on Politics, 2:4 (2004), 795-801.
20. NAACP Legal Defense Fund, The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, and the Center for the Study of Race and Law at the University of Virginia Law School, Looking to the Future: Voluntary K-12 School Integration (New York: Author, 2005).
21. Jennifer Hochschild, "Is School Desegregation Still a Viable Policy Option?" PS: Political Science & Politics 30 (1997), 458-465.
22. For a fuller and more nuanced discussion of voluntary and mandatory strategies than is necessary here, see Christine H. Rossell, "The Effectiveness of Desegregation Plans" in Christine H. Rossell, David J. Armor, and Herbert Wahlberg, eds., School Desegregation in the 21st Century (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2002).
23. LDF, Looking to the Future, 31. A sixth case involves a graduate school of education's laboratory school.
24. Judy Longshaw, "Is Board Lacking Diversity?" Herald, November 1, 1998, 1B.
25. Allison Bruce, "School Board Wants Lawmakers' Input on Elections," Herald, December 21, 1999, 1A.
26. Allison Bruce, "Members Endorse Plan to Diversify School Board," Herald, April 25, 2000, 1A.
27. Jean Denton, "Savage Says Some Redistribution Likely," Evening Herald, February 17, 1973, pp. 1, 14.
28. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Order of Dismissal in the Matter of York County School District No. 3, South Carolina and South Carolina State Department of Education, Docket No. S-122 Proceedings Under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by Creagh B. Evins, Administrative Law Judge (Greenville, SC: Author), April 11, 1977.
29. Jennifer Woods, "School Rezoning To Ignore Race," Evening Herald, May 13, 1983, 1.
30. Jennifer Woods, "School Rezoning Geared to Maintain Racial Balance, Evening Herald, April 26, 1983, pp. 1, 14.
31. Joe Berger, Interview with authors, Rock Hill, SC, October 7, 2002. Berger was a member of the board in 1983.
32. Jennifer Woods Parker, "Board OKs Rezoning," Evening Herald, December 7, 1983, pp. 1,2.
33. Quantitative historical data on the actual extent of socioeconomic balance is not available, but data on racial balance is. In 1990, for example, the Black-White dissimilarity index for RHSD's elementary schools was 20.6, slightly less than the median for South Carolina school districts in that year. By 2000, largely because of the situation with Sunset Park and Sylvia Circle discussed further on in the article, the corresponding figure was 25.9, slightly more than the median for all of South Carolina's districts. [The dissimilarity index indicates the proportion of a district's students that would have to be moved to ensure that the racial composition of each school in the district would be the same as the racial composition of the entire district. The index ranges from 0 (perfect racial balance) to 100 (complete segregation). Data obtained from the American Communities Project at Brown University, accessed online at http://www.s4.brown.edu/schoolsegregation/index.htm. According to this website, a dissimilarity index of 60 or above "is considered very high," and "values of 30 or below are considered to be fairly low."]
34. Cal Harrison, "Racial Makeup of New Zones Outrages Parents," Herald, May 7, 1996, 1a.
35. Judy Longshaw and Nicole Gustin, "Parents: Leave Zones Alone," Herald, May 22, 1996.
36. Harrison, "Racial Makeup."
37. Rock Hill School District, Comparisons of the Impact of the Proposed Student Attendance Plan on Student Demographics: Preliminary Discussions, May 28, 2001 (Rock Hill: Author, 3).
38. Rock Hill School District Enrollment - All Ethnic Codes, October 24, 2000 (Rock Hill: Author, 2000).
39. Editorial, "Balancing Our Schools," Herald, April 22, 2001, 23.
40. Jennifer Stanley, "Board: 'Fixes' to Sunset Park May Be Route to Rezoning," Herald, June 12, 2001, 1a.
41. Jason Cato, "Concerns Rise Over Proposed Zones, Herald, May 30, 2001, 1A.
42. "Sylvia Circle will give first priority for admission to the 200 students who are currently attending the school and who reside within walking distance of Sylvia Circle. The second 200 seats, as well as those seats available because currently enrolled students selected other district locations, will be open to any student in the district in grades K-5th grade. If more students apply than can be served . . . students will be randomly selected . . . Sylvia Circle Montessori will maintain a racial balance comparable to all schools in the Rock Hill School District" (Charter school grant application submitted by RHSD to South Carolina Department of Education, April 25, 2001).
43. Tiernee Midkiff, "Don't Bus Our Children," Herald, August 25, 2001, 5A.
44. Rock Hill School District Minutes of Meeting of November 26, 2001 (Rock Hill: Author, 2001).
45. rd High School, news release, April 30, 2002.
46. Amy French, Nichole Monroe Belle, and Sean Jamiseson, "Judge Lets Reassignment Policy Proceed This Year," Herald, July 21, 2002, 4b.
47. Erica Pippins, "Judges Deny Appeal in Rezoning Case, Herald, July 31, 2002, 1A.
48. Offer of Judgment in Burris v. Rock Hill School District No. 3, Civil Action 0:02-1409-10, United States District Court for the District of South Carolina.
49. As discussed below, at the start of the 2004-5 academic year, Sunset Park became a year-round school. It retained its defined attendance zone, but students anywhere in RHSD could apply to attend the school. We lack data on the extent to which this change led to the increase in the school's Black enrollment.
50. Computation is the authors' based on data from RHSD's 45-day membership report dated October 13, 2005.
51. We are not, it should be emphasized, claiming that the elections were a referendum on desegregation; many other issues were involved. But with the reassignment having just taken effect and the outcome of the litigation very uncertain, the results of the election are prima facie evidence that opposition to the board's pursuit of desegregation was nowhere near as important to voters as NU had hoped it would be.
52. Jennifer Stanley, "4-3 Vote Ends Battle Over Where To Build," Herald, March 13, 2001, 1A.
53. Andrew Skerritt, "McDaniel To Hear Public Speak About Third High School," Herald, March 16, 2001, 1A.
54. Rock Hill School District, Minutes of School Board Work Session, April 9, 2001 (Rock Hill: Author, 1);
55. Jennifer Stanley, "Saluda Trail Site OK'd", Herald, April 10, 2001, 1A.
56. Wendy Bigham, "Parents Voice Views On School Lines," Herald, February 3, 2004, 1B.
57. Five seats were on the ballot because one of them had been filled by a temporary appointment to a seat left vacant by a resignation.
58. In 1999-2000, non-Hispanic Whites constituted 64 percent of the high school enrollment; in 2000-1, 63 percent; in 2001-2, 63 percent; and in 2002-3, 61 percent (all data from RHSD's Ethnic Reports based on 45-day membership). In the discussion we present data on private school enrollment that also argues against significant White flight in recent years.
59. In this respect, the situation in RHSD parallels that in many other districts. As Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee say about the situation nationally, "Within a decade it is likely that there will be fewer than half white students in our public schools . . . This will not be true because of flight to private schools, which serve a much smaller proportion of students than they did in the 1950s and are expected to serve a declining share in the future. It is because of a changing population structure created by differential birth rates and age structures and a largely nonwhite international flow of millions of immigrants" (Orfield and Lee, Raaal Transformation).
60. David Armor, Forced Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 223; Rossell, "Effectiveness of Desegregation Plans," 94.
61. Armor, Forced Justice; Rossell, "Effectiveness of Desegregation Plans."
62. Ken Spears, personal communication, Rock Hill, SC, January 18, 2006.
63. Lynn Moody, personal communication, Rock Hill, SC, January 23, 2006.
64. Phillip McDaniel, personal communication, Rock Hill, SC, January 30, 2006.
65. Ibid.
66. Allison Bruce, "Officials like option of year-round class," Herald, June 12, 2000, 1A;
67. Rock Hill School District, Minutes of School Board Work Session, April 13, 2003 (Rock Hill: Author, 2003).
68. Gary Orfield, "Metropolitan School Desegregation: Impacts on Metropolitan Society," Minnesota Law Review 80:4 (1996), 825-874.
69. Armor, Forced Justice, 183.
70. Charles T. Clotfelter, Helen F. Ladd, and Jacob L. Vigdor, "Segregation and Resegregation in North Carolina's Public School Classrooms," North Carolina Law Review 81:4 (2003), 1484.
71. Moody, personal communication. Rock Hill, SC, January 23, 2006.
72. During the same period when non-Hispanic-White enrollment in the district's high schools dropped from 65 to 56 percent, system-wide it dropped from 61 to 56 percent (computations from RHSD ethnic reports based on 45-day membership).
73. Computations by authors from annual reports, Private School Enrollment By Grade, By County obtained from South Carolina Department of Education. These reports do not provide data on where students reside or the number who are home-schooled, and we do not have the report for 2005-6. However, in the absence of a comparison between RHSD's enrollment and York County population trends - an undertaking beyond the scope of this article - these reports provide the best available data on private school enrollment.
74. Armor, Forced Justice, 222;
75. Clotfelter, Ladd, and Vigdor, "Segregation and Resegregation," 1485. Another relevant structural factor might be residential segregation. However, Clotfelter, Ladd, and Vigdor report that in North Carolina "the relationship between neighborhood and school segregation is surprisingly weak" (p. 1492). Our preliminary analyses for South Carolina also indicate a weak relationship.
76. We are grateful to Chinh Le for calling the possible conflict between scholarly and normative commitments to our attention.
77. Leila Hicklin, personal communication, Rock Hill, SC, December 28, 2004.
78. Spears, personal communication. Rock Hill, SC, January 18, 2006.
79. Ibid.
80. Lonnie Harvey, personal communication, Rock Hill, SC, January 23, 2006.
81. Lacking student-level data, we base this statement upon FRL and housing value data from the 174 segments into which RHSD was divided by OR/Ed for developing the high school reassignment plan. Wedgewood was one of these segments, and we compare it with the segments in which three of NU's five officers lived (a fourth lived outside of Finley Road's attendance zone, and we were unable to obtain data on the fifth). Only 1 percent of students from Wedgewood were FRL-eligible; the average for the three NU officers' segments was 15 percent. Moreover, even though Wedgewood had only about 63 percent the number of students that, on average, the NU officers' segments contained, it had, on average, about four times the number of expensive homes.
82. Harvey, personal communication, Rock Hill, SC, January 23, 2006.
83. Ronald P. Formisano, Boston Against Busing, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). One reason why working-class Whites have opposed desegregation efforts is that many plans - again Boston is the poster child - have required much greater changes in pupil assignment for Blacks and working-class Whites than they have required for more privileged, affluent, and politically influential Whites.
84. Richard D. Kahlenberg, The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
85. Michael A. Miller, personal communication with authors, February 9, 2006. Miller was the OR/Ed staff member who worked most closely with the high school reassignment committee. There was strong support for the priority given to variables other than race even from committee members for whom civil rights, race, and ethnicity were very salient issues. Thus, Lonnie Harvey - the defendant-interveners' representative on the committee, a consultant on workplace diversity issues, and a Black - noted that when the committee considered "a map that gave racial balance to all three schools," he considered it "an atrociouslooking map, difficult as far as travel is concerned, created a lot of satellites, income had no balance to it" (interview with authors).
86. Spears, personal communication, Rock Hill, SC, January 18, 2006.
87. Jeff Nicholson, personal communication, Rock Hill, SC, January 5, 2005.
88. Elissa Cox, personal communication, November 18, 2004. Cox's comments contain words within quotation marks because she used quotation marks in the e-mail from which her comments are taken.
89. The scholarly understanding is often labeled the participation hypothesis [Sidney Verba, Small Groups and Political Behavior (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961)].
90. Morton Inger and Robert Stout, "School Desegregation - The Need to Govern," Urban Review, November, 1968, 36.
91. Susan L. Greenblatt and Charles V. Willie, "School Desegregation and the Management of Social Change," in Charles V. Willie and Susan L. Greenblatt, eds., Community Politics and Educational Change: Ten School Systems Under Court Order (New York: Longman, 1981), 340.
92. Jennifer L. Hochschild, The New American Dilemma: Liberal Democracy and School Desegregation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 101-102, 106.
93. Of course, in the era of court-mandated desegregation efforts, local political support could facilitate such efforts. But broad-based community input in these efforts from the very outset was not as necessary as it is in the absence of such mandates.
94. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society (Boston, Mass: Beacon Press, 1985).
95. Moody, personal communication, Rock Hill, SC, January 23, 2006.
96. Hollie S. Bennett, personal communication, Rock Hill, SC, October 26, 2004.
97. Julie Sturgeon, "Over the Line," District Administration, August 2005.
98. John Chesser, personal communication, Charlotte, NC, February 14, 2006.
99. Arlene K. Brown and Karen W. Knight, "School Boundary and Student Assignment Procedures in Large, Urban Public School Systems," Education and Urban Society, 37:4 (2005), 401.
100. The future of pupil assignment in RHSD may bear as much witness to the need for such evaluation as the past does. Despite the high school committee's success, RHSD is currently taking a different approach to future pupil reassignment issues by appointing a seven-person advisory committee whose members are expected to serve for two years. The committee will make recommendations upon which district staff will draw in developing assignment plans for the board's approval. Motivating this new approach are what the district viewed as the downsides of the high school committee, e.g., the extensive amount of staff time and energy required to support the work of so large an ad hoc committee. At this point, it is unclear whether this new process will serve RHSD as well as the high school reassignment committee did.
101. Bennett, personal communication.Rock Hill, SC, October 26, 2004.
102. Phillip J. McDaniel, personal communication, Rock Hill, SC, October 19, 2002.
103. Hochschild, New American Dilemma.
104. Of course, in many districts, had Blacks been able to vote, school board elections might have turned out very differendy. But federally mandated desegregation was not confined to such districts. Indeed, some of the most crucial federal interventions occurred in districts such as Charlotte where Whites constituted a majority of the citizenry.
105. Putnam, Bowling Alone. In response to early works touting the benefits of social capital, critics pointed out that high levels of it could have pernicious consequences, e.g., the Ku Klux Klan draws on the kind of social networks and norms of trustworthiness to which the concept of social capital refers. In response to this criticism, Putnam subsequently distinguished between bonding and bridging social capital (Bowling Alone, 22). While the Klan might rank high on the former, it embodied litde of the latter. We talk of bridging civic engagement rather than bridging social capital because while the empirical referents of the term social capital merit sustained study, the term itself, in our view, is deeply flawed both analytically and ideologically [Stephen Samuel Smith and Jessica Kulynych, "It May Be Social, but Why is It Capital? The Social Construction of Social Capital and the Politics of Language," Politics & Society 30: 1 (2002), 149-196].