Study finds carving up school districts worsens segregation. Case study Montgomery Co., AL

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Pike Road High School graduates its first senior class this school year, and leaders of this sprawling, semi-rural suburb of Alabama’s capital city extol the young community’s focus on education as one of its defining elements. “We are extremely proud of where we are,” said Pike Road Mayor Gordon Stone. “We’re competing well in every area that you measure from academics to athletics.”

Pike Road pulled out of the Montgomery County school district in August 2015, leaving the much larger district even more heavily African American than it was before. And Pike Road is not alone. A new study finds that the carving out of new school districts in the South is increasingly dividing white students from their black and Latino peers, reinforcing segregation. “It can help draw boundaries around white spaces,” said Erica Frankenberg, a Penn State University professor who is one of three authors of the study, published Wednesday in AERA Open, a journal of the American Educational Research Association. Those who study the creation of new school districts call the exits secession, conscious of the Civil War overtones that has for districts in the South.

The issue is particularly important, Frankenberg says, because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1974 that courts couldn’t order desegregation across district lines. That means that while an individual district may be able to find ways to more effectively integrate students, district lines usually pose fatal obstacles to such efforts. The study examines 18 districts created since 2000 across Alabama, around Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and around Memphis, Tennessee. The study found that an increasing share of segregation between black and white students was caused by district lines as opposed to clustering at specific schools within a district.

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Dawn Chapman, a former teacher in the Montgomery County schools, said she considered sending her son to the larger county system but was worried about its fit in terms of learning style. Chapman, who is African American, also said she didn’t want her child to attend an overwhelmingly black school. “I wanted him to go somewhere that was more diverse,” said Chapman, who enrolled her son at Pike Road’s elementary school. She said she worries about how students in the county school system will fare without exposure to children of other races. “It has a huge effect, knowing how to interact with people from different races,” she said.

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Beyond racial overtones, those who study secessions say there’s also a resource disparity. Voters in Pike Road agreed to a property tax increase, and the school is spending $10 million to renovate its high school, a historically black campus that it bought from Montgomery County for another $10 million.

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In Alabama, any city with more than 5,000 residents can walk out of its countywide school system with a vote of the city council. But in Tennessee, constituents had to persuade lawmakers to lift a ban to allow school systems to separate from a district that temporarily included Memphis and its surrounding county. In Louisiana, voters statewide must approve a constitutional amendment for each system.

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