Black parents battle school rezoning plan in Tuscaloosa, Alabama
Black parents are battling a school rezoning plan in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, calling it resegregation. The results of the plan: all but a handful of the hundreds of students required to move this fall were black—and many were sent to virtually all-black, low-performing schools. And in a new twist for an integration fight, they are wielding an unusual weapon: the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, which gives students in schools deemed failing the right to move to better ones. The schools superintendent and board president, both white, say the rezoning, which redrew boundaries of school attendance zones, is a color-blind effort to reorganize the 10,000-student district around community schools and relieve overcrowding. By optimizing use of the city’s 19 school buildings, the district saved taxpayers millions, officials say. They also acknowledge another goal: to draw more whites back into Tuscaloosa’s schools by making them attractive to parents of 1,500 children attending private academies founded after court-ordered desegregation began. Superintendent Joyce Levey says all students forced by the rezoning to move from a high- to a lower-performing school were told of their right under NCLB to request a transfer. When the racially polarized eight-member school board approved the rezoning plan, last spring, its two black members voted against it. "All the issues we dealt with in the ’60s, we’re having to deal with again in 2007," said Earnestine Tucker, one of the black members. "We’re back to separate but equal—but separate isn’t equal." For decades school districts across the nation used rezoning to restrict black students to some schools while channeling white students to others. Such plans became rare after civil rights lawsuits in the 1960s and ’70s successfully challenged their constitutionality, says William L. Taylor, chairman of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights (CCCR).
Tuscaloosa’s rezoning dispute, civil rights lawyers say, is one of the first in which NCLB has become central, sending the district into uncharted territory over whether a reassignment plan can trump the law’s prohibition on moving students into low-performing schools. Tuscaloosa is not the only community where black parents are using NCLB to seek more integrated, academically successful schools for their children. In Greensboro, North Carolina, students in failing black schools have transferred in considerable numbers to higher-performing, majority-white schools, school officials there say. A 2004 CCCR study documented cases in Florida, Indiana, Tennessee, and Virginia where parents were moving their children into less-segregated schools. Nationally, less than 2% of eligible students have taken advantage of the law’s transfer provisions.
While under court-ordered desegregation, Tuscaloosa’s schools roughly reflected the school system’s racial makeup, and there were no all-black schools. However, in recent years the board has carved the district into three zones, each with a new high school. One cluster of schools lies in the east of the city with a high school that is 73% black. Another cluster on the west side now amounts to an all-black mini-district. A cluster of schools that draw white students from homes in the north, as well as some blacks bused into the area, now includes two majority-white elementary schools. Its high school, Northridge, is 56% percent black. Ms. Tucker claims the impetus for the rezoning came after white parents from the north zone complained about their children being sent to middle school outside that zone. The school board commissioned a demographic study to draft the rezoning plan. J. Russell Gibson III, the board’s lawyer, contends the plan uses school buildings more efficiently, freeing classroom space equivalent to an entire elementary school and saving potential construction costs of $10-14 million. Others see the matter differently. Gerald Rosiek, who was an education professor at the University of Alabama, studied the Tuscaloosa school district’s recent evolution and calls it "a case study in resegregation." His research found disappointment among some white parents that Northridge, the high school created in the northern enclave, was a majority-black school. He concludes the rezoning is in part an attempt to reduce its black enrollment. A number of whites have publicly stated their support for the rezoning plan.
School board president Dan Meissner says any rezoning would make people unhappy and that the plan has involved "minimal disruption." But black students and parents say the plan has proven disruptive for them. Parents looking for recourse have turned to NCLB. Its testing requirements have enabled parents to distinguish good schools from bad. And other provisions give students stuck in troubled schools the right to transfer. Some black parents wrote to the Alabama superintendent of education, Joseph Morton, arguing that the rezoning violated the federal law. Mr. Morton disagreed, noting that Tuscaloosa is offering students who were moved to low-performing schools the right to transfer into better schools. That, he said, had kept it within the law. Dr. Levey says about 180 students requested a transfer.
New York Times By Sam Dillon
[Editor’s Note: The CCCR report on NCLB transfers is below. The drawing of school attendance zones to improve racial diversity is addressed in initial guidance from NSBA’s Office of General Counsel available at the first link, on the U.S. Supreme Courts diversity ruling. See also the new publication on the same subject by the NSBA Council of Urban Boards of Education and Office of General Counsel, and the College Board, at the second link.]
CCCR report on "Choosing Better Schools"
NSBA School Law pages on resegregation of schools
"Not Black and White" report