Seattle schools move toward resegregation
Nearly three decades after Seattle Public Schools integrated almost all its schools through busing, that racial balance is long gone. Today, a total of 30 schools—close to a third of the district's buildings—have nonwhite populations that far exceed the district's average of 58%. In 20 of them, nonwhite enrollment is 90% or more. Seattle schools don't look exactly like they did before districtwide busing began in 1978. There are fewer nearly all-white schools. Minority students are not as concentrated as they once were in the central part of the city. But Seattle Public Schools, like many districts across the nation, has slowly, steadily resegregated.
“We like to think of ourselves as these enlightened, liberal folks,” says school board member Harium Martin-Morris. “But the fact is our schools aren't the way that people really think they are.” The segregation is often the byproduct of who lives where. But other schools end up that way through the choices parents make.
The Seattle School Board is weighing what, if anything, to do about the situation. As the board plans a major overhaul of how it assigns students to schools, its members face conflicting desires. Do they assign more students to schools close to their homes? That's what many parents say they want, and it's what the board (before last year's elections) voted to pursue. Do they try to ensure racial diversity at every school? Many parents say they want that, too. But if a neighborhood is segregated, Martin-Morris points out, a neighborhood school will be, too. The board is more limited than ever in what it can do, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court's closely watched desegregation decision a year ago. The court ruled that Seattle and Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky could no longer use a student's race in deciding where some students attend school.
Seattle never had the kind of laws that, in places such as Little Rock, Ark., forbade white and minority students from going to school together. But Seattle did have housing covenants and other discriminatory practices that limited minority families to certain neighborhoods. The school segregation that those practices caused was what the district's busing plan, adopted in 1977, was designed to change. The district turned to busing after more than a decade of other efforts, including a voluntary transfer program that, at its peak in 1969-70, attracted just 3% of district students. Mandatory busing involved about 12,000 of the district's 54,000 students. Three years after it started, the district reached its racial-enrollment goals. By 1980, only one school—Cleveland High—still was considered "racially imbalanced" because its minority population was 20 percentage points or more above the district average. But mandatory busing didn't create as much diversity as the numbers might appear to show. White enrollment dropped by 28% in the first three years of busing, with many students moving to the suburbs or private schools, according to a district history of its desegregation efforts. (Minority enrollment over the same period went up about 10%.) More minority than white students ended up riding buses, despite careful planning to avoid that. And too many schools, integrated on paper, were still segregated in the lunchroom, and sometimes even the classroom. As the district reduced busing in 1989, then ended it entirely eight years later, the racial balance at many schools continued to unravel. From 1970 to today, the district's enrollment dropped from 85,000 students to 45,000. The nonwhite enrollment nearly tripled, and is now 58%. The city's population, over the same time period, grew 8%, and its minority population more than doubled. The Supreme Court said that diversity in the nation's public schools also is important. Justice Anthony Kennedy suggested other ways to accomplish it. Some districts now are looking at basing some school assignments on family income.
That's something the Seattle School Board is considering, although not to a large degree. “The hard truth,” says school board member Steve Sundquist, “is that the school district is hard-pressed to single-handedly overturn segregated housing patterns in the city.” In its brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, the American Education Research Association said studies clearly show that diverse schools contribute to improved cross-racial understanding, a reduction in prejudice and a willingness to live and work in diverse settings. It also said that diverse schools lead to higher academic achievement, but Seattle schools ended busing in part because it found no evidence of that. Gary Ikeda, Seattle Public Schools' general counsel, says busing "crippled us and diverted us from pursuing quality education." "Was it the right answer?" he asks. "Yes, in 1972." But in 2008, he said, "it's clear under the law that mandatory assignments based on race are not appropriate." The challenge now, he says, is to foster diversity without mandating it.
Source: Seattle Times, 6/1/08, By Linda Shaw
[Editor’s Note: Links to issues of segregation and diversity in other communities are available starting below with news on desegregation efforts in Jefferson County, Louisiana. A resource on the implications of the Supreme Court decision by NSBA’s Council of Urban Boards of Education and Office of General Counsel and the College Board is at the next link. An argument made in a legal challenge to recent school attendance zone adjustments in Fairfax County, Virginia relates to diversity efforts in some states. Among other things, the plaintiff parents argue that Virginia school districts are precluded from using attendance zones with diversity in mind. According to the school district, however, the adjustments were based strictly on considerations of enrollment and capacity. See the last link.]
NSBA school law pages on desegregation issues
“Not Black and White” report
NSBA School Law pages on Fairfax County lawsuit