Crossing the Line? School District Responses to Demographic Change in the South

• In Event: New Perspectives on the History of the American School District: Reforms, Reorganizations, and Innovations, 1935-2014

Abstract

The 1974 Milliken decision striking down city-suburban school desegregation in Detroit was a watershed moment in school desegregation efforts. Today, the ruling continues to affect the relationship between school-related boundary lines and segregation. Roughly 80% of contemporary school segregation can be attributed to how students are spread across multiple school districts, rather than how they are distributed within them. At the same time, it is also important to recognize that attendance boundaries within a single district can help shape patterns of school segregation.

Two southern river cities—one high in the mountains of Tennessee, the other on the edge of the Virginia Piedmont—help illustrate the past and present relationship between school boundary lines, segregation, and educational opportunity. These two cities responded to demographic changes in their districts in two distinct ways, demonstrating both the possibilities of reconfiguring district boundaries and school enrollment zones to either increase or decrease equity, and the challenges of pursuing equity across static boundary lines.

The urban school districts in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Richmond, Virginia, resisted school desegregation in the initial aftermath of Brown, and then eventually complied. In the early 1970s, the Richmond metro was on cutting edge of inter-district efforts to desegregate (the Richmond case was filed just before the more well-known Milliken one), but a tied Supreme Court allowed a lower court decision striking down the city-suburban merger to stand. In the end, school desegregation in both Richmond and Chattanooga moved forward within the confines of urban district boundaries, in school systems already in the throes of white and middle class flight to surrounding suburbs.

Yet nearly three decades after the failed consolidation in the Richmond metro, schools in Chattanooga City voluntarily consolidated with outlying Hamilton County. In the mid-1990s, in the context of a broader “renaissance” of downtown Chattanooga, city residents voted to relinquish control of a majority black, urban school system and consolidate with outlying, predominately white Hamilton County. The merger went forward, coupled with an expansion of an existing system of magnet schools. In the years since the Chattanooga-Hamilton merger, levels of black-white school segregation have steadily fallen.

By contrast, segregation in Richmond Public Schools (RPS) has risen dramatically since the district gained unitary status in 1986. But new evidence of population growth in the city, the increasing popularity of school choice, and the first major school rezoning efforts since desegregation present important opportunities to help begin reversing the trend towards deepening inequality.

Drawing upon newspaper articles, school board minutes, interviews, policy reports, and secondary sources, this paper explores how differing responses to demographic change unfolded in two southern cities. It also relies upon district data and the National Center for Education Statistics’ Common Core of Data to document how adjustments to boundary lines—within and between districts—have been linked to levels of segregation. The paper argues that it is imperative to examine how school boundaries continue to structure segregation—and that it is even more important to understand how to cross or eliminate those lines.

Author

• Genevieve Parker Siegel-Hawley, Virginia Commonwealth University