From School Desegregation to Promise Neighborhoods: Moving Forward or Going Back?

• In Event: Forty Years After Milliken v. Bradley I (1974): Looking Back to Move Forward

Abstract

After decades of unsuccessful efforts to achieve or sustain educational equality through school desegregation, placed-based education reforms are receiving greater consideration and support in historically segregated communities. This is evidenced by an overwhelming interest in the U.S. Department of Education’s Promise Neighborhoods program - a neighborhood-based approach to combat poverty and improve educational opportunities and achievement in persistently low-achieving urban school communities (U.S Department of Education, 2011). Launched in 2010 and modeled after the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York, this highly competitive grant program has awarded nearly $100 million to more than 50 communities serving students in over 700 schools (U.S. Department of Education, 2012).
A required component of this place-based strategy to fighting concentrated poverty and creating a pipeline of support for children and families from cradle-to-college and career is the identification of a low-performing school or schools within a target neighborhood. Given the high levels of racial segregation that have historically existed and continue to exist in distressed U.S. urban communities, this paper contextualizes the emergence of Promise Neighborhoods initiatives within communities that have experienced failed desegregation efforts and are now seeking ways to restore their school-family-community connections to advance educational equity and opportunity. It considers whether such place-based strategies empower distressed communities through its focus on “civic infrastructure” (Edmondson & Zimpher, 2012; Strive Network, 2012) or simply encourages a return to neighborhood schools, which due to segregated housing patterns, often result in segregated schools.
Using Strive Network’s (2013) concept of “civic infrastructure” as an analytical framework, this paper will review select documents from Promise Neighborhoods applicants representing urban communities that served as sites of school desegregation and are currently focused on achieving educational equity for African American students in (re)segregated neighborhoods. Strive Network defines “civic infrastructure” as

A way in which a region or community comes together to hold itself collectively accountable for implementing their own unique cradle to career vision, and organizes itself to identify what gets results for children; improves and builds upon those efforts over time; and invests the community’s resources differently to increase impact” (para. 2).

Components include: (a) a shared community vision, (b) evidence based decision-making, (c) collaborative action, and (d) investment and sustainability. Data sources will include: Promise Neighborhood application project narratives, memoranda of understanding, and technical reviews, in addition to desegregation-related lawsuits, court decisions, school district policies, and oral histories relevant to the project.
Findings will help to explain why urban communities across the country, after decades of fighting for school integration, are interested in engaging in neighborhood-based approaches to achieving educational equity for African American students (funding maybe an obvious reason, but the degree of time, coordination, and matching funds required to submit an eligible application may suggest otherwise) and whether or not a shift from school desegregation to Promise Neighborhoods is an example of moving forward or simply going back.

Author

• Sonya Douglass Horsford, George Mason University