Educational (In)equality: The Legacy of Supreme Court Cases in Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Detroit Public Schools

• In Event: 16.031 - The Pursuit of Equal Educational Opportunity for Students of Color and the Competing Purposes of Schooling in the United States: Colonial Times to Today

Abstract

The American public education system has struggled with the notion of equality since the inception of the Common Schools (Labaree, 2011). The judicial system has been part of this struggle since Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Brown promoted the idea that education was a right. However, within 20 years, two critical US Supreme Court decisions created dissonance about the intent and methods of equalizing educational treatment for all students. Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971) and Milliken v. Bradley (1974), focused on schooling in the Detroit, Michigan area, show how sharing space within and across boundaries is a necessary, but inadequate prerequisite for promoting equal treatment and access to quality education for all students.
According to Labaree (2011), as a public good, education is an “essential right” for all citizens. I use this lens of an essential right to analyze The Swann and Milliken cases and to illuminate the conflict between equalizing treatment and membership rights to a given community’s schools. I then examine newspaper articles related to the two cases using the idea of boundary work (Lamont & Molnar, 2002) to analyze the symbolic and social boundaries people in the two communities constructed of their schools.
I show how the “essential right” to schooling was understood differently in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) and the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) in part because the boundaries between communities and schools were perceived quite differently. The CMS case shows that symbolic and social boundaries characterized by inclusiveness support the view of schooling as an “essential right.” In the CMS case, though the “essential right” to schooling was seen in conflict with individual rights to live within self-selected neighborhood boundaries, educational leaders in CMS pushed for more exclusive notions of these neighborhood boundaries. This allowed the “essential right” of schooling for all to be pursued through school desegregation.
Conversely, the DPS case shows how exclusive definitions of boundaries support the independence of municipalities. Citizens’ rights to choose their communities was viewed as more powerful than the “essential right” to education for all. The spaces within municipal boundaries were preserved as fixed and exclusive. “Essential rights” to an education equal in treatment and quality was seen and established as secondary to individual rights to attend a school in a self-selected community.
Some in American society assume integration efforts have been for naught. When one looks at CMS and DPS, it is less clear that this is actually true. Rather, boundaries in educational systems are important levers for potentially equalizing access to and treatment in quality schools for all students. CMS demonstrates how the construction of inclusive symbolic and social school boundaries can promote a focus on equalizing treatment and access for students. DPS demonstrates, in contrast, that the symbolic and social construction of exclusive school boundaries impedes this focus. The paper thus suggests one possible path towards slowing the resegregation of American schooling goes through school leadership that can facilitate inclusive boundary work that provides an expansive view of community membership.

Author

• Jeremy B Landa, University of Connecticut