Educational Inequity in Baltimore: Some Historical and Legal Highlights

• In Event: 18.071 - Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: 18.071-17 - Framing Educational (In)Equity in Baltimore: From Origins to Solutions

Abstract

Objectives
To show Baltimore City as the lens through which to define the unique opportunity presented by its post-Ferguson, post-Baltimore “riots” moment.
While racial exclusion and disparity has been thrust to the forefront thanks to citizen-police interactions captured on social media, those interactions are symptomatic of spatial segregation that, in Baltimore, began a century ago with the creation of the country’s first racialized zoning ordinance, and persisted with FHA redlining, followed by urban renewal and displacement of black residents post-WWII.
By the 1960s and 1970s, Baltimore’s white-controlled school system had become the site of racial conflict because the city’s black population had greatly increased, and was more politically active. After the failure of desegregation, an uneasy racial détente took hold in the late 1970s with the shift to black control of the schools. White families fled the system, and the white political establishment ceded political power over the schools to the nascent black establishment, which was left managing a majority-black school system with declining resources.
By the 1990s the school system was political marginalized, in fiscal crisis, and a recalcitrant bureaucracy unwilling to reform. A drastic shift in control -- sponsored by the city’s first black mayor and its preeminent black legislator – resulted in a power-sharing agreement between local leadership and largely white state authorities.
This agreement also failed, and black students in City Schools remain as economically, racially, and socially isolated as ever. Out of this context came the unrest of April 2015, sparked by the unexplained death of a young man in police custody, but with the stage set by a history of failure by political institutions including the schools. That unrest was the rejection of all established power – of the whites that control the city’s major foundations and businesses, and of the blacks who control schools and government.
While many urban centers have ‘solved’ the problem of segregation through gentrification, few have justly addressed the century of history that Baltimore exemplifies. Baltimore’s current political moment is one of tremendous political destabilization, and can be the start of a new chapter in the fight against education inequity.

Perspective(s)/theoretical framework
This is an institutional analysis that focuses on the city-wide consequences of institutional imperatives and policy, and with these things in effect ‘personified’ by political actors through history (mayors, school superintendents, etc.). These actors are not themselves the authors of these policies, but it is through them that these policies emerge.

Methods
The research is informed by a Foucauldian archival approach, with the intent of unearthing statements at relevant historical moments that reveal the dominant systems of belief at the time.

Data sources
Primary source materials including newspaper reports and other first-hand accounts, historical government reports and analyses, secondary research materials.

Results
This analysis informs existing work on desegregation, housing mobility litigation, and urban poverty.

Significance of the work
This research shows how the history of segregation is more than just a theoretical matter, but was and continues to be enacted through local urban politics.

Author

• Dan Sparaco