Is Anything Stopping the District Secession Movement? Recent Legal Developments and Policy Implications for Researchers and Practitioners

• In Event: 66.068 - Policy and Precedent: An Examination of Legal Implications in Education for Policy Scholars

Abstract

American Public Schools reached the lowest levels of segregation in the late 1980s(Lee, 2014). Since then, schools have slowly re-segregated. Even through the undoing of desegregation, equal access for all racial groups remains a major purpose of American Public Schools (Labaree, 2011). Desegregation policy advocates have recently used redrawing district or school boundaries to help equalize access to some success (Finnigan et al., 2015; Holme, Finnigan, & Diem, 2016; Richards, 2014; 2017). However, local control advocates have used boundary tactics like district secession to gain control of schools boundaries and financing (Frankenberg, Siegel-Hawley, & Diem, 2017; Hannah-Jones, 2017; Siegel-Hawley, Diem, & Frankenberg, 2018).
This policy paper uses content analysis of school segregation Supreme Court cases since the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision to show whether and when legal coverage exists for districts hoping to pursue desegregation policies. I then use the case law evolution to examine two recent high profile district secessions in county-wide districts and describe how case law precedents intersect with secession policies and consider the ramifications of these applications.

Findings
Supreme Court case law concerning the guarantee to equal education irrespective of race has slowly moved from cases focused on whether a single district operated separate systems based on race (in cases like Brown, 1954; Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 1968; Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 1971; Wright v. City Council of Emporia, 1972) to balancing the goals of desegregation with local government interests to control schools (in cases like Milliken v. Bradley, 1974; Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 2007).
The looming threat of district secession and its intersection with 14th Amendment protections are important for educational policy researchers to understand. Two cases demonstrate why. First, Stout v. Jefferson County Board of Education (2017) allowed a municipality to partially secede from a district with a still operating court ordered desegregation plan. This despite case law precedent that places the burden of proof on the seceding municipality to show it is not doing so because of racial discrimination. Conversely, the Memphis-Shelby County Public Schools were unable to prevent municipalities from seceding as the district had no standing court order to desegregate. Couple this with the fact that few states have laws that require municipalities to scrutinize district secessions (EdBuild, 2017) and there is little to stop cities from leaving.

Significance
While case law still protects students who may face discrimination when a district is under court-ordered desegregation plans, this legal condition applies to only about 5% of districts (Reardon, Grewal, Kalogrides, and Greenberg, 2011). Therefore, the assumption that the law provides 14th Amendment protection to equal schooling irrespective of race may not be widely applicable. One implication of this is policy-makers need to activate state legislators to create new laws to protect districts that may be harmed by secessionists and parents need to pressure state legislators to pass laws, an important tactic since some studies show state legislators are responsive to their constituents (White, 2018).

Author

• Jeremy B Landa, University of Connecticut