Racial Segregation in Southern Schools, School Districts, and Counties Where Districts Have Seceded

• In Event: Place, Geography, and Geographic Information Systems in Educational Policy and Politics

Abstract

Objectives

The South has a history of both policies and practices to avoid school integration as well as a recent history of being a region where black and white students are the most racially desegregated. An increasing number of school district secessions in the South disrupt one of the mechanisms which has made racial integration of southern schools possible, the countywide school district. Countywide school systems can be more integrative for students because they encompass demographically diverse populations in one large school district and they also tend to have lower levels of racial residential segregation, in part because housing choices are not as impacted by fragmentation of metro areas into many school districts.

Perspective

Our exploration of school district secession in the South is informed by several multi-disciplinary strands of literature. We consider school district secession as a new mechanism to resist desegregation in the historical context of southern efforts to avoid school integration. Additionally, researchers have identified that school district boundaries are a key reason that students are so segregated today. We extend upon this existing literature by examining the role of school district boundaries in segregation as boundaries are created and may accrue meaning because of community characteristics as district secession occurs. Finally, demographic change has swiftly altered the Southern region, with a burgeoning Hispanic enrollment. We consider what school district secession means in a multiracial South.

Methods and Data Sources

We analyze data from the Census and NCES Common Core of Data, examining school and residential segregation in 2000, 2010, and 2014/15 in seven southern counties where school district secession has occurred. We calculate racial segregation separately for residents and students in each county to analyze absolute changes from 2000-2015. Additionally, we decompose Theil’s H, an evenness measure of segregation, to determine the relative contribution of school district boundaries to school and residential segregation over time as communities seceded.

Results

We found that in the seven southern counties where secession occurred between 2000 and 2015, an increasing share of school segregation was due to school district boundaries. While in 2000, school district boundaries accounted for, on average, 60 percent of the school segregation of black and white students, by 2015 that had increased to 70 percent. For Hispanic and white students, the increase was even larger, growing from 37 percent of all segregation in 2000 to 65 percent in 2015. Additionally, between 2010 and 2014, the total population was increasingly residentially segregated due to school district boundaries in the seven counties. Thus, school district boundaries contributed an increasing share to school segregation in the counties where districts seceded between 2000 and 2015, and to residential segregation between 2010 and 2014.

Significance

Countywide school systems have historically been a mechanism for achieving racially diverse school systems in the South, particularly for black and white students. Our research demonstrates how school district secession is an erosion of this historical mechanism and illustrates how district secession creates new political boundaries that, over time, become racialized, sorting residents and students.

Authors

• Kendra Taylor, The Pennsylvania State University

• Erica Frankenberg, The Pennsylvania State University

• Genevieve Parker Siegel-Hawley, Virginia Commonwealth University