An Undertold History: Detroit after Milliken

• In Event: Milliken at 50: Looking Back to Imagine Forward

Abstract

For many education researchers, Milliken v. Bradley is a story of national importance as the decision halted desegregation across urban-suburban lines and inaugurated a new era of education reform. The decision undoubtedly had a profound national impact, but focus on its national dimensions has diminished our understanding of the local and state education policies developed and implemented within Milliken’s shadow, including municipal desegregation and school choice programs. Joyce Baugh’s The Detroit School Busing Case deeply examines the local and state dynamics which eventually pushed the case onto the Supreme Court’s docket, and the Court’s deliberations to pursue compensatory reforms. However, her book does not examine how the decision became interpreted and negotiated in the decades following it. Similarly, Jeffrey Mirel and Leanne Kang’s intensive studies of Detroit recognize the importance of Milliken within the city, but the decision appears disconnected from the subsequent education politics and policies that reinforced segregation and the disproportional allocation of educational resources within the city and across the state. Their work has left unstated the important connection between the political climate wrought by Milliken and state policymakers’ later efforts to make the city a testing ground for school choice policies, takeover the city school system, and transform how Michigan school districts were funded. This paper seeks to build upon these histories by interrogating how the Milliken decision was understood at the local level by an array of political actors, and its subsequent impact on policymakers and citizens understood the possibilities of education policy in its aftermath.

Using archival materials from Wayne State’s Reuther Library and oral histories conducted by the authors, this paper analyzes the crafting, implementation, and impacts of policies and practices after 1974 through students and teachers’ experiences. These collected oral histories–from Detroit Public School administrators, students, local activists, and a school board member–provide unique insights into grassroots understandings of the Milliken case and subsequent school-based developments. Moreover, these oral histories compel renewed analysis of the archival record because they illuminate the complex social and political terrain in the city and state as well as the competing understandings of inequality that shaped the policymaking process. In so doing, this paper details the legal, political, and ideological connections between Milliken and later school funding changes (Michigan’s Proposition A), state-enforced mayoral takeover, and emergency financial management as understood and experienced at the local level. In so doing, this local history queries how local histories and understandings of race, segregation, and inequality in Detroit and Michigan have shaped the policymaking process and resultant policies.

Authors

• Matt Kautz, Eastern Michigan University

• Donya Odom, Eastern Michigan University

• Janikka P Winfree, Eastern Michigan University