Loss of Oversight: How Two Large School Districts Responded to the Release of Court-Ordered Desegregation

• In Event: Housing, Neighborhoods, and the Schools Children Attend: Policy Evidence

Abstract

Following Brown v. Board of Education and subsequent rulings (1954, 1969, 1971), school districts across the country were placed under court-ordered racial desegregation plans that required districts to proactively integrate their schools. However, in 1991, the Supreme Court decided in Dowell that court desegregation orders were not intended to be permanent, and subsequently hundreds of these orders were lifted. Research shows that school segregation increased gradually within the first several years after the release of a district’s court order, but these impacts varied across districts and grade-levels (Orfield & Eaton, 1997; Reardon et al., 2012). A large body of social science research documents the mechanisms that maintain high levels of racial segregation in neighborhoods and schools. Much of this work emphasizes the demand side of segregation: the choices families make about where to live and where to send their children to school, given constraints on affordability, information, and access (Krysan & Crowder, 2017; Lareau & Goyette, 2014). Less visible in this literature are the institutional actors—school boards, district administrators, and policymakers—who define the opportunity structures within which families make those choices. School assignment policies, attendance zone boundaries, and decisions about school closures all shape which schools are available to which children, yet we know relatively little about how and why these policies change over time, or how such changes contribute to segregation dynamics.The release of court-ordered desegregation plans provides a unique quasi-experimental case for observing institutional responses to shifts in legal constraints, and to examine the varied motivations—fiscal, demographic, political—that shape district decision-making in the aftermath. Drawing upon originally-collected archival and digitized data from two large U.S. school districts released from court oversight in the 1990s, I answer the following research question in this paper, How do school districts change school assignments after release from court oversight and how do these changes affect segregation patterns? I use gerrymandering measures (including the Polsby-Popper test, convex hull test, and Voronoi polygons) on archival attendance zone map data to compare two districts with diverging responses to the release of court oversight. This project will show how the return to local control had varying effects on policy outcomes across school districts and reveal the processes through which school segregation increased following the release of desegregation orders.

Author

• Elly M Field, The University of Texas at Austin
  Presenting Author