No Choice but Choice: Eliminating School District Boundaries in the Desegregation Era

• In Event: Spatial Categories of Analysis and Educational Inequality in the Postwar Era

Abstract

More than any other factor, a child’s address often determines what kind of public education he or she will receive. As urban historians have documented, a complex set of historical forces including local and federal housing policies, mortgage lending practices, highway construction, and school districting have channeled particular economic, racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups into particular neighborhoods, where many remain today. And because public schools are funded by local property taxes and influenced by neighborhood boundaries, they often reproduce this narrative of inequality. Recent Supreme Court rulings, particularly Parents Involved in Community Schools v. the Seattle School District (2007), have only circumscribed the strategies that communities might employ to disrupt the linkage between residence and educational opportunity.

For good reasons, historical and contemporary conversations about spatial inequality and educational opportunity commonly stress the urban-suburban divide. However, in the aftermath of Milliken v. Bradley (1974), which insulated suburbs from court-ordered desegregation, urban school systems had no choice but to turn inward for meaningful ways to equalize educational opportunity. For this reason, intra-district efforts to integrate public schools in the aftermath of Milliken warrant greater consideration.

This paper explores Cambridge, Massachusetts as it mobilized to eliminate attendance zones in the decades between Milliken and Seattle. In the early 1980s, Cambridge adopted a system of controlled choice, whereby parents could select a school and a district could consider race when making assignment decisions. In so doing, Cambridge eliminated a system which had been in place since the 1930s, which linked school attendance to place of residence, and replaced it with a city-wide assignment policy which took into account parental preference and racial balance. Cambridge was the first city in the nation to experiment with this style of school assignment to desegregate its public schools, which was later adopted by the city of Seattle. It is this practice the Court now deems unconstitutional.

This paper asks how the city of Cambridge convinced homeowners, who had purchased houses in neighborhoods that fed into the best schools in the city, to sacrifice their individual privilege for the sake of collective equality. It argues that while Cambridge’s educational history is, without a doubt, exceptional, many aspects of its history are emblematic of the crises other cities endured during the 1970s. Like many northern public school systems, for example, Cambridge faced a declining student population, triggered in part by white middle-class flight from urban areas and into suburban schools. Cambridge’s shrinking tax base imposed additional fiscal pressures on those who remained to fund local government, especially public schools.

This paper asserts that Cambridge’s efforts to disentangle educational opportunity from residential inequality are particularly noteworthy because they occurred during a period commonly associated with the demise of desegregation. Cambridge’s efforts to eradicate school attendance zones, even amidst political upheaval and economic decline, provide tangible proof that the link between educational opportunity and residential inequality is not pre-ordained.

Authors

• Hilary Moss, Amherst College

• Rachel optional Stern, Amherst College