The Enduring Power of Milliken's Fences

Abstract: Using the experience of one community that has undergone a district line altering transformation as a case study, this article argues that endorsement from the state is an essential element for success in efforts to mitigate the educational inequities caused by district boundaries and then offers specific steps states can take to support such changes even without altering district boundaries. Part I will introduce the ways in which school district lines can serve as barriers to educational opportunities, and Part II will summarize several current educational reform proposals and trends that either have the intent or effect of weakening the power of district lines. Part III examines the rationale for the largely successful suburban resistance to district-weakening proposals, filling out the context in which conversations on these topics take place. The case study of the merger of urban and suburban school districts in Memphis and Shelby County, Tennessee will be introduced in Part IV. Utilizing the experience in Memphis and Shelby County, Part V will identify lessons learned from Memphis, focusing on the role of the state in assisting or obstructing elimination of interdistrict disparities, and Part VI will offer practical and politically viable suggestions that states can take to address these issues. Although the legal context was quite different, the practical landscape facing the merger process in Memphis was not unlike what Judge Roth found in Detroit four decades earlier. At issue remained questions about whether education should be considered a common undertaking for the entire metropolitan area it affects, or whether local control should be limited conceptually by existing district lines. If anything, the fences between urban and suburban districts have grown even stronger since the Supreme Court embraced them in Milliken. The lessons from this contemporary attempt to break down school district boundaries demonstrate just how strong those fences have become.

This article appeared in The Urban Lawyer.  The full article is available here.

Education Week: Memphis-Shelby Schools Merge Amid Uncertainty

While plans are forging ahead this summer for joining Memphis' 140,000-student school system with the surrounding suburban district, school officials also have to take into account the possibility that the unification might be temporary.

The Memphis and Shelby County, Tenn., districts officially merged July 1. For one year at least, the unified district will be the nation's 14th largest, and the planning for the merger has involved board members and district leaders from both legacy systems.

The merger stemmed from the city schools' desire to be more financially stable.

"The merger gave us the opportunity to identify inefficiencies. Our community had to come together to improve and invest in the schools," said Kenya Bradshaw, a fellow with the Minneapolis-based Policy Innovators in Education Network, who served on a transition planning committee for the new district.

However, several municipalities in the surrounding county will vote next month to determine whether new school districts will be carved out of the newly unified system starting in 2014-15. Differing racial demographics have also emerged as an issue.

Although district officials say the system is ready to open schools' doors in August, the possibility of those further changes has affected the planning, said Daniel Kiel, a law professor at the University of Memphis who also served on the transition planning committee.

"There's so much uncertainty about whether the new municipal districts are going to exist," he said.

Read the full article here.

The Endangered School District

The Endangered School District: The Promise and Challenge of Redistributing Control of Public Education

Abstract: One constant in American public education reform has been the existence of a single local entity – the school district – with operational responsibility. In some places, that is changing. Fueled by undercurrents in education reform such as the embrace of broader school choice and an increase in state involvement in local education, as well as federal political alignment supporting these undercurrents, some communities are embracing a radical structural reform that redistributes operational control across a series – or portfolio – of autonomous entities.

In such communities – typically large, urban school systems serving a student population that is largely poor and made up of minority students – the term “district” no longer applies. The broad, district-wide authority of a school board and superintendent is being dispersed to a variety of operators, including state education departments, private (i.e., charter school) operators, and the preexisting district itself. Each operator enjoys substantial or even total independence from other operators, generating an autonomy that has not existed within the traditional district structure.

The Endangered School District describes the causes and ramifications of such a substantial departure from the traditional district model and offers case studies from two communities – New Orleans, LA, and Memphis/Shelby County, TN – at the epicenter of urban education reform. Building on scholarship evaluating the theory of expanded school choice and operational autonomy, these case studies help demonstrate the practical challenges of applying these theories beyond isolated schools to entire educational communities.

There is great disagreement about the wisdom of transitioning toward a portfolio model for public education. The Endangered School District simply accepts the development as the emerging trend that it is and offers insight from two communities for making the most of such a radical structural change.

First, the article describes the undercurrents that are enabling the portfolio strategy and the ramifications – administrative, legal and philosophical – of moving away from the traditional district model. After introducing the case studies, the article next examines the respective new models in depth in order to evaluate whether either can deliver as a strategy to increase educational opportunities for students. Specifically, the article identifies the dangers that these structural reforms may simply reorganize the stratified educational systems they seek to eliminate or that they may not be financially, legally, or politically sustainable over time and on such a large scale. Rather than merely identifying these challenges, the article then goes on to identify legal structures – such as state laws or bilateral agreements between public school authorizers and public school operators or even among operators themselves – that can help minimize these risks.

This article appeared in the Boston University Public Interest Law Journal.  The full article is available here.

Atlantic: In Memphis Classrooms, the Ghost of Segregation Lingers

Samantha Crawford, an 18-year-old high-school senior, doesn't like to use the word "ghetto" to describe her neighborhood in the center of Memphis, Tennessee, but she can't think of a better one. In Binghampton, people drink and hang out. They are transient, moving from apartment to apartment and job to job. Many don't work at all. Samantha speculates that few have finished college, or even high school.

In the past two years, though, Samantha has begun to look at her neighborhood as an inspiration. "It's not about where I stay, or wherever I come from, but what I'm going to make of it," she says.

Samantha once earned only Bs and Cs. Now, she makes straight As. She had dreamed of college, but wasn't sure how she'd get there. Now, she's feeling overwhelmed by the choices available to her. In the past few months, she received five college acceptance letters, along with a scholarship to a local community college.

Read the full article from the Atlantic here.

NY Times: Merger of Memphis and County School Districts Revives Race and Class Challenges

When thousands of white students abandoned the Memphis schools 38 years ago rather than attend classes with blacks under a desegregation plan fueled by busing, Joseph A. Clayton went with them. He quit his job as a public school principal to head an all-white private school and later won election to the board of the mostly white suburban district next door.

Now, as the overwhelmingly black Memphis school district is being dissolved into the majority-white Shelby County schools, Mr. Clayton is on the new combined 23-member school board overseeing the marriage. And he warns that the pattern of white flight could repeat itself, with the suburban towns trying to secede and start their own districts.

“There’s the same element of fear,” said Mr. Clayton, 79. “In the 1970s, it was a physical, personal fear. Today the fear is about the academic decline of the Shelby schools.”

“As far as racial trust goes,” Mr. Clayton, who is white, added, “I don’t think we’ve improved much since the 1970s.”

Read the full article here.

A Memphis Dilemma

A Memphis Dilemma: A Half-Century of Education in Memphis and Shelby County from Desegregation to Consolidation

Abstract: On May 17, 1954, the day that the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education, essentially four separate school systems existed within the borders of Shelby County, Tennessee. Memphis City Schools (MCS) served students within the city limits, and Shelby County Schools (SCS) served the balance of students in the county; within each system were white schools and black schools. The next several decades saw the two districts grapple with implementation of the Supreme Court mandate to remove the vestiges of segregation from public education.

By 2010, both districts had achieved unitary status, freeing them from court supervision and adherence to judicially approved desegregation plans. However, there remained a sense in the community that public education remained very much separate - and that there was a continued racial component to that separation. Indeed, the demographics of the two districts supported this perception. Of the 100,000 students in MCS, nearly 90% were African American. Meanwhile, the majority of the county’s white students were learning in SCS. Coupling these demographic differences with the fact that the county schools performed better educationally, on average, by state accountability standards and the claims of separate, unequal schooling no different than what was confronted in Brown seemed even more legitimate.

This article appeared in the University of Memphis Law Review.  The full article is available here.

NY Times: Memphis Votes for County to Run Schools

Memphis residents voted Tuesday to transfer the administration of the city’s schools to the county, supporting earlier moves by city officials and effectively putting an end to the city school system.

The referendum is the first time that voters have weighed in on the fate of the schools, a racially and politically charged issue that has fueled months of debate and political brinkmanship and pitted the city against its suburbs and many state lawmakers.

Voters decided roughly two-to-one that the 103,000 students in the city’s schools should join the 47,000 suburban students in one countywide system. State law limited the vote to city residents.
Still, the issue remains in uncertain legal territory, subject to numerous lawsuits. In the short term, it is even unclear just who will be in charge of city schools.

“We are on a path to a merged school system,” said Daniel Kiel, a law professor at the University of Memphis who specializes in education law. “How we get there, we don’t know.”

For years, the Memphis and suburban Shelby County school systems operated semiautonomously but were paid for collectively. Taxes were drawn from everyone in the county and divided between the two systems based on attendance. City schools were additionally financed by revenues from a city-only tax.

But residents of the more affluent suburbs have harbored a goal of forming a so-called special district, which would permanently freeze the boundaries of the suburban-controlled school district, preventing any merger or urban encroachment.

City residents were deeply concerned about the financial implications of such a move. If Memphis, a poor city, were forced to pay for its schools without countywide support, taxes in the city would skyrocket and schools could face financial difficulties.

Advocates of a suburban district say they would have continued to pay taxes toward all schools even with a special district, but that assurance has been received by city residents with skepticism.
Such special districts, which proliferated in the years after school desegregation, were declared illegal in 1982. But Republican domination in the state elections in November, fueled in part by Republican strongholds in the suburban areas, made it much more likely that special districts would be allowed again.

So in December, the city school board took the drastic step of voting to dissolve itself and leave its schools in the county’s hands. The City Council later voted to dissolve the city school board. Tuesday’s referendum was seen by many as the final step.

But suburban residents were outraged, seeing the maneuver as a hostile takeover by a much larger, poorer and more complicated school district. Never in the state’s history, they pointed out, has a larger district — in this case, more than twice as large — dissolved into a smaller one.

 Last month, Republican state lawmakers passed a law mandating a two-and-a-half-year transition period for the merger. The law would also lift the prohibition on special districts in Shelby County at the end of that period. Smaller towns in the suburbs have already begun planning to create autonomous school districts of their own.

As far as the state is concerned, that law is now governing the transition. But the county commission has its own plan, and there are other debates over exactly who sits on a transition committee. And lawsuits are coming almost by the week, putting the whole process into what Professor Kiel calls “a legal black hole.”

NY Times version available here.