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.

It Takes a Hurricane

It Takes a Hurricane: Might Hurricane Katrina Provide for New Orleans Students What Brown Once Promised?

Abstract: Presented as part of a program for the AALS Education Law section entitled “Five Years After Katrina: Access to Education,” this article places post-Katrina education in New Orleans directly in the line of education reform triggered by the decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The article agues that post-Katrina New Orleans represents the pursuit of the same goal pursued by the Brown plaintiffs: improved access to educational opportunities for students, most of whom are African American, not being equitably served by the status quo. The article then frames these two moments – the Brown decision and Hurricane Katrina – as inertia-jarring events in the history of New Orleans public education and compares the responses to these two hurricanes (one figurative, one literal).

Connecting the post-Brown and post-Katrina eras, the article focuses on themes common to both – state intervention in New Orleans schools and an increase in choice for students – and details the ways in which the response to one has shaped the response to the other. Looking at ways the city has learned from the Brown era and the ways in which the city seems on a path to repeating some of that era’s mistakes, the article argues that success or failure in post-Katrina public education will be impacted by the city’s post-Brown experience. Specifically, although the motivation behind state intervention is clearly different than it was during the Brown era, there remains skepticism about the role of the state in providing for New Orleans public schools.

Further, despite having made choice far more widely available after Katrina than it had been before, the potential for a return to a stratified system of schools – and the class - and race-based resentment such stratification engenders – could threaten the public support New Orleans public schools currently enjoy.

The progress of public education in New Orleans is important beyond the boundaries of Orleans Parish. Post-Katrina New Orleans serves as the pivotal proving ground for the use of increased choice and charter schools to provide more equitable access to quality education. With 61% of New Orleans public school students enrolled in 51 charter schools (both numbers by far the highest in the nation), post-Katrina New Orleans represents an opportunity for the choice movement to demonstrate success on a large scale. Success in New Orleans will lead to broader choice in struggling urban districts across the country. Conversely, failure to deliver improved access to quality education will reverse the current upward trajectory of the choice movement.

Given the stakes, the New Orleans public schools are likely to be among the most scrupulously evaluated in the coming years. However, as scholars and advocates begin evaluating this reform effort and continuing to shape the future of public education in New Orleans, it is imperative to recognize the ways in which the story that precedes the hurricane shapes and impacts the story unfolding in its wake. This article serves will help ensure that happens.

If reformers in New Orleans are able to focus on the goal of increasing access to quality educational opportunities, then the chance created out of the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina will not be wasted. It would be beautifully ironic if, thanks in part to a hurricane, the schools in the city whose segregated railcars gave us Plessy v. Ferguson could finally deliver on that elusive promise of Brown to provide more equitable access to quality educational opportunities.

This article appeared in the Journal of Law and Education.  The full article is available here.

Accepting Justice Kennedy's Dare

Accepting Justice Kennedy's Dare: The Future of Integration in a Post-PICS World

Abstract: In the wake of the most important public schools case in decades, Parents Involved in Community Schools (PICS), the future of diversity in public schools is in doubt. This period of uncertainty comes at a moment when parents, educators, and employers are demanding high quality schools that prepare students for an increasingly globalized world. Justice Anthony Kennedy, in his PICS concurrence, recognized this and challenged districts to continue the important work of bringing different students together without resorting to unconstitutional means. Filling the void between what is essential to public education and what is constitutionally permissible after PICS, the public schools of Jefferson County (Louisville), Kentucky, one of the districts rebuked in PICS, have accepted Justice Kennedy’s dare by crafting a nuanced and race-conscious student assignment plan aimed at promoting broadly-defined diversity and increasing the quality of education across the district.

The article argues two distinct points. First, it argues that the new plan is a constitutionally permissible response to PICS. Second, it argues that the new plan’s broadening of both the definition of diversity and the mission of a school district represents the beginning of a new post-Brown era that is responsive to the realities of public education in the 21st century. By tethering its analysis of PICS - and specifically of Justice Kennedy’s concurrence - to a specific response to that decision, the article provides a detailed analysis of the new constitutional framework in this area. Ultimately, the article argues that because it is both constitutional and educationally-relevant, the new plan represents the future of integration for any district willing to make the commitment to providing the educational benefits of diverse public schools to its students.

This article appeared in the Fordham Law Review.  The full article is available here.

Wash Post OpEd: Obama's Subtle Hurdle

Just 46 years ago, riots erupted at the prospect of an African American man enrolling at the University of Mississippi. The progress our country has made on race was brought into focus Friday night when Barack Obama, the first African American presidential nominee, arrived at Ole Miss, where James Meredith's matriculation sparked clashes in 1962. Unfortunately, instead of frank considerations of the racial issues that persist in America, the discussions that have accompanied Obama's candidacy have frequently unfolded in ways unlikely to foster progress on interracial dialogue.

 Undoubtedly, Obama's race is playing a role in this election. It has helped him generate enthusiasm among African American and white voters. Conversely, some people simply will not vote for him because he is black. Precise numbers will be known only within the voting booth, but social science research on racial attitudes in job candidate evaluations sheds some light on how race may be affecting our collective judgment.

Selecting a candidate to vote for, after all, is like making a hiring decision for the country's top job. Studies of " aversive racism" have shown that when reviewers compare identical résumés of black and white job applicants, white candidates are rated more highly than black candidates. Paradoxically, this discrepancy becomes more significant the more qualified the candidates are. While modestly qualified candidates of different races may be evaluated relatively equally, higher-qualified African American candidates are, on average, subjectively judged to be inferior to white candidates whose credentials are objectively identical. The discrepancy is exaggerated when the job to be filled is superior to the job held by the evaluator. Part of the reason is that while white candidates were considered "highly skilled," black candidates were considered "fortunate," the implication being that results based on skill are likely to be repeated, whereas those based on luck are not.

In the majority of these evaluations, individual racism or racial prejudice is not driving the evaluators -- each evaluator is earnestly attempting to select the best applicant. Yet, the research pioneered by Jack Dovidio and Sam Gaertner, among others, suggests that African American job candidates must be objectively more qualified than white applicants to be subjectively perceived as the best candidate. It seems reasonable, then, that the same type of earnest but biased evaluation could be affecting Obama's campaign.

Commentators have not shied from citing the influence of race on Obama's prospects. Recently, some have argued that only racism is to blame when trying to explain why the Democratic nominee had not pulled further ahead in national polls. Others have called cries of racism an excuse for Obama's inability to assuage voters' genuine questions about his readiness for the job. But ignoring or minimizing the effect of race -- pretending that criticisms of Obama's readiness or elitism or good fortune are entirely independent of the color of his skin -- is to minimize the lasting impact of our nation's history of race relations.

The effect that race has on Obama's campaign is far more subtle, and powerful, than the ballots of those who reveal their closeted bigotries only inside the voting booth. Millions of Americans have been breathing the smog of racial stereotyping their entire lives; their decisions, like those of the evaluators in the studies, are unsurprisingly affected.

In Oxford, we could see how much progress our country has made. Rather than continuing accusatory conversations on race that only serve to thicken the smog, let's move forward recognizing both how far we've come and how far we have yet to go toward perfecting our union.

See the Washington Post version here.

Exploded Dream: Desegregation in the Memphis City Schools

Abstract: This article is a comprehensive look at the story of school desegregation in the Memphis City Schools. Beginning with the Brown v. Board of Education decision that ended segregation in schooling, the article traces the steps taken in Memphis to put the Brown decision into practice. Following a period of inaction and delay, the Memphis City Schools experienced a relatively peaceful transition as token desegregation took place in the early part of the 1960s. However, after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis in 1968, the community's polarization was globally exposed and further progress on school desegregation was limited. After federal courts ordered busing to implement the Brown mandate, a quarter of the district's white students departed for the nearby Shelby County Schools or for a growing, and uniquely successful, system of private schools. Since the busing order, the white population in the Memphis City Schools has steadily declined so that by the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision, a district that had been 58% white and 42% black in 1954 was 86% black and 9% white in 2004. Using the Northcross v. Board of Education of the Memphis City Schools litigation as a guide, this article traces that history, putting Memphis in the context of the larger desegregation story.

This article appears in the journal Law and Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice, published at the University of Minnesota School of Law.  

The full article is available here.