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.
August 01, 2011
July 06, 2011
An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure
An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure:
Abstract: Written as an invited response to Prof. Richard Sander’s “Class in American Legal Education,” this piece argues that the debate about affirmative action in higher education has overemphasized the admissions process without focusing a sufficient amount of energy on addressing longer-term strategies that would make controversial admissions interventions unnecessary.
This essay appeared in the Denver Law Review. The full article is available here. Links to the other articles in the volume are available here.
Abstract: Written as an invited response to Prof. Richard Sander’s “Class in American Legal Education,” this piece argues that the debate about affirmative action in higher education has overemphasized the admissions process without focusing a sufficient amount of energy on addressing longer-term strategies that would make controversial admissions interventions unnecessary.
This essay appeared in the Denver Law Review. The full article is available here. Links to the other articles in the volume are available here.
May 24, 2011
C-SPAN: Memphis School Desegregation at 50
Memphis School Desegregation at 50
University of Memphis Law school professor Daniel Kiel has spent years
collecting stories of the original desegregation of the Memphis City
Schools in October 1961. His work takes a look at the history of
desegregation and its legacy fifty years later. He presented video clips
from oral histories of people who were part of the first desegregated
class, when two separate communities combined as one. He talked about
the lessons that apply as the community moves toward unifying the city
schools of Memphis with the Shelby County school systems. Professor Kiel
talked with Ms. Peiser and offered a long-view look at public education
in Memphis and Shelby County.
“Memphis School Desegregation at 50” was a program of the Downtown Neighborhood Association’s conversation series. It was held at the University of Memphis law school.
Video available here...
“Memphis School Desegregation at 50” was a program of the Downtown Neighborhood Association’s conversation series. It was held at the University of Memphis law school.
Video available here...
March 08, 2011
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.
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.
May 01, 2010
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.
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.
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