Solidifying Segregation or Promoting Diversity?

Purpose: Layered with myriad considerations, school closure and rezoning processes in urban school systems are politically fraught with the potential for damaging consequences. This article explores the politics and impacts of a closure and rezoning process in Richmond, Virginia, through the lens of themes applicable to urban school systems and students across the nation. These include the intersection of closure and rezoning with growing White reinvestment in urban school systems, as well as the importance of focusing on diversity and equity during a time of intense pressure to close schools. Research Methods/Approach: Drawing on the case of Richmond, Virginia, we use an explanatory sequential mixed methods research design, employing qualitative methods to examine the political process of a 2013 school closure and elementary school rezoning effort and quantitative and spatial methods to examine its impact on racial composition and segregation in attendance zones and schools. Findings and Implications: We find that the political process of redrawing elementary school attendance boundaries in Richmond was associated with a dramatic increase in racial segregation between elementary attendance zones over a short period of time. Leadership changes and political considerations drove a rapid and antagonistic decision-making process that minimized broad-based public participation and privileged the voices of White families in a city school system that is less than 10% White. Despite a contentious and opaque decision-making process and starkly segregative impacts, community response and support for school diversity points to the potential for leveraging urban population shifts to increase rather than decrease diverse school settings.

[1]  R. Salmon The Evolution of Virginia Public School Finance: From the Beginnings to Today's Difficulties , 2010 .

[2]  M. Maguire,et al.  Changing Urban Education , 2010 .

[3]  M. Laughlin The School That Refused to Die: Continuity and Change at Thomas Jefferson High School , 1994, History of Education Quarterly.

[4]  Michael J. Dumas A Cultural Political Economy of School Desegregation in Seattle , 2011 .

[5]  J. B. Stillman Gentrification and Schools: The Process of Integration When Whites Reverse Flight , 2012 .

[6]  The Color of Their Skin: Education and Race in Richmond, Virginia, 1954-89 (Carter G. Woodson Institute Series in Black Studies) , 1992 .

[7]  Salvatore Saporito,et al.  Mapping School Segregation: Using GIS to Explore Racial Segregation between Schools and Their Corresponding Attendance Areas , 2009, American Journal of Education.

[8]  D. Reimers,et al.  The Negro in Virginia politics, 1902-1965 , 1968 .

[9]  Jennifer Jellison Holme,et al.  Buying Homes, Buying Schools: School Choice and the Social Construction of School Quality. , 2002 .

[10]  John W. Creswell,et al.  Designing and Conducting Mixed Methods Research , 2006 .

[11]  Reginald S. Lee,et al.  Accountability in a Postdesegregation Era: The Continuing Significance of Racial Segregation in Florida's Schools , 2004 .

[12]  James E. Ryan,et al.  Five Miles Away, A World Apart: One City, Two Schools, and the Story of Educational Opportunity in Modern America , 2010 .

[13]  Genevieve Siegel-Hawley Race, Choice and Richmond Public Schools: New Possibilities and Ongoing Challenges for Diversity in Urban Districts , 2014 .

[14]  Sarah Diem,et al.  The Politics of Diversity: Integration in an Era of Political and Legal Uncertainty , 2013, Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education.

[15]  Genevieve Siegel-Hawley,et al.  Educational Gerrymandering? Race and Attendance Boundaries in a Demographically Changing Suburb , 2013 .

[16]  Harry F. Silberman,et al.  The National Institute of Education. , 1972 .

[17]  Dana N. Thompson Dorsey Segregation 2.0 The New Generation of School Segregation in the 21st Century , 2013 .

[18]  Matthew D. Lassiter,et al.  The moderates' dilemma : massive resistance to school desegregation in Virginia , 2000 .

[19]  I. Luckey : American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass , 1995 .

[20]  Helen F. Ladd,et al.  Who teaches whom? Race and the distribution of novice teachers , 2005 .

[21]  Kara S. Finnigan,et al.  A Political Analysis of Community Influence over School Closure , 2012 .

[22]  Mark Seasons,et al.  School Closure Decision-Making Processes: Problems and Prospects , 2012 .

[23]  N. Denton,et al.  The Dimensions of Residential Segregation , 1988 .

[24]  C. Jackson Student Demographics, Teacher Sorting, and Teacher Quality: Evidence from the End of School Desegregation , 2009, Journal of Labor Economics.

[25]  Y. Lincoln,et al.  Scientific Research in Education , 2004 .

[26]  W. Frey Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics are Remaking America , 2014 .

[27]  Valerie J. Caracelli,et al.  Toward a Conceptual Framework for Mixed-Method Evaluation Designs , 1989 .

[28]  Richard R. Valencia School Closures and Policy Issues. Policy Paper No. 84-C3. , 1984 .

[29]  Stephen B. Billings,et al.  School Segregation, Educational Attainment and Crime: Evidence from the End of Busing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg , 2012 .

[30]  G. Weiher The Fractured Metropolis: Political Fragmentation and Metropolitan Segregation , 1991 .

[31]  M. Orr,et al.  The color of school reform : race, politics, and the challenge of urban education , 1999 .

[32]  R. Basu Negotiating Acts of Citizenship in an Era of Neoliberal Reform: The Game of School Closures , 2007 .

[33]  Jean Anyon,et al.  Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform , 1997 .

[34]  J. J. Holme,et al.  Suburban School Districts and Demographic Change , 2014 .

[35]  L. Bondi Political participation and school closures: an investigation of bias in local authority decision-making , 1988 .

[36]  M. Orfield Region: Planning the Future of the Twin Cities , 2010 .

[37]  Kevin G. Welner,et al.  Race-Conscious Policies for Assigning Students to Schools: Social Science Research and the Supreme Court Cases. Committee on Social Science Research Evidence on Racial Diversity in Schools. , 2007 .

[38]  B. Kirshner,et al.  Review of School Closures and Student Achievement , 2015 .

[39]  Annette Lareau,et al.  Choosing homes, choosing schools , 2014 .

[40]  R. L. Green Learning in a Burning House: Educational Inequality, Ideology, and (Dis)Integration by Sonya Douglass Horsford (review) , 2012 .

[41]  J Tudor-Hart,et al.  On the nature of prejudice. , 1961, The Eugenics review.

[42]  K. Buras Race, Charter Schools, and Conscious Capitalism: On the Spatial Politics of Whiteness as Property (and the Unconscionable Assault on Black New Orleans) , 2011 .

[43]  Terrance L. Green Leading for Urban School Reform and Community Development , 2015 .

[44]  M. P. Richards,et al.  The Gerrymandering of School Attendance Zones and the Segregation of Public Schools , 2014 .

[45]  J. B. Stillman Gentrification and Schools , 2012 .

[46]  Sarah Diem,et al.  The “Post-Racial” Politics of Race , 2015 .

[47]  S. Saporito,et al.  From here to there: Methods of allocating data between census geography and socially meaningful areas , 2007 .