“At this year’s conference of the American Educational Research Association, Penn State researchers will present three studies exploring school segregation in Pennsylvania.”
Although Brown v. Board of Education overturned segregated schooling by law in 1954, segregated schooling in fact continues to this day, and in some cases has even worsened. For instance, the proportion of Black students in the Northeast attending highly segregated schools (White enrollment < 10 percent) has increased since 1969. In Pennsylvania during the 2009-2010 school-year, 25 percent of Latino students and 45 percent of Black students attended such schools.
A main factor in these high segregation rates is the tendency of school district boundaries to follow racial housing trends. The problem is especially pronounced when students are sorted into many small school districts, as is the case with Pennsylvania’s 500 districts, because a small district is less likely to encompass a racially diverse area. As a result, many districts cannot enroll a diverse student body.
At this year’s conference of the American Educational Research Association, Penn State researchers will present three studies exploring school segregation in Pennsylvania. A demographic study by Stephen Kotok and Katherine Reed found that about 73 percent of the segregation experienced by Black students and 78 percent experienced by Latinos in metropolitan Pennsylvania is attributable to cross-district segregation. The other two studies from Penn State examine two lawsuits shaped by cross-district segregation: Hoots v. Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission v. School District of Philadelphia.
Hoots, filed in 1971, concerned five school districts in the eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania determined that the state deliberately arranged the districts’ boundaries to segregate students by race. Emily Hodge, the researcher who studied Hoots, found that minority enrollment in four of the districts ranged from 1 percent to 13 percent, while the fifth district enrolled minority students at a rate of 63 percent. In 1981, the court ordered the districts to merge into a single district and continued to oversee the case to monitor integration. The district, later named Woodland Hills, was finally declared integrated in 2003.
Like Hoots, the desegregation suit in PHRC commenced in the early 1970s but was not resolved until the 2000s. Unlike Hoots, PHRC proceeded through state court, rather than federal court, and was shaped by different jurisdictional issues. Over the course of the case, the School District of Philadelphia (“SDP”) repeatedly proposed merging with neighboring school districts to tackle desegregation. The Commonwealth Court, however, determined that the court lacked authority to order a merger and rejected SDP’s proposal. PHRC subsequently shifted its focus from integration to improvement of racially isolated schools. Alison Tyler and Steven Nelson, who studied the case, found that PHRC’s final consent agreement of 2009 did not even address desegregation. Metropolitan Philadelphia’s districts remain segregated to this day.
These studies not only reveal that segregation is alive and well in Pennsylvania, but also illuminate the formidable obstacles to racial integration. Kotok and Reed note that previous efforts to integrate districts though consolidation have failed to gain political traction. While Hoots achieved more meaningful desegregation in federal court than PHRC achieved in state court, developments in federal law since the 1981 Hoots order have severely limited federal courts’ support for racial integration. Strategies such as inter-district transfer programs, however, have been met with some success in other states. Pennsylvania policymakers can make progress toward integration by cultivating cooperation between districts and strengthening support for desegregation at the state and local level.
Posted April 4, 2014