The Disintegration of Memphis-Shelby County,Tennessee: School District Secession and Local Control in the 21st Century

Colorblind Attitudes Despite the Racial Legacy of Law and Policy

Discriminatory law and policy at all levels of government assisted in heavily segregating U.S. metropolitan communities and, consequently, their schools (Rothstein, 2014). Laws, ordinances, and restrictive covenants prevented white homeowners from selling to racial minorities while widespread public and private mortgage lending practices stigmatized racially diverse, historic neighborhoods in cities and incentivized new, homogeneous localities in suburbs (Haynes, 2001; Massey & Denton, 1993). So, when 20th-century developers began building on peripheral land near cities, these new suburban homes and schools were almost completely closed off to buyers of color. Mid-century construction of federal interstate highways made white exodus to suburban communities practical and convenient, just as site selection for public housing confined low-income Black residents to increasingly segregated urban cores (Taylor, 1979). Amid these macro-level forces, discriminatory real estate tactics thrived as agents preyed on racial fears to flip neighborhoods and school districts near shifting color lines (Dougherty et al., 2015; Rothstein, 2014). These public and private forces meant that, by the early 1970s, virtually all U.S. metropolitan areas were defined by central cities with extreme concentrations of poverty and minority segregation and overwhelmingly white and more affluent suburbs.

Though this history continues to shape contemporary segregation and inequality, colorblindness has dominated the way that race has been discussed in the United States for the past several decades. Colorblind ideology “denies the salience of race, scorns those who talk about race, and increasingly proclaims that ‘we are all Americans’” (Bonilla-Silva, 2004, p. 934). Proponents of colorblind ideology believe that in order to create a more inclusive and just society, we should not accentuate racial differences. Under what Bonilla-Silva (2004) refers to as the “new racism,” colorblindness allows race-neutral policies and practices to operate in ways that at the surface seem nonracial, allowing white individuals to explain why inequality exists by “rationaliz[ing] minorities’ contemporary status as the product of market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and blacks’ imputed cultural limitations” (Bonilla-Silva, 2014, p. 2). These policies and practices are framed as treating everyone “equally” yet actually work to maintain the racial caste system and perpetuate racial inequality (Bonilla-Silva, 2004). In a society that is as color conscious as ours, operating from a colorblind ideology is simply unrealistic (Pollock, 2004).

The ongoing segregation of white individuals contributes to colorblind ideology. DiAngelo (2011) suggested that “because whites live primarily segregated lives in a white-dominated society, they receive little or no authentic information about racism and are thus unprepared to think about it critically or with complexity” (p. 58). Today, the average white student attends a school that is almost 72.5% white even though white students no longer account for a majority of the nation’s school enrollment (Orfield & Frankenberg, 2014). People’s meanings of race are heavily influenced by their local context, including where they live and attend school, which is still determined by the inequitable laws and policies implemented decades ago (powell, 1997).

Isolation from racialized concentrations of poverty helps shape views held by many Americans, particularly white individuals, who believe that race should no longer be factored into public policies like affirmative action or school desegregation (Hochschild & Scott, 1998; Siegel-Hawley & Frankenberg, 2011). Recent survey findings indicate that black respondents overwhelmingly (88%) feel that changes in the United States still need to be made in order for black individuals to obtain rights equal to those of white individuals, while only a bare majority (53%) of white respondents feels the same. Moreover, 38% of white adults say that enough has already been done to achieve equal rights between black and white individuals (Pew Research Center, 2016). White Americans’ belief that discrimination is a thing of the past and policies should be enacted that treat everyone equally are maintained and legitimized by colorblind ideology (Bonilla-Silva, 2004).

It is also true that U.S. society has made progress against discrimination. Research and opinion poll data show that beliefs around racial inferiority have declined since the 1970s (Bobo, Kluegel, & Smith, 1997), and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 began to open up the suburbs to minority homebuyers after decades of the aforementioned discrimination. Yet, inconsistent enforcement, exclusionary zoning, and ongoing discrimination in the mortgage and real estate markets still help to maintain high residential segregation across U.S. metropolitan areas. Meanwhile, rapid demographic shifts have been unevenly distributed, creating a “patchwork metropolis” defined by small enclaves of racialized affluence and much broader areas of distress and decline that no longer fall neatly along traditional urban/suburban boundary lines (Florida, 2017).

In the aftermath of the housing crisis and the Great Recession, many distressed expanses now are found in our suburbs. The spread of decline has strengthened competition for resources across metropolitan areas—between cities and suburbs to be sure, but also between suburbs and other suburbs. In the middle of that competition, advantaged enclaves often exercise power through the colorblind language of local control.

Local Control: A Colorblind Rationale for Resisting Desegregation

Almost immediately following the landmark 1954 decision in Brown, school districts asserted “local control” to prevent compliance with even token desegregation. During this period, local control—and the related argument for “states’ rights”—meant turning power away from a federal government intent upon expanding constitutional rights to a level of government that would preserve the segregationist status quo (Lassiter, 2007; MacLean, 2017). The 1955 Brown II decision buttressed assertions of local control as the justices remanded school desegregation back to district court judges to fashion remedies based on local conditions. Local control quickly became an ideological driver of the political effort to delay and disrupt the implementation of school desegregation across the southern states.

One of the more prominent and creative methods for undermining Brown in the South, home to numerous school districts that shared the same boundaries with county governments, was municipal secessions from larger counties. Those secessions were cloaked in the colorblind language of local control, with rationales ranging from the desire to determine the direction of the smaller school system by excluding those outside of the municipality, to better funding for the system, to improving the quality of education (Wilson, 2016). The U.S. Supreme Court eventually rejected this assertion of colorblindness in Wright v. Council of City of Emporia (1972), ruling that district secessions could not go forward if they interfered with school desegregation.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, after several years of belated but rapid progress on southern school desegregation, politicians took up local control as part of a comprehensive scheme to politically realign the South toward Republicans. This “southern strategy” built a powerful coalition of working class, white voters in both the rapidly growing Sun Belt and the industrial northeast. The largely race-neutral rhetoric accompanying it hinged on white fear and resentment of new federal civil rights laws (Lassiter, 2007). Like initial resistance to Brown, southern strategy adherents found that calling for local control was an appealing way to talk about desire for governance closer to home. For schools in particular, it reflected the local roots of education in this country. Yet, just beneath the surface lay the fact that states and local communities were intent on preserving segregation against the will of the federal government (Kluger, 1976; Orfield, 1969).

Nixon’s anti-busing, neighborhood schools platform served as a race-neutral euphemism for halting federal desegregation efforts and helped reframe the struggle against desegregation (Delmont, 2016; Lassiter, 2007). It became a race-neutral battle about how busing impacted the individual rights of white students to attend schools near their homes rather than about the state-sponsored discrimination that required busing to ensure equal protection under the law for black students (Delmont, 2016). The politics associated with Nixon’s southern strategy worked. His election in 1968 signaled the beginning of the end for the still-nascent federal implementation of Brown, in part because Nixon’s four conservative appointments to the Supreme Court realigned it for decades (Grant, 2009).

The 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision, involving Detroit and surrounding areas, effectively sealed off most suburban school districts from school desegregation efforts in central cities (Ryan, 2010). Milliken became one of a string of 1970s-era decisions that walled off cities from their overwhelmingly white, resource-rich, and progressively more powerful suburbs (see Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp, 1977; Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas, 1974; San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, 1973; Warth v. Seldin, 1975). In Troutt (2013), one scholar of law termed these cases “legal localism,” asserting that the rulings erected a

jurisdictional edifice . . . that would define insiders from outsiders, draw economic meaning from jurisdictional lines, empower suburbs against the cities from which they came, and limit their responsibilities even to their regional neighbors—for the first time, none of it on the basis of race. (p. 109)

In another set of early 1990s cases, the Supreme Court again deferred to the importance of returning districts to local control by relaxing what was required to remedy school segregation (Orfield & Eaton, 1996). Taken together, the legal localism rulings sanctioned deference to the race-neutral principle of local control rather than to the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equal protection under the law.

For decades, legal localism in the form of decisions like Milliken has shaped racial and economic segregation in U.S. metros. In Atlanta, a comprehensive study of white flight to the suburbs found that large numbers of white residents who had migrated from the central city in order to avoid desegregation were joined in the 1990s by numerous white residents from suburban locales both near and far (Kruse, 2005). Like the reframing of school desegregation into a battle over busing, the rationale for those later waves of white suburban settlement centered on a race-neutral desire to protect white families’ individual rights to choose neighbors and classmates without the interference of the federal government (Kruse, 2005).

Education as an Individual Versus a Collective Benefit

Alongside the race-neutral revision of constitutional battles for equality into constitutional battles for individual rights, public education has come to be seen largely as an individual instead of a societal benefit. Beginning with the 1966 Coleman Report examining inequality in students’ access to educational opportunity, stakeholders have increasingly assessed public schools in terms of their outputs, often narrowly measured by student achievement on standardized tests. This has helped fuel an understanding of schools as institutions that more or less effectively produce measurable student outcomes— without regard to the variety of unequal circumstances that students experience. The constricted focus on test scores has, as we demonstrate below, also constricted our understanding of what schools should do. We used to perceive schools as organizations that worked both to foster absolute success, or some collective level of well-being higher than where we started, and relative success, or allowing individual students to attain more than others (Hochschild & Scovronick, 2003). We now see them more as organizations that foster relative success, measured by achievement, for individuals.

A range of recent educational reforms like school accountability illustrates the increasing prevalence of education as an individual benefit. These popular reforms have a theory of action informed by the market, claiming that education outputs will improve as a result of actions taken by a parent/consumer. Accountability restricts educational goals to whether or not students have mastered basic academic skills versus broader aims like producing citizens for our democracy or an appreciation of arts and literature (Rose, 2013; Wilder, Jacobsen, & Rothstein, 2008). Public school ranking systems based on student outcomes like test scores help reinforce the notion that schools are an individual good that can be measured solely based on student performance.

Similarly, school choice supporters argue that by permitting families to choose the best school for their child, they will create competition among schools, ultimately improving the quality of all schools. This represents a fairly significant swing toward believing that parents, not educational leaders, have the most expertise for determining a student’s appropriate educational setting (Orfield & Frankenberg, 2013). It may also reflect an extension of the perception that policies adopted as a result of the Civil Rights Movement required too much governmental involvement (Wells, 2014). Parallel politics flow through contemporary Tea Party ideology that prioritizes individual rights and freedom from government. School choice moves the goal of student assignment from balancing the needs of all children in the district to focusing on individual children. This stands in contrast to school desegregation, which required students’ school assignments to ensure that all schools were racially diverse, benefiting the collective. At the same time, legal arguments for desegregation historically rested on the premise that access to white schools would expand opportunities for black students. Politically, that framing, otherwise understood as the idea that desegregated education was an individual good benefiting black students, fostered white resistance to relinquishing control of that good (Labaree, 2012).

By conceptualizing education as an individual good rather than a collective good, and in concert with colorblindness, political leaders can effectively ignore the legacy of public policies that resulted in inequality—and families that seek separate schools for their children and/or those who can afford to live in relatively homogeneous neighborhoods can easily justify such moves without regard to race. Yet, whether it is through school or housing choice or seeking local control of schools, such decisions often exacerbate segregation. Those segregating outcomes are often overlooked or rejected as a result of this contemporary framing. In other words, the choices of affluent families are made within a larger structure of reconceptualizing education as an individual good that allows individuals seeking local control for their communities to make decisions that impact many other communities beyond their own.

Significance of Educational Boundaries in an Individualized Era

As public schools become more of a means to ensure the relative success of individuals, acquiring educational resources can appear to be a zero-sum game. This amplifies the importance of school boundaries and spurs the rise of enclaves, or select sets of schools with heavy parental investment in improving their child’s school instead of more systemic investment geared toward improving the district (Henig, Hula, Orr, & Pedescleaux, 1999). Educational boundary lines contribute to these inequalities because they outline the geographic scope of a school or system, define its student population, and label it with a name. When those units are narrowly defined, it can limit the development of a more collective perspective (Weiher, 1991).

People are deeply attuned to the racial signals that school and district names send according to a number of studies exploring how highly resourced, white families make decisions about where to move and enroll their children in school (Dougherty et al., 2015; Holme, 2002; Lareau & Goyette, 2014). In their study on school choice in New York, Roda and Wells (2013) highlighted the “colorblind-diversity contradiction” (Wells, 2014) that exists between what white, advantaged parents say they value in a school and what schools they actually end up choosing for their children. They found parents who were aware of their racial, economic, and educational privilege and who wanted to send their children to diverse schools. Yet, in a high-stakes, competitive, market-based system that lacked diverse options, they ended up sending their children to what they believed were the “best” schools, which were racially isolated (Roda & Wells, 2013; see also Wells, Holme, Revilla, & Atanda, 2009). Advantaged white families tend to associate school district names with simplistic reputations like “good” and “bad” that are closely related to the demographic makeup of the student population (Holme, 2002; Johnson, 2006; Pearce, 1980). The race-neutrality embedded in those labels helps perpetuate isolation.

The housing market rewards segregating moves, as property values tend to be higher in districts and catchment areas with more white students relative to surrounding areas (Kane, Riegg, & Steger, 2010). At the same time, advantaged families make school and housing choices in the context of existing segregation and inequality, often with the result of protecting white privilege and providing resource-rich educational opportunities. And those individual choices have a more collective impact: leaving other communities within the same metropolitan area with fewer resources with which to educate those left behind (Frankenberg, 2009).

Since education is a key commodity, political leaders of homogeneous suburban communities work to maintain exclusionary boundaries in the hopes of attracting new residents (Buendía & Humbert-Fisk, 2015). While comprehensive school desegregation plans that de-emphasize urban-suburban boundaries can mitigate white flight (Green, 1985; Orfield, 2001; Orfield & Frankenberg, 2014), a recent causal study of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, found that once such plans end, white families are considerably more inclined to move to a neighborhood (and school) with higher shares of other whites (Liebowitz & Page, 2014). In fragmented metropolitan areas with numerous school districts, the boundary lines that separate central city districts from multiple suburban ones partly explain high levels of school segregation between districts (Bischoff, 2008; Fiel, 2013, 2015; Frankenberg, 2009; Reardon, Yun, & Eitle, 2000). Through residential decisions, households with school-aged children have exploited growing inequality to move to school districts in a manner that produces much higher racial and income segregation than households without children (Owens, 2016, 2017).

Given the racial and economic significance of school district boundaries— and the hardening perception of education as an individual rather than a collective benefit—it is not surprising that communities have waged fierce political and legal battles over how boundaries are created and maintained (EdBuild, 2017). Yet, while evidence shows that race plays a central role in choosing homes and schools and that school segregation remains tightly connected to myriad educational disadvantages, discourse around these fundamental realities has been clouded by colorblind politics, policymaking, and jurisprudence (Pollock, 2004). Colorblind attitudes and the persisting isolation of white Americans gives renewed resonance to the concept of local control as a race-neutral rationale framing the enactment of exclusionary new school district boundaries today.

Local Control and Contemporary Educational Inequality

As the literature discussed here demonstrates, the principle of local control often subverts the principle of equality given the unequal nature of our society. Still, one of the much-touted benefits of local control is the election of community representatives well positioned to make critical decisions about how to fund and what to teach in public schools. It is important to acknowledge here that calls for local control of schools have not been limited to white communities. Black and Latino leaders, for instance, have supported community-controlled schools to protect students of color from systemic discrimination (Goldstein, 2014). Public opinion polls also routinely cite overwhelming support for local control of schools (Hochschild & Scott, 1998; Jacobsen & Saultz, 2012). Yet, voter and parent complacency, as measured by turnout and involvement, is actually quite high (Viteritti, 2005). This is particularly true in homogeneous suburban and rural districts where school board elections are less often contested than in more diverse urban districts (Cistone, 1974; Oliver, 2001). An important disconnect emerges between the democratic values and ideals embedded in local control and, as we will see, how it often works in practice.

Today, echoes of the earlier resistance to desegregation are reverberating through a school district secession effort in metropolitan Birmingham. A suburb, seeking to break off from the countywide school district that remains under court order to desegregate, offered as its rationale a desire to (a) provide an excellent educational experience for its students, (b) decrease classroom sizes, and (c) exercise local control over its system (Brief for U.S. Department of Justice, 2016). After pointed questioning of suburban Gardendale school board members and employees, the U.S. Department of Justice concluded in its brief opposing the secession, “The testimony fails to explain how the proposed separation will accomplish most of these objectives. . . . [It] shows only that the separation will provide Gardendale with control over the composition of its schools” (pp. 35–36). The Justice Department also highlighted the negative consequences of Gardendale’s attempted secession for ongoing school desegregation efforts in the entire county.

While the judge in the Gardendale case agreed that racial exclusion was a motivating factor for secession, local control won out. Quoting a federal appeals court, the judge wrote, “Complete return to local control of school systems is the ultimate goal of all judicial supervision because from the very first, federal supervision of local school systems was intended as a temporary measure to remedy past discrimination” (Faulk, 2017). The judge ordered a process—including a desegregation plan and an interdistrict transfer provision—by which the new district could be created. The case is currently on appeal to the Eleventh Circuit.

A recent EdBuild (2017) policy report notwithstanding, many contemporary appraisals of school district secession have played out in popular media. In these news stories, a key theme emerges: White residents of suburban areas wishing to secede from larger, more diverse school districts regularly express the race-neutral desire for local control (Brown, 2016; Eaton, 2014; Spencer, 2014; Wilson, 2016). When a simplistic narrative like local control hardens around a complex phenomenon like segregation (Erickson, 2016)—and endures—it becomes increasingly important to understand what lies beneath it.

Through extensive interviews with political leaders and educational stakeholders in the Memphis area, we sought to systematically explore the rationale for the secessions. We came to understand that leaders rationalized secession through local control, which, as this framing illustrates, has strong resonance today due to a combination of colorblindness and a focus on education as an individual rather than collective benefit.

Local Control as a Means to Preserve and Accumulate Relative Advantage

Suburban stakeholders saw secession as a means of preserving and accumulating resources, broadly defined, for their individual children and communities. They did not hesitate to acknowledge that secession may contribute to inequality when the interests of “their” children won out over the interests of all children. Said one white suburban leader,

I certainly, selfishly, want Bartlett schools, whoever’s running them, to have the very best opportunity for our children. I want Memphis children to have a good education, but I’m elected to make sure [my] 57,000 people have a high quality of life. So that’s my primary responsibility.

This perspective crystallizes the shift toward thinking about education as a relative advantage, or a competitive benefit, rather than a collective good—and played out across the various positive attributes linked to local control.

Push for Local Control Driven by Suburban Resentment and Racial Fear of Memphis

Accompanying the affirmative rationale for asserting local control was simmering suburban resentment and fear of what a merger with Memphis schools represented. As one white suburban mayor said, “They [Memphis] weren’t giving up anything. What they were doing was accessing a larger pool of resources. And a growing tax base.” The resentment and fear related to resources, political power, and increased interracial contact.

Reemphasizing Education as a Societal Benefit

To confront a central tenet of the local control framework, educational stakeholders must begin to reemphasize education as a societal benefit for the broader community. In other words, communities must come to see diverse public schools as essential to participatory democracy and a high-quality workforce (McDermott, 1999a). Conversations about schools and resources can then include a focus on how to best serve all children rather than how to advantage a select few. Relatedly, we must work to create an affirmative understanding of the benefits of school diversity—including the benefits for isolated white families—rather than the harms of segregation (Wells, 2014). The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), for instance, represents an opportunity to retool the accountability framework to include school diversity and other broader goals.

Openly Confronting a History of Segregation and Discrimination

Our fieldwork illustrated the lack of cross-racial trust or understanding that flowed from decades of separation in the Memphis area. It was hard to work together amid the fear and “othering” (powell & Menendian, 2016). Because there was no multiracial, urban-suburban political coalition with shared goals or understanding, the TPC’s work never had a chance. Communities and schools have a central role to play in honestly confronting the history of racial discrimination through educational curricula and community programming that allows people to see race and racial segregation as central drivers and inhibitors of opportunity. For example, Rothstein’s (2017) powerful examination of how governmental policy created today’s “de facto” segregation noted that none of our high school textbooks talk about government-backed discrimination.

Cross-Sector Collaboration and New Political Coalitions

Suburban stakeholders saw the creation of separate districts as a means for community economic development, which, in turn, would improve their own wealth through increased housing demand and prices. Given the reciprocal relationship between school and housing segregation, inclusionary zoning policies and/or fair share affordable housing initiatives on a regional scale are critical. This would provide at least some lower- to middle-class families access to exclusive communities—and their schools—and help offset the ways in which secession confers advantage upon those who already have it.

Given the current political context and its hyper commitment to education as an individual benefit, stakeholders will need to reach across sectors—for example, education, housing, public health—to find and work with those committed to the collective good. We need new political coalitions more generally—ones that recognize that many of the challenges of the city are now the challenges of the suburbs and that only small, privileged swaths of metropolitan communities are benefiting under the current paradigm (Orfield, 2002).

Diversity Impact Assessments

In Memphis and elsewhere, suburban proponents of secession are generally not required to provide an assessment of its broader influences: Only 6 of the 30 states that have laws around dividing up school districts require attention to the impact that secession would have on racial and socioeconomic diversity and opportunity (EdBuild, 2017). Wilson (2016) argued that state legislatures, through their authority to establish rules for secession, must consider how secession would impact the quality of the communities formed, particularly racial and socioeconomic demographics. States could also require a diversity impact statement before approval of new districts, similar to the idea that the federal government should consider the integration effect of any new education policy (Siegel-Hawley, 2016). With the Supreme Court’s recent decision sustaining the disparate impact standard in housing integration efforts (see Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., 2015), the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education could also investigate complaints that proposed district secessions would violate students’ civil rights.

Regional Educational Equity Initiatives

Constructive leadership from state and federal governments on region-wide equity initiatives is also important. Higher levels of government are best positioned to help overcome the narrow interests of local communities (McDermott, 1999a). At the federal level, two Obama-era federal initiatives, “Stronger Together” and “Opening Doors, Expanding Opportunities,” offered competitive planning and implementation dollars to communities interested in voluntarily promoting integration, either within or across district boundary lines. Though neither was funded in the current political environment, both represent the kind of future leadership needed to promote regional integration efforts.

At the state level, New York has demonstrated significant interest in incorporating school diversity into several provisions of its ESSA plan, both as part of its accountability metrics and as a turnaround option for struggling, high poverty schools. The ESSA initiatives in New York build on prior state efforts that used federal School Improvement Grants to diversify struggling schools. In the Midwest, Nebraska’s state legislature crafted a regional governance system, called the Learning Community, to address racial and economic isolation across two Omaha area counties. The legislature established a common levy on property across the 11 districts in the two-county system. That levy was then redistributed based on the state funding formula. Wealthier districts were allowed to preserve some of the advantages of their local property tax wealth by setting a levy above the one established by the Learning Community (Holme & Diem, 2015). The regional agreement also included an inter-district student transfer plan that sought to foster diversity within all of the districts’ schools.

If more ambitious educational equity efforts are out of reach, at a minimum, more protections should be built into existing open enrollment policies (Holme & Wells, 2008). This would include the provision of free transportation, the presence of diversity goals, easy to access information and strong outreach, and enrollment policy based on student and family rather than district interest (Orfield & Frankenberg, 2013; Siegel-Hawley, 2016).