November/December 2007

Charting a New Course toward Racial Integration

Districts seek legal routes to capture the benefits of diversity

by Brigid Schulte

Richard Gastellum, desegregation coordinator for Tucson United School District, had been watching all last spring for the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on two race-based desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville. The plans being challenged in both cities were purely voluntary efforts to promote diversity, like similar plans at an estimated 1,000 districts nationwide. Tucson, however, is one of about 253 school districts across the country that are still under a court order to desegregate to remedy past harms. Tucson used an array of magnet schools, controlled choice student assignment, and forced busing to do so. Gastellum was interested in the decision to be handed down by the Court in June, but because his district’s plan was court-ordered, not voluntary, he was confident that the ruling would have no bearing on Tucson.

But it did.

Two short months after the Supreme Court ruled on June 28 that both voluntary race-based plans were unconstitutional, the U.S. district judge overseeing Tucson’s desegregation order decided that its mandated Policy 5090 “Ethnic and Racial Plan” was also now unconstitutional because it relied solely on an individual student’s race to make school assignments. The policy had prohibited students from transferring into a school or out of another if it would throw off the racial or ethnic balance of either school. So instead of moving with “all deliberate speed” to desegregate—to quote the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling—Tucson’s school board decided to turn on a dime. Two weeks into the 2007–08 school year, they voted 3-2 to scrap the 30-year-old plan immediately and move to a purely open enrollment system. “It all came as a complete surprise,” Gastellum says. “But I’m an educator, not a constitutional lawyer.”

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Voluntary Integration: Two Views

Carol Swain: "Just Make Our Schools Better"

Carol Swain, an African American professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University, attended segregated schools as a child under the U.S. Supreme Court Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which held that racially separate schools were constitutional as long as they were equal. She is one of the first to admit that for her, separate wasn’t so bad. “It was the unequal part that was the problem,” she says. So she views the Court’s recent decision on two voluntary race-based integration plans through a different lens. As far as she’s concerned, it’s time to stop trying so hard to integrate….

Gary Orfield: "Separate but Equal Doesn't Work"

Gary Orfield, codirector of The Civil Rights Project at UCLA, has spent his career researching the benefits of school integration and the harms of racial isolation. He sent his own children to integrated inner-city schools in Washington, D.C., at a time when many middle-class white parents were fleeing to the suburbs, and has seen them all thrive academically and professionally. To Orfield, there is no question that racially and economically integrating schools is the only way to ensure an equitable education for all children….

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Creating Coherence in District Administration

A framework based on the work of the Public Education Leadership Project

by Stacey Childress, Richard F. Elmore, Allen S. Grossman, and Susan Moore Johnson

Pockets of excellence exist in all school districts. One can find spectacular classes in otherwise dreary schools and stunning schools in mediocre districts. However, to truly serve all students and meet the demands of today’s accountability environment, district leaders must find a way for these pockets of excellence to become the norm rather than the exception. This is one of the greatest challenges facing American education today.

What does an urban school district that enables systemwide improvement look like? How is the district organized, and how does it implement a comprehensive strategy to improve student learning? To help leaders of urban school systems answer these questions, 12 faculty members from Harvard Business School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education launched the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP) in 2003. The PELP team set out to identify effective leadership and management practices from both the business and nonprofit sectors that could be adapted to the unique needs of urban districts. The team also spent hundreds of hours observing 15 urban districts of varying sizes across the United States (see “Districts Participating in the Public Education Leadership Project,” p. 6). Twelve district teams, composed of the superintendent and other leaders, have participated in the PELP programs, discussing a series of leadership and management cases drawn from settings within and outside education.

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