Alabama Opinion, March 29, 2018
By Erica Frankenberg, a native of Mobile, Alabama and graduate of MCPSS. She is an associate professor of education and demography and director of the Center for Education and Civil Rights at the Pennsylvania State University.
As a 1997 graduate of the Mobile County Public School System (MCPSS), the dismissal of its school desegregation case my senior year of high school was an impetus for my current career studying the extent and causes of school desegregation and, now, resegregation. My experiences as a child hopscotched across the boundary lines now dividing the county's schools and assignment of students. I went to a private kindergarten in Chickasaw and attended Saraland Elementary School before my family moved to west Mobile. In middle school, I attended Phillips Preparatory, which had just become a magnet school via the desegregation consent decree, and then attended Murphy High School. I know from my own history--and the consensus of decades of social science research--that having such diverse experiences benefited my education.