Politico Morning Education, September 4, 2019 by Nicole Gaudiano
WHEN SCHOOL DISTRICTS SECEDE: School district secessions in seven counties in Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee in recent years have increasingly sorted white and black students and white and Hispanic students into separate school systems, a new study has found.
— The study published today in AERA Open, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association, examined whether, and to what extent, new school district boundaries segregate students and residents in southern counties where school district secessions have occurred. It defines school district secession as “a political process forming small, new school systems that tend to serve a higher-proportion white and more affluent residential population than the large districts from which they splinter.”
— The study analyzed trends between 2000-2015 for Jefferson, Marshall, Mobile, Montgomery and Shelby counties in Alabama; East Baton Rouge Parish in Louisiana; and Shelby County in Tennessee. The study found that an increasing share of segregation in those counties was due to segregation between school districts rather than within school districts.
— School district secession resulted in splinter districts that typically report higher percentages of white students than in most of the “left-behind” county districts, the study found. Most “left-behind” districts had a higher percentage of black and Hispanic students.
— “Given the relative scarcity of students crossing district lines, the implications of this trend are profound,” said study co-author Erica Frankenberg, a professor of education and demography at Pennsylvania State University, in a statement. “School segregation is becoming more entrenched, with potential long-term effects for residential integration patterns as well.”
— School district secessions aren’t limited to the South. The nonprofit EdBuild, which advocates for equitable school funding, recently released a report that showed 128 communities nationwide attempted to secede from their school districts since 2000, with 73 successfully doing so.