Dive Brief:
- A 1996 civil rights case against the Hartford Public Schools in Connecticut found the district segregated its students by class and race, forcing a new era in the system that has since seen an increase in graduation rates and the prosperity of several magnet schools created under the desegregation effort.
- District Administration reports Superintendent Beth Schiavino-Narvaez is facing a $3.2 million budget gap for the 2016-17 school year but remains committed to preserving arts education and P.E. in every school, along with access to social workers and small class sizes.
- Schiavino-Narvaez has overseen a reduction in chronic absenteeism and out-of-school suspensions, an Acceleration Agenda to improve neighborhood schools, a greater focus on addressing the nonacademic needs of students and families, and the creation of new advisory councils to get feedback from teachers, parents and principals.
Dive Insight:
The nation’s landmark desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education, decided by the Supreme Court in 1954, eliminated the “separate but equal” argument in favor of segregated schools. The 1971 decision in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education substantially shaped the desegregation fight by authorizing bussing of students across school district lines to better integrate classrooms. Boston is one city that had particularly aggressive opposition to bussing plans.
While some of the major desegregation cases happened decades ago, there has been a lot of attention on the retrenchment in this area. There were twice as many segregated schools in the 2013-14 school year as there were 13 years before. And in Texas, the affirmative action plan upheld by the Supreme Court for UT-Austin includes a partner strategy for ensuring diversity in the university system by guaranteeing a place for the top 10% of students from every high school. That only works because of highly segregated schools.