2 Segregated Schools, 2 Reactions

At Church Street School, a K‑6 elementary school in southern Hamden, roughly 16 of 20 students in every classroom are black and Hispanic — a figure that’s so out of whack with the rest of the town that the state has demanded an immediate remedy to racially desegregate its students.

Two miles down Dixwell Avenue, at Lincoln-Bassett, a K‑6 elementary school in New Haven’s Newhallville neighborhood, roughly 19 of 20 students in every classroom are black and Hispanic — a figure that’s so out of whack with the rest of the region that the state won’t do anything about it.

“What kind of sense does that make to you?” Ed Joyner, one of New Haven’s two elected school board members, asked of the discrepancy in the way the Connecticut State Department of Education classifies schools as unlawfully segregated.

Separated only by the town line, many public schools in New Haven closely match the racial demographics at Church Street School, with classrooms that exist almost exclusively for black and brown children. Often, its neighborhood schools have even fewer white students on their attendance sheets than Church Street School does.

All of them can be considered ​“racially segregated,” but by two different ways of defining the problem.

Experts look at ​“racial isolation,” an absolute measure of how often students interact with classmates of a different race, as well as ​“racial imbalance,” a relative measure of whether each school looks like the rest of the district.

Within academia, there’s an ongoing debate about which one is the ​“right” definition. Each leads to a different view of whether America’s public schools have become more or less segregated since the late 1980s, after federal judges limited the ability to enforce Brown v. Board of Education while the country’s school-age population diversified.

As Church Street School and Lincoln-Bassett show, both of those types of segregation occur throughout the greater New Haven area, but the state government responds in vastly different ways, requiring only one to be fully solved.

Racial imbalance, like at Church Street, comes with swift consequences if white suburbanites confine themselves to specific schools within their districts. Racial isolation, like at Lincoln-Bassett, takes decades-long lawsuits to set up a voluntary system for only some of a district’s schools, as New Haven’s magnets have attempted to do.

In other words, absent a court order requiring it to do more, the state steps in only if the black and brown neighbors who are being kept out of schools already live within the town.

Racial imbalance, which the state enforces more strictly, is a useful way to understand what individual districts can do about segregation, says Jeremy Fiel, an assistant sociology professor at the University of Arizona.

“These relative measures get more to the heart of what school assignment policies do or can do to segregate or desegregate schools,” he said. ​“The least amount of segregation would be perfect balance, where all schools have the same racial breakdown.”

But Gary Orfield, an education professor who co-directs the Civil Rights Project at the University of California in Los Angeles, said that measure of racial imbalance, which in Connecticut is limited by the arbitrary boundaries of town lines, has little to do with student’s education.

“I don’t think it makes any sense to define segregation based on the demographics of the district,” he said. ​“What’s the situation that students are actually confronting? If you’re isolated in a high-poverty school, it doesn’t matter what district you’re in.”

Racial Imbalance In The Suburb

At a recent State Board of Education meeting in Hartford, Dianna Wentzell, Connecticut’s departing education commissioner, handed over an annual report on racial imbalances in the state’s education system.

State law requires a fix whenever a school’s racial demographics exceed a 25-point gap compared to the district as a whole’s students in the same grade.

That document said Church Street School has such skewed racial demographics compared to the rest of Hamden that it joins a category of only seven schools statewide. Those outliers are required to submit a corrective action plan to fix the racial imbalance or risk losing state funding.

The document added that two more of Hamden’s schools, Helen Street and Shepherd Glen Schools, are close to being racially imbalanced, though they haven’t passed the point of facing state intervention yet.

That’s also been a problem in Greenwich, Fairfield, Vernon and West Hartford, where districts got into trouble for disproportionately clustering black and brown students together in one building.

Wentzell’s report was delivered the same week that one of the Hamden town council’s at-large members ​“liked” an online post describing ​“the southern section of Hamden” as ​“a ghetto,” where the commenter claimed to avoid going ​“unless [I] am armed.”

Southern Hamden, where Church Street School is located, has a larger black population and more families in poverty than does the northern side of town.

“The housing in Hamden, it’s a bifurcated community,” said Superintendent Jody Goeler, saying Mix Avenue marks a dividing line between the town’s north and south.

Hamden’s administrators already knew this moment was coming, and they’d prepared for more than two years to racially rebalance all their schools. In the end, the school board voted to shut down Church Street School. In the coming years, it also plans to magnetize its four remaining elementary schools and redraw attendance zones.

“We felt strongly that we needed to make sure all of our elementary schools reflect the racial balance of our entire community,” Goeler said.

Under the state’s metrics, some of New Haven’s schools might be considered close to racially imbalanced too. At Worthington Hooker, for instance, 40 percent of the students are white, while just 12.9 percent are district-wide.

But Connecticut exempts New Haven from following most of the rules for where it places students within its own borders.

Calling them ​“diverse schools,” the law says that, in minority-majority districts, schools don’t need to submit a racial balance plan as long as at least one-quarter of the students in each school are racial minorities. It also includes other exemptions for ​“unique schools,” including magnet, charter, vocational and alternative schools.

That may be for good reason, said Fiel, the University of Arizona professor. Balancing those schools could create more racial isolation, he explained.

In a predominantly black and brown school district like New Haven, ​“any efforts to try to make a particular school less racially isolated would come at the expense of others,” Fiel wrote. ​“Moving enough white students from other schools to the 90% minority school” — like Lincoln Bassett — ​“would mean fewer white students to send to other schools, making them more likely to be racially isolated,” he wrote in an email. ​“While a 90% minority school might seem very isolated, the district cannot do much better unless it finds a way to bring in a more diverse student population overall.”

Racial Isolation In The City

In a measure of racial isolation, half of New Haven’s schools are considered profoundly segregated, because its black and brown students will rarely sit in a classroom with any white students.

However, there’s not much that New Haven alone can do about it, because that’s how the district as a whole looks.

That was the issue that Connecticut’s State Supreme Court tried to address in the landmark case of Sheff v. O’Neill in 1996. The justices said that the state’s century-old choice to use town lines as school district boundaries had contributed to the ​“concentration of racial and ethnic minorities” in its public schools, isolating schoolchildren to such an extent that it deprived them of ​“a substantially equal educational opportunity.”

The court’s ruling led to a proliferation of inter-district magnet schools in Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport. With extra money, the schools were supposed to reduce racial isolation by enticing suburban white families to cross town lines, and, in the Hartford area, they started to close racial achievement gaps on standardized tests.

Locally in New Haven, though, the effort to reduce racial isolation is unraveling, as city residents clamor for more desks and libertarian lawyers and city officials threaten lawsuits.

The experiment also didn’t deliver on the promise of integration. Three high schools have been fined for not meeting racial isolation benchmarks. And almost half of the inter-district magnet schools are less diverse than the district as a whole: L.W Beecher Museum School, John C. Daniels School of International Communication, King-Robinson IB School, High School in the Community, Hill Regional Career High School, Metropolitan Business Academy and New Haven Academy.

What’s the state doing for them? ​“NHPS is responsible for marketing and recruiting students for their inter-district magnet schools to ensure that legislative mandates and standards are met,” Peter Yazbak, a spokesperson for the Connecticut State Department of Education, wrote in an email. ​“Non-compliant schools receive guidance in the form of ideas and best practices that are utilized in other districts.”

A Segregated County

Students in integrated schools not only become better citizens; they also do substantially better later in life, graduating at higher rates and earning more as adults. If the research on school integration’s benefits is so clear and convincing — enough for the state to order redistricting within a town — what’s to be done for those cities, like New Haven, that can’t do it just with their own families?

Although Orfield, the UCLA professor, prefers to use racial isolation as the defining measure of school segregation, he thinks that governments can use racial imbalance across metropolitan areas — a consensus that experts on the other side of the academic debate agree on.

“Unevenness can also be sort of problematic,” said Meredith Richards, an assistant professor of education policy at Southern Methodist University. ​“If a district is predominantly white, like many of these in the Northeast, where there’s a lot of fragmentation into really small districts, it may be perfectly ​‘integrated,” while the neighboring city is also perfectly ​‘integrated.’

“But we can think about it at the metro level, between districts,” she added. ​“That tells us how students are distributed, so we can really see where the segregation is.”

Nationally, Richards has found that racial imbalances are generally getting smaller within districts but larger across districts. The dividing boundaries have become ​“really important sorting forces,” she explained, that largely can’t be challenged since the Supreme Court’s 1974 decision in Milliken v. Bradley.

Locally, those lines are having the same effect. By analyzing last year’s enrollment data, the Independent found that 16 of 23 public school districts in the greater New Haven area are racially imbalanced compared to the entire county.

Black and brown children are disproportionately clustered in New Haven and Waterbury, while white children are disproportionately clustered in North Branford, Oxford, Madison, Wolcott, Guilford, Bethany, Cheshire, North Haven and other towns.

Hamden (along with Derby and Ansonia) is one of the few districts that actually looks like the county as a whole. Its schools are under state scrutiny precisely because they are diversifying.

“When you look at it in its entirety, Hamden is a racially balanced community. If we can ensure that our schools reflect that, it will be a huge stride for our students,” Goeler said.

“When I look at the research, all students perform at higher levels and are better prepared for the world that awaits them when they go to diverse schools,” he went on. ​“It isn’t just reading, writing and arithmetic; there are different kinds of people and cultures. Having a respect for all the people that you’re going to be working with and living with over the years, you do that through public schools.”

Goeler added that he thinks the only way Connecticut can racially integrate all its schools is to ​“look more more regionally” and ​“get away from the town vs. town mentality.” But he conceded that getting there would be ​“a huge political issue.”

In the long run, like ​“inner-ring” suburbs throughout the country, the town is becoming increasingly diverse. And it too could see a change in the way the rest of Connecticut treats its schools’ racial demographics.

As Hamden trends toward racial isolation, with fewer white students in its classes, no one at the state will eventually call its schools segregated — just as long as they keep the balance right.

Previous stories on New Haven’s inter-district magnet schools:

• Suburbs Profit Off New Haven’s Magnets
• Magnet School Tuition Back On The Table
• Magnet Lottery Rigged For Suburbanites
• Suburban ​“Pushback” Feared On Magnets
• Goldson Targets Magnet Hustle
• Magnets Seek $2,250 Tuition From Suburbs
• Schools To Appeal State Magnet Ruling