“Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Those words were uttered in 1963 by Alabama’s George Wallace in his first inaugural address as governor of what is sometimes called the Cotton State.
Actually, legally-based segregation in America’s public schools was ruled unconstitutional in May 1954, when the United States Supreme Court, in an unanimous decision, banned the separation of public-school pupils by race.
In a case known as Brown v. Board of Education (Topeka, Kansas), the nine Supreme Court justices ruled that state laws permitting the separation of students by race were unconstitutional.
The court overturned an 1896 High Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, which allowed states to segregate public-school pupils by race. The Plessy ruling permitted racial segregation by race as long as separate schools for whites and blacks provided essentially equal education.
In 1954, the High Court said: “We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
Today, more than six decades after the High Court’s desegregation decision, segregation is still an issue.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, a group of residents inside the Mt. Diablo Unified School District wants to secede from the district and form a new district called the Northgate Unified School District.
The Mt. Diablo district is 35 miles east of San Francisco. The district, which is ethnically diverse, includes the cities of Concord and Clayton. It also covers parts of Pleasant Hill, Lafayette, Martinez and Walnut Creek. The district is located in Contra Costa County.
The new Northgate district, if established, would include parts – generally affluent parts – of Concord and Walnut Creek.
Supporters of the Northgate plan have gathered more than 6,000 signatures from registered voters and are seeking permission from officials of Contra Costa County and the state of California to allow a public vote on the secession plan.
On June 26, 2017, according to the East Bay Times (June 28 edition), about 70 people rallied against the secession movement.
The school secession movement is not new. In Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi, school secession movements do not require approval from any county or state authority.
According to U.S. News and World Report (June 21, 2017), school secession movements seek to protect white, wealthy communities from areas where the population is poorer and perhaps contains non-white individuals.
High-income parents have always had the option of choosing private schools for their children. Two examples stand out. President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary, during their White House years, sent their daughter, Chelsea, to the Sidwell Friends School, a highly selective, private Quaker school which has locations in Washington, D.C., and Maryland. The two daughters of President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle also attended Sidwell. Presumably, neither president wanted to send his children to the public schools in Washington, D.C.
In the last 30 to 40 years, many public schools in the United States have come under attack, often because these schools are accused of providing inferior education.
However, affluent parents, especially those who do not necessarily have the funds or the desire to send their children to private schools, often move to communities where the public schools have a reputation for quality. In the East Bay region of San Francisco, communities like Danville, Orinda and Lafayette have public schools known for excellence. These communities are largely white but also contain a smattering of Asians.
Segregation can also exist within a given school district that may – or may not – have affluent parents. Using a system called “tracking,” students are assigned to classes based on academic achievement. Tracking may separate students into such categories as “above average,” “average” or “below average.”
So, despite what the U.S. Supreme Court did in 1954, public-school segregation, even though banned by law, can still exist.
Two major questions are: (1) Will government intervene to stop public-school segregation on the basis of where parents live? (2) Will government outlaw a public school’s separating students on the basis of academic ability?
