The Supreme Court ruled in 1974 (Bradley v. Milliken) that a court could not order desegregation across district lines. The case referred to Detroit, which was highly segregated. That put an end to the possibility of metropolitan districts like the one already established in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, NC. The children of Detroit were doomed to remain in segregated, underfunded schools in an increasingly impoverished district.
This article reports the findings of a study of the most segregating lines dividing the children of different races. http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/08/where-school-district-borders-are-invisible-fences/497279/
[ALERT: I was just informed that Edbuild is funded by reformers who want to destroy our public schools. Keep that in mind as you read—DR]
“A few blocks away from Bernita Bradley’s house, the Detroit Public School district ends and the Grosse Pointe Public School System begins. The border is invisible, but with a 12-year-old daughter enrolled in DPS, the reminders for Bradley are impossible to ignore. Every student seems to have a Macbook. There’s the annual Grosse Pointe toy drive, which distributes free bicycles to kids who need them. And there are the parks with shiny new playground equipment, where parents routinely ask Bradley, “Do you live around here?”
“Ours are torn down and dilapidated,” Bradley says. “Just seeing theirs makes me feel bad.“
“According to a new report and interactive map by the education think tank EdBuild, the district border that Bradley navigates as a parent and an activist (she helped launch Enroll Detroit, which distributes information about school enrollment requirements to families) is the most income-segregating in the nation. The median property value in DPS is $45,100, versus $220,100 in suburban Grosse Pointe, and roughly half of the city student population lives in poverty, compared to one out of every 15 students across the district line—a difference of 42 percentage points. Local per-pupil public revenue is about the same, at around $4,650 per student, but that’s because Detroit now taxes properties at a rate of 8.7 percent each year to pay for its schools. This is 47 percent higher than the rate paid in Grosse Pointe, “where, it goes without saying, there are most likely no vermin carcasses under the desks,” says Rebecca Sibilia, the founder and CEO of EdBuild, in an email to CityLab.
“EdBuild’s report ranked the country’s top 50 segregating school-district borders. More than 60 percent of these borders are in Rust Belt cities in upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, eastern Wisconsin, and Illinois, which have suffered from patterns of disinvestment similar to those in Detroit. As the city underwent decades of depopulation, hundreds of Detroit’s public schools closed, leaving properties abandoned and blighted. DPS now struggles with a budget deficit of nearly $300 million, along with frequent teacher shortages and staff walk-outs. Research shows that students coming from profound disadvantage need even more resources from schools than their wealthier peers to achieve equal outcomes—yet DPS cannot meet those needs, even with additional state funding.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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Our current system of funding schools through property taxes and our refusal to incentivize integration will never solve our unequal access and funding of our public schools. It will take a new era of civil rights to inspire minority communities rise up and demand equity for their children. The marketplace offers no sound solutions, just more exploitation. The federal government could have addressed some of these inequities through the reauthorization of ESEA. Instead, the federal government squandered an enormous opportunity to help poor minority students, They turned ESSA into a corporate barrel of pork. Our current system of partiality to charters is creating increased segregation and using public money to underwrite it. We need another Martin Luther King, Jr. The Center for American Progress made some suggestions for addressing funding disparities. As for integration, it seems to not be on the radar of public consciousness. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/2015/05/18/113397/a-fresh-look-at-school-funding/
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It is so very sad that children are victimized by the system. When I look at the face of a newborn I feel hope. In some places hope crashes and burns and then it’s tossed in a trash heap with everything else that is an “inconvenient truth.”
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St Louis Voluntary Desegregation program is between St Louis City and some districts in St Louis county. St Louis City is not part of St Louis county.
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Nor do public school district lines necessarily coincide with town, city, and/or county lines in the Show Me State. Public school districts are political entities in/of themselves.
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The good neighborhood public schools in Detroit are being closed one by one or were taken over by the EAA. In spite of less funding, those schools had every program you could think of, students received millions of dollars of scholarships, and students were able to graduate and go on to succeed. Not that there weren’t problems: poverty creates immense obstacles.
The narrative now is that all Detroit schools are failing, and the move to 100% privatized schools may happen as soon as the new board is elected. Detroit teachers protested the starving of the public schools with sick outs, how dare they! Powers that be want non-union for-profit charters. It will take a huge fight to stop this steamroller. One small step is to vote Mary Anne Hering, Working Class Party, for State Board of Education.
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Detroit is a tragic reform hoax. They did it for their charter allies and ignored the kids. The kids don’t matter because they are black.
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If the majority of a population are black in Detroit, then the union leader, State Board of Education leader and members, and parents should unite for their children’s sake in order to have a decent funding for public schools.
In this 21st century, white race is becoming minority. I thought that color people are becoming the majority in many sectors in society.
The GOOD question is to ask Mr. John King of DoE for an answer as to why he promotes and supports UNQUALIFIED PRIVATE RUN chain of CHARTER schools? Back2basic
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I teach in the district hammered here for being “segregated.” Diane, you should know that the head of EdBuild, Rebecca Silibia, is a former staffer for Michelle Rhee at StudentsFirst. The intent here is to make a case to pay Detroit charters more per pupil than the state minimum. It has nothing to do with “equity.” Detroit Public Schools already gets more per pupil than Grosse Pointe. The charters don’t – they get the state base amount. They want more.
My middle school in Grosse Pointe is 35% African American and 30% free/reduced lunch. Those numbers don’t fit Rebecca Silibia’s narrative…so she purposely left out an entire neighborhood of our district, located in Harper Woods, when she calculated Grosse Pointe Schools’ poverty and minority rates. The entire report is a complete lie. Not surprising considering the source.
Please, please retract your support of this “report.”
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