The South’s Push to Resegregate Its Schools

On April 4, a little-known legislative committee met for the fourth time in six weeks in downtown Raleigh, N.C. Although its name is dull and obscure—the Joint Legislative Study Committee on the Division of Local School Administrative Units—its mission is anything but. The committee is the front line of a legislative push, led by statehouse Republicans, to dismantle North Carolina’s big countywide school districts by allowing rich, often white suburbs to secede.

Though it has no law allowing school secession, North Carolina is the latest Southern state looking to resegregate what’s left of the region’s integrated public schools. More than 60 years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling made school racial segregation unconstitutional, school secession has been gaining momentum across the South, with richer areas trying to wall their kids and tax dollars off from big districts in Atlanta; Dallas; Little Rock, Ark.; Baton Rouge, La.; Birmingham, Mobile, and Montgomery in Alabama; and Memphis and Chattanooga in Tennessee.

Since 2000, 71 areas in the U.S. have tried to secede from their school districts, reversing a decades-long consolidation trend, according to EdBuild, which studies school funding.  Forty-nine succeeded; nine are in process. The moves come as federal courts have gradually released districts from the oversight in place since Brown. Linda Brown, the schoolgirl at the heart of the landmark case, died at age 75 on March 25.

For integration proponents, North Carolina’s move is particularly disheartening because desegregation worked so well there. Its big urban districts have been national role models for successful, integrated schools, helping to attract businesses and power local economies. The Raleigh-centered Wake County district is “one of the foundation stones of our economy here,” says Wake County Commissioner John Burns. “People want to move here for the public schools.”

Raleigh’s countywide district was the brainchild of business leaders. In 1976 they got state lawmakers to merge the mostly white county district and the increasingly black city one, creating a sprawling entity with enough resources to tackle integration head-on.

Wake divided the district into segments and allocated students within them socio-economically. They set parameters on how many students in a school received free lunch, to prevent lopsidedly rich or poor schools. A third of Wake schools became magnets, drawing suburban kids into the city. The result was a high-performing system with more than 160,000 students, ample resources, a stable tax base, and strong student performance and graduation rates.

That kind of size does have downsides. The district is so big—857 square miles, or about 40 miles across—that parents scramble over surprise school cancellations, even on sunny days, if sleet falls an hour away. And there’s a tug of war for money. The rural, eastern end of Wake County thinks the bustling western end gets too many resources. Although suburban Raleigh parents have sporadically pushed for the right to secede, the idea got nowhere until two Charlotte suburbs got a bill introduced to allow it last year.

But overall, the district has prospered. In February, the secession study committee listened in silence to a staff presentation on statewide student performance broken down by district size. The mega-districts in Raleigh and Charlotte scored best.

The Southern secession movement follows the gradual lifting of federal desegregation court orders in the 1990s and 2000s, says Erika Wilson, a University of North Carolina law professor. Federal courts began releasing school systems from oversight based on demonstrations of “best efforts’’ to integrate, paving the way for secessions that courts once would have stopped. “Southern municipal secessions threaten to serve as the proverbial nail in the coffin for students’ ability to attend racially non-segregated schools, at least in the South,” Wilson wrote in the Cornell International Law Journal in 2016.

The region that once required school segregation by law is also where desegregation worked best, in part because Southern school districts are so big. Even before Brown, Southern districts tended to follow county lines or be divided between a single city and a single county district. Northern ones follow municipal boundaries, with a district in every suburb. New Jersey, with 1.3 million students, has 590 school districts. Ohio has 1.7 million students and 618 districts. North Carolina, with 1.5 million students, has 115.

Although the Supreme Court in Brown required integration within districts, a 1974 ruling said desegregation plans could not be enforced across them, essentially giving the district-by-district segregation of the North a pass. Southern secessionists want to be organized more like their Northern counterparts. In North Carolina, in fact, breakaway rumblings have often come from transplants used to small districts. One push in Cary, a Raleigh suburb known locally as Containment Area for Relocated Yankees, was led by a newcomer from Boston. Another transplant ran for town council last year on the issue—and lost.

With court orders fading away, legislatures alone shape schools. “States have such vast authority on how schools can be organized that it turns into a question of politics,” says UNC’s Wilson. Of 30 states with laws allowing secession, six require a review of the racial or economic effects on districts left behind. 

In Alabama, where state law makes secession easy, suburban districts have been splitting off at an accelerating pace. Birmingham’s Jefferson County, which is still under a federal desegregation court order, has splintered into 12 school districts, most either poorer and black or richer and white. In February, a federal court blocked a 13th district following a first-time review as to whether a secession was racially motivated: Supporters had distributed pamphlets making it clear that they wanted whiter schools.

Then there’s Shelby County, Tenn., home of Memphis. Although city and county schools never merged there, state law required them to share tax revenue. When the legislature threatened to end the revenue-sharing deal, the city system dissolved itself in financial self-defense, putting its 93 percent minority student population into the county district. So Republican lawmakers made secession legal and easy, allowing six Memphis suburbs with a combined poverty rate lower than Beverly Hills to secede in 2014. The next year, the left-behind district closed six schools and laid off 500 teachers, according to EdBuild.

In North Carolina, the legislative move to allow secession began last year, when a Republican state representative from Charlotte’s Mecklenberg County, Bill Brawley, introduced a bill allowing two suburbs to secede and form charter districts. It passed the House, but remains stalled in the Senate. Brawley’s second bill created the secession study committee, which will issue its findings in May.

Since February, the committee’s eight Republican and two Democratic lawmakers have heard testimony on other states’ school organization and how North Carolina’s mega-districts compare with smaller ones. One expert said bus routes would be less efficient if big districts broke up. Another asked what would happen to big district warehouses for storing school lunch supplies. A lawyer discussed repercussions for employment contracts, purchasing, and lawsuits, and two scholars testified about the lack of conclusive research on the effects of district size.

Last week, the committee’s final testimony came from small school districts and charter schools that had innovative programs for minority children. The speakers included Charlotte-Mecklenburg Superintendent Clayton Wilcox, who was invited to discuss a public-private partnership program in his district and not the school system itself. It was the first time the committee had heard from anyone representing either of the districts most likely to be broken up, if secession becomes legal in North Carolina. Only four of the committee’s 13 members showed up.