Grading desegregation in public schools: Dayton gets an ‘incomplete’
Beginning with the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, American public schools confronted the challenge of dismantling racial segregation. Today – more than seventy years after Brown – schools in the Dayton area remain segregated and unequal.
Desegregation isn’t just an abstract principle. In his book, Children of the
Dream, Rucker Johnson finds that Black students who attended integrated rather than segregated schools saw greater educational attainment, higher wages, and better health, all without significant negative effects for the white students attending these same schools. Decades after learning in integrated classrooms, adults report having more racial tolerance and more diverse friendships.
Black Americans accounted for about a fifth of Dayton’s population in 1960. But discriminatory housing policies like redlining largely restricted African Americans to a limited number of neighborhoods. School zones followed these lines, meaning that Black and white students mostly attended separate schools.
In 1971, a desegregation advisory committee created by the Dayton school board recommended that the state consolidate school districts in the region. A metropolitan-wide desegregation plan would be necessary to prevent white families from avoiding integration by moving to the suburbs. The advisory committee wrote, “There will be no place to run from the changes that must be made.”
But later that same year, a different coalition won majority control of the school board and rescinded the endorsement of desegregation. In 1972, the NAACP sued, seeking a desegregation plan across the entire metropolitan region. By 1976, when the lawsuit finally resulted in court-ordered desegregation, the increasingly conservative Supreme Court had already ruled, in Milliken v. Bradley, that desegregation plans should not include multiple school districts. Court-ordered desegregation in Dayton was limited to the city itself.
Restricting the desegregation plan to city limits had consequences. Between 1970 and 2010, while the city’s Black population held relatively steady, the white population was cut in half. Overall, the city’s population fell by more than 40 percent between 1970 and 2010. Some of this was due to a regional economic decline, but much of it was also due to out-migration to the suburbs. The metropolitan region’s population declined by a much more modest six percent over the same period. Avoiding racially integrated schools was not the only motivation for people to leave Dayton for the suburbs, but it was a significant factor.
By 2002, several state and local agencies, including the local chapter of the NAACP, signed an agreement ending the desegregation order in Dayton. By that point, 73 percent of students in Dayton Public Schools were Black. U.S. District Court Judge Walter Rice, who oversaw the agreement, explained his decision: “There simply weren’t enough white children.”
In effect, the Dayton region never desegregated its schools. Today, 78 percent of Dayton public school students identify as minority, and total enrollment is less than a quarter of what it was at the district’s pre-desegregation peak. The eight largest suburbs in the region have majority-white enrollment. According to Ohio School Report Cards, each of them has higher average teacher salaries, higher test scores, and a higher graduation rate. Prior to Brown, Dayton’s schools were segregated and unequal; they remain so today.
Racial segregation and inequality aren’t just subjects for history books. They are challenges that we must continue to confront today through individual actions and collective politics.