Subverting Swann: First- and Second-Generation Segregation in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools

Abstract

For more than 40 years, communities across the United States have grappled with Brown’s mandate to provide equality of educational opportunities to Black children by ending school segregation. Despite considerable unambiguous evidence that desegregation enhances students’ long-term outcomes such as educational and occupational attainment, the situation with respect to short-term outcomes is more ambiguous and more highly contested. Using survey data from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, a North Carolina district that used mandatory busing to desegregate its schools, the author demonstrates the direct and indirect negative effects of segregation on academic achievement in ways not employed previously. The distinctive research design includes a longitudinal measure of exposure to racially isolated Black elementary education, multiple indicators of educational outcomes, measures of track placement, and a large representative sample of grade 12 students from the entire school system. By demonstrating how both direct and indirect effects of segregated education impair Blacks’ academic outcomes, and how—even in an ostensibly desegregated school system—Whites retain privileged access to greater opportunities to learn, this article increases our understanding of the role of segregated schooling in maintaining the racial gap in academic achievement. Future research in other school districts once believed to be successfully desegregated will allow us to judge whether the situation in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School district reflects a more general pattern.