Browsing by Subject "Public education"

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated schools were inherently unequal and detrimental to students’ educational experiences. Just three decades later, school boards and communities across the United States ended desegregation programs and returned to largely segregated schools based on housing patterns, claiming that these arrangements would be more equitable than desegregation programs. How and why did desegregation disappear from the definition of educational equity? Contrary to extant scholarship in public policy and educational history, the end of desegregation was neither a backlash nor an inevitability. Rather, it was a policy choice embraced by communities across the political spectrum and across racial lines. I explore that choice and its consequences by looking at how resegregation reshaped a self-professed progressive Sunbelt city: Austin, Texas. In the 1980s, Austinites gradually altered their definition of educational equity to make segregated schools compliant with new ideas of the purpose of public education. My work highlights how a combination of the Reagan administration’s dismantling of busing and local-level discussions of compromise created a new educational reality centered on the belief that separate schools could be equitable, if not equal. By examining Austin’s tri-ethnic Black, Mexican American, and white perspectives, I show that the end of school desegregation came alongside a change in Black Austinites’ willingness to bear the burden of desegregation, erasure in Mexican American experiences, and division among white Austinites over the benefits of desegregation. My dissertation makes three key interventions. Over the past fifteen years, historians have demonstrated the failed promise of desegregation as a panacea to racism and structural inequalities. Most historical studies end at the implementation of desegregation and take the move away from busing for granted. I build upon these studies to present a novel periodization of educational desegregation history moving from the 1950s and 1960s into the 1980s. Second, I reconsider the concept of “educational equity” and its fundamental claims. While the Brown v. Board of Education decision emphasized segregation as inherently detrimental to students, contemporary educational policy discussions generally do not consider integration as a component of educational equity. I demonstrate the fundamental emptiness of the idea of “educational equity” by tracing its origins to anti-busing movements and color-blind racism. Finally, I argue that the end of busing came as part of the Nixon and Reagan administration’s efforts to recast the purpose of education, not just from individual community decisions. Methodologically, I construct my arguments through historical practices of archival examinations documenting change over time, while incorporating scholarship from public policy and legal scholars as both primary and secondary sources. My project brings history and public policy together in assessing the steps that a progressive city took not to implement desegregation, but to reverse it.