How One Community Chose Integration and a Select Few Threaten to Deny It

Across the country this year, Americans will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Yet a silent struggle is taking place over Brown’s very meaning–one that is likely to define the case’s legacy and shape the way in which we will educate our children into the future. A series of lawsuits, many engineered by conservative organizations, challenge the validity of active measures to promote integration, even when local school boards take those measures voluntarily. One of those lawsuits targets a program in Lynn, Massachusetts–an otherwise unremarkable sleepy working-class hamlet just north of Boston. I am one of the attorneys working to defend Lynn’s school system.

The Local Story: How Lynn Came to be Lynn

Lynn is home to a small school district educating a racially and ethnically diverse student population of approximately 15,500. In the 2001—02 school year, 58 percent of its overall student body was nonwhite, with sizable populations of Hispanic/Latino (29%), black (15%), Asian (14%), and Native American (less than 1%) children. One-third of its students speak a primary language at home other than English, and almost two-thirds qualify for free or reduced lunch programs.

As in many small American cities, the correlation between race and poverty is high. Nonwhite students in Lynn are almost twice as likely as white students to be enrolled in free or reduced lunch programs. Moreover, most of Lynn’s nonwhite families live in segregated residential neighborhoods that are, on the whole, significantly less affluent than their white counterparts. In the absence of a constitutional obligation to maintain desegregated schools, therefore, Lynn’s demographic profile is the textbook setting for the kind of racially segregated schools that can be found with increasing frequency throughout the nation.

Yet, just the opposite is true; Lynn bucks the trend in a big way. For almost fifteen years, its democratically elected school board has voluntarily maintained racially integrative student assignment policies despite being under no legal obligation to do so. Although by no means perfectly integrated, Lynn has done an extraordinary job of encouraging integration and capitalizing on the levels of diversity that it manages to achieve in each of its schools. With little opposition or fanfare, these policies have exposed generations of children to diverse educational settings they otherwise would have never experienced.

What is more, during that same fifteen years, the Lynn school system has also managed to provide resources more equitably to all of its facilities regardless of their locations or racial compositions. It has lowered suspension and absenteeism rates for all students, reduced incidents of interracial conflict and violence, raised academic achievement for all students, and stemmed–in fact, reversed–a troubling historical pattern of white flight.

These successes make it hard to believe that in the late 1970s, racial imbalance and unrest plagued Lynn’s public schools. Although no court had ever found that the school district maintained segregated schools by law, for many years Lynn practiced the kind of subtle discrimination that was rampant throughout the North and West. As the nonwhite student population in the district grew each year, Lynn found ways to shuttle them to the same racially isolated schools that also happened to be the ones burdened by crowded classrooms and limited resources.

The situation became so severe that in 1977 the Massachusetts Board of Education intervened. In a series of official warnings it repeatedly condemned the Lynn Public School System for exacerbating racial isolation by allowing white students to transfer out of schools with high minority populations and by placing all of its (nonwhite) bilingual programs in schools that were already racially identifiable. To relieve the racial imbalance, the board recommended that Lynn officials encourage and facilitate voluntary, integrative transfers for what was then its most isolated school.

The district initially ignored the board’s concerns. While it did vote to adopt a voluntary transfer policy for its most isolated school, the district did just about anything it could to undermine that policy. Over the next several years, it closed seven schools, resulting in reassignments that intensified existing racial patterns. The district also permitted an increase in the class sizes of minority-isolated schools beyond the district-wide average, making those schools less effective for their mostly nonwhite students and also less attractive to the white students who might transfer in. And in spite of its official policies, it continued to allow white students to make segregative transfers. Indeed, in one year, the district approved the transfers of 107 out-of-neighborhood white students to a high school in the white neighborhood, increasing the school’s white enrollment to 93 percent; more than half of these newly transferred students resided in an attendance zone that would have fed them into a school located in the minority neighborhood.

By the mid-1980s, almost all of the district’s small but slowly expanding minority population could be found concentrated in four schools, while the rest remained virtually all-white. White teachers regularly sought transfers to white schools when opportunities presented themselves, leaving nonwhite schools to suffer from faculty inattention and low attendance rates, achievement scores, and morale. Over the years, racial tension, polarization, and conflict in the system grew. Racial name-calling, fights, and altercations between white and minority students and rampant self-segregation at lunch and recess characterized the atmosphere in both elementary and secondary schools. The system gained a reputation for its bad race relations and poor school conditions, and white families who could afford sending their children elsewhere did so.

The Plan: Achieving a Racial Balance Among Schools

A frustrated Massachusetts Board of Education again raised concerns with Lynn, this time encouraging the school district to defeat racial isolation and imbalance by establishing a long-term, comprehensive plan rather than the piecemeal approach taken over the years. In September 1989, after several more failed attempts, the Lynn school board finally devised a student assignment plan that the commonwealth approved. Unlike its less effective predecessors, which had been designed primarily by school officials behind closed doors, the 1989 plan was shaped by community and parental input gathered from a number of public hearings, a special advisory committee, and representatives from minority organizations.

The logic behind Lynn’s new plan was rather simple. The district continued to afford all students with the unconditional right to attend their neighborhood schools. In addition, however, it sought to reduce racial isolation and achieve greater racial balance system-wide by encouraging parents and children to make voluntary, integrative transfers to schools throughout the district. The school board gave its assurances that there would be space for such transfers by agreeing to ambitious new school renovations and more equitable resource distribution.

To encourage these transfers, the district adopted a two-step program. First, it made a renewed effort to ensure that all schools in the system started from a baseline of equality in curricula, educational resources, teachers, and facilities. This guaranteed that all students–regardless of where they were enrolled in the district–would have access to the same high-quality education. Second, the district helped each school develop attractive, distinct themes and programs. The purpose here was to provide incentives for students and parents to seek transfers to other schools in the district that might offer programs matching their interests.

In order to ensure that the plan would produce integrative results in the end, the district permitted transfers that would either reduce racial isolation in the sending school or increase racial balance in the receiving school. Neutral transfers–transfers that would neither improve nor adversely impact the level of integration in the schools within a broad range of the district-wide average–were also permitted. Segregative transfers were denied. The plan also underwent periodic review and revision. A 1999 amendment, for instance, added additional flexibility, granting wider latitude for racial identification to bi- and multi-racial students, instituting an appeals process for denials of transfer, and making allowances for cases of extreme hardship (such as transportation or daycare burdens on parents).

Having established a mechanism to achieve racially diverse settings, Lynn school authorities did not want to squander the newfound opportunity for meaningful, positive interracial interactions among students. Thus they complemented the new assignment plan with significant curricular innovations that would make Lynn’s goal of integration more than just an abstraction. With the district’s help, schools developed activities to encourage inter-group association and cooperation and to challenge racial stereotypes and prejudice. The district also instituted a system of training for its teachers and administrators to work with diverse student populations, and it sponsored schoolwide activities and assemblies that celebrated rather than suppressed racial and ethnic differences. In short, the new policies in Lynn were a sincere effort to change the course of its educational mission and racially integrate–not just desegregate–its public schools.

The policies worked. Since the implementation of the plan, tens of thousands of students–well over one-third of the total student population in Lynn each year–have used the assignment plan to make voluntary transfers. Of these transfers, about two-thirds are integrative transfers that, altogether, significantly alter the composition of each school within the district.

Surveys conducted in the community and among students convey almost uniformly positive feedback. The overwhelming majority of Lynn residents say that integrated schools are important to them, and high school students across all races report an increased comfort working and interacting in interracial environments. Students say classroom discussions and the general racial atmosphere help them better understand and appreciate points of view different from their own. Lynn students also place a higher value on interracial friendships and demonstrate a greater appreciation for others of different backgrounds. Moreover, educational experts and social and developmental psychologists, observing elementary school classes in the district, have found that the integrated environments help students challenge stereotypes and develop positive racial attitudes at a young age, when prejudices typically form. In other words, the Lynn public schools have shown that integration does matter.

The Big Picture: Legal Retrenchment and the Threat to Communities Like Lynn

Despite this year’s celebrations of Brown and success stories like Lynn, efforts to voluntarily integrate schools are now threatened. In recent years, emboldened by the recent decisions of conservative judges limiting the scope of desegregation, a handful of disgruntled parents–predominantly white and often bankrolled by strategic, conservative legal foundations–have begun suing school systems. Unlike the plaintiffs in school desegregation cases of the decades before, these new plaintiffs claim not that school authorities have done too little to integrate schools, but rather that they’ve done too much. The argument is ingeniously simple: Brown, in their view, did not outlaw racially isolated conditions or require schools to provide truly equal, integrated education; rather, it laid out the principle of strict colorblindness–the idea that race must never be taken into account, even to avoid the racial inequality that Brown itself outlawed.

These new legal challenges, if successful, would effectively render Brown void of any real meaning by denying school districts the ability to counter segregative trends in our public schools. And such segregation abounds. A number of researchers have documented the steady unraveling of school desegregation over the past several decades. They show not only that desegregation has slowed to a halt, but that American public schools have been resegregating in recent years. Today three out of every four black and Latino students attend schools in which they constitute a majority. A remarkable 37 percent of them attend intensely segregated schools, where students of color comprise between 90 and 100 percent of the student population. If anything, the number of nonwhite children educated in these kinds of racially and ethnically isolated conditions has grown over the past decade.

The problem, however, is not simply one of racial and ethnic isolation: race and poverty remain inextricably linked in America. Nine out of ten intensely segregated minority schools are also schools with a majority of students on free or reduced lunch programs. Compared to their white counterparts, these schools are fourteen times more likely to be schools with concentrated poverty.

Concentrated poverty, in turn, has powerful effects on educational opportunities. Students in high-poverty schools are much less likely to have gone to preschool and more likely to come from households headed by a single parent–often a parent who must work more than one job to make ends meet. These students are more likely to live in segregated neighborhoods plagued by high levels of criminal activity and serious environmental and safety threats. Their communities have little or no access to critical services such as adequate and affordable health care, public transportation, fair housing and economic development opportunities, and sustainable employment beyond mere subsistence.

It is no wonder that predominantly minority, predominantly poor schools lag far behind others in the educational resources available to them and in the performance of students who attend them.

Resisting the Challenge: Lynn’s Legal Struggle

In August 1999, five Lynn parents, represented by a Boston-based conservative litigation nonprofit, Citizens for the Preservation of Constitutional Rights, sued the school district, alleging that its actions violated both the state and federal constitutions. The plaintiffs claimed that the district’s integration plan was barred by the federal Equal Protection Clause–the same provision on which the Supreme Court relied a half-century before in Brown to advance its vision of racial integration and harmony.

The litigation in Lynn dragged on for years. Elsewhere, meanwhile, similar groups of parents brought suits against school districts operating similarly designed student assignment policies in Seattle, Washington, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Louisville, Kentucky. Each hoped to build upon judgments against voluntary integration policies in Arlington, Virginia, in Montgomery County, Maryland, and in Boston. The legal developments in Lynn, therefore, are part of a systemic attack by litigators on a quest to redefine Brown. With the era of court-ordered desegregation in its waning days, opponents of integration have turned their attention to challenging even the most modest, voluntary efforts that school boards might take in seeking to counter the powerful effects of de facto racial segregation.

In June 2003, after a three-week trial held six months earlier, a federal district judge issued a carefully reasoned, 153-page opinion in Lynn’s case. The court upheld the assignment plan. “The message it conveys to the students,” wrote Judge Nancy Gertner, “is that our society is heterogeneous, that racial harmony matters–a message that cannot be conveyed meaningfully in segregated schools.” She went on to acknowledge what the data on the Lynn program had demonstrated–that their student assignment plan “played an important part in creating a thriving, diverse, and integrated urban school system, successful on all fronts and by all measures.”

For now, the school board and many community members in Lynn are breathing a sigh of relief. The respite will be brief, however, for the plaintiffs have appealed the decision to the federal appellate court, where the case will be heard later this year. And beyond that, they have their eyes set on the Supreme Court. Supporters of the program, however, find hope in the toughest challenge that faces the plaintiffs’ formalistic arguments: whatever opponents might claim, a growing body of social science literature on the real-life examples of places like Lynn documents the numerous benefits of integrated education. Many observers believe that such practical realities influenced the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold affirmative action in law school admissions in 2003, recognizing, in the words of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, that “it remains the current reality that minority students encounter markedly inadequate and unequal educational opportunities.” Regardless of the outcome of the Lynn case, it will not be the end of the attack on voluntary desegregation plans. Late last year, another challenge was filed. The target this time? The school district in Berkeley, California–the heart of progressive America, and the home of the oldest voluntary integration policy in the country.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s only and not that of LDF or of its clients.