White Space, Black Hood

by Sheryll Cashin

  32. The Connecticut Supreme Court did not acknowledge the state’s racially segregated landscape and certainly did not assert that law requires formal equality. Instead the Connecticut Supreme Court legitimized systemic educational inequality between rich schools and poor ones by stressing that “court’s primary focus should be on the adequacy of educational inputs . . .” See Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding, Inc. v. Rell, 327 Conn. 650, 706 (2018). Once the state showed that it had met the “minimally adequate” standard, the courts had no further role to play in the policy judgments involved in allocating resources for education; Kauffman and Mahony, “State Supreme Court Overturns Sweeping Ruling in CCJEF Education Funding Lawsuit.”

  33. Roger L. Kemp, “Chapter 6: Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (January 14, 1639),” in Documents of American Democracy: A Collection of Essential Works, ed. Roger L. Kemp (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 37.

  34. Jason Reece, Samir Gambhir, Jilian Olinger, Matthew Martin, and Mark Harris, People, Place and Opportunity: Mapping Communities of Opportunity in Connecticut (Connecticut Fair Housing Center, November 2009), https://www.ctfairhousing.org/wp-content/uploads/People-Place-and-Opportunity.pdf. The Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, which john a. powell now heads, continues to refine the methodology and tools of opportunity mapping to enable similar mapping of regions across the country. See Othering & Belonging Institute, “Opportunity Mapping Project,” https://belonging.berkeley.edu/opportunity-mapping-project, accessed February 20, 2021.

  35. Reece et al., People, Place and Opportunity, 5.

  36. “Mayor’s Office,” West Hartford, https://www.westhartfordct.gov/government-services/mayors-office, accessed October 5, 2020.

  37. Interview with Phil Tegeler, October 10, 2020, notes on file with the author.

  38. Katie Roy, “Lawmakers Are Jeopardizing School Funding Equity—Again,” CT Mirror, May 13, 2019, https://ctmirror.org/category/ct-viewpoints/lawmakers-are-jeopardizing-school-funding-equity-again.

  39. Luke Broadwater, “Maryland School Funding Legislation Calls for $1 Billion over Two Years to Start Meeting Kirwan Goals,” Baltimore Sun, March 4, 2019, https://www.baltimoresun.com/politics/bs-md-kirwan-bill-20190304-story.html.

  40. Liz Bowie and Talia Richman, “Civil Rights Groups Ask Court to Force Maryland to Spend Hundreds of Millions More on Baltimore Schools,” Baltimore Sun, March 8, 2019, https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-lawsuit-aclu-20190307-story.html.

  41. Memorandum of Grounds, Points, and Authorities in Support of Plaintiffs’ Petition for Further Relief, Bradford v. Maryland State Board of Education, https://www.aclu-md.org/sites/default/files/bradford_memoranduminsupportofpetition.pdf.

  42. “Climate Change: Creating an Integrated Framework for Improving School Climate,” Alliance for Excellent Education, August 2013, https://all4ed.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/HSClimate1.pdf.

  43. Dan Goldhaber, Lesley Lavery, and Roddy Theobald, “Uneven Playing Field? Assessing the Teacher Quality Gap Between Advantaged and Disadvantaged Students,” Educational Researcher 44, no. 5 (2015): 293, doi: 10.3102/0013189X15592622.

  44. C. Kirabo Jackson, “Student Demographics, Teacher Sorting, and Teacher Quality: Evidence from the End of School Desegregation,” Journal of Labor Economics 27, no. 2 (2009): 213.

  45. P. Iatrarola and L. Stiefel, “Intradistrict Equity of Public Education Resources and Performance,” Economics of Education Review 22, no. 1 (2003): 77, doi:10.1016/S0272–7757(01)00065–6; Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, and James Wyckoff, “Teacher Sorting and the Plight of Urban Schools: A Descriptive Analysis,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 24, no. 1 (2002): 54–55, doi:10.3102/01623737024001037; Marguerite Roza et al., “How Within-District Spending Inequities Help Some Schools to Fail,” Brookings Papers on Education Policy 7 (2004): 202, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20067269; Ross Rubenstein, “Resource Equity in the Chicago Public Schools: A School-Level Approach,” Journal of Education Finance 23, no. 4 (1998): 487, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40704039; Kenneth Shores and Simon Ejdemyr, “Pulling Back the Curtain: Intra-District School Spending Inequality and Its Correlates,” SSRN Electronic Journal (2017): 3, doi:10.2139/ssrn.3009775.

  46. John R. Logan, Elisabeta Minca, and Sinem Adar, “The Geography of Inequality: Why Separate Means Unequal in American Public Schools,” Sociology of Education 85 (2012): 287–301

  47. Schleicher, Preparing Teachers and Developing School Leaders for the 21st Century.

  48. Erica Frankenberg, Jongyeon Ee, Jennifer B. Ayscue, and Gary Orfield, “Harming Our Common Future: America’s Segregated Schools 65 Years After Brown,” Civil Rights Project, May 10, 2019, https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/harming-our-common-future-americas-segregated-schools-65-years-after-brown/Brown-65–050919v4-final.pdf.

  49. “Dismissed: America’s Most Divisive Borders,” EdBuild, https://edbuild.org/content/dismissed, accessed October 14, 2020.

  50. Nancy McArdle and Dolores Acevedo-Garcia, “Consequences of Segregation for Children’s Opportunity and Wellbeing,” paper presented at A Shared Future: Fostering Communities of Inclusion in an Era of Inequality, a national symposium hosted by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, April 2017, 8.

  51. Raegen Miller and Diana Epstein, There Still Be Dragons: Racial Disparity in School Funding Is No Myth (Center for American Progress, July 5, 2011), https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-k-12/reports/2011/07/05/9943/there-still-be-dragons.

  52. “Projections of Education Statistics to 2026 Forty-Fifth Edition,” US Department of Education, April 2018, https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2018/2018019.pdf.

  53. John A. Powell, “The Tensions Between Integration and School Reform,” Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 28 (2001): 655.

  54. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483, 493 (1954).

  55. Appellate Brief for Appellants, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 11, https://www.naacpldf.org/wp-content/uploads/Oliver-BROWN-Mrs-Richard-Lawton-Mrs-Sadie-Emmanuel-et-al-Appellants-v-BOARD-OF-E-1.pdf.

  56. Josephine Sedgwick, “25-Year-Old Textbooks and Holes in the Ceiling: Inside America’s Public Schools,” New York Times, April 16, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/reader-center/us-public-schools-conditions.html.

  57. Noliwe Rooks, Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education (New York: New Press, 2017).

  58. “Redlining Louisville: Racial Capitalism and Real Estate,” https://www.arc-gis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=a73ce5ba85ce4c3f80d365ab1ff89010, accessed February 1, 2021; Gil Corsey, “Once a Booming Strip of Black Business, Wall Street Faded from Louisville’s Memory for Failed Urban Renewal,” last updated February 27, 2020, https://www.wdrb.com/in-depth/once-a-booming-strip-of-black-business-walnut-street-faded-from-louisvilles-memory-for-failed/article_fc600e82-580f-11ea-9ea5-638cf333c542.html.

  59. Century Foundation, Louisville, Kentucky: A Reflection on School Integration (September 15, 2016), https://production-tcf.imgix.net/app/uploads/2016/09/03193859/louisville-kentucky-a-reflection-on-school-integration.pdf.

  60. Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 4.

  61. Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 551 U.S. 701 (2007).

  62. Semuels, “The City That Believed in Desegregation”; Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, “City Lines, County Lines, Color Lines: The Relationship Between School and Housing Segregation in Four Southern Metro Areas,” Teachers College Record 115 (2013): 1, 12, 14.

  63. Siegel-Hawley, “City Lines, County Lies, Color Lines,” 1, 24; see also Karl E. Taeuber, “Housing, Schools, and Incremental Segregative Effects,” Annals of American Academy of Political and Social Science 441, no. 157 (1979).

  64. Alana Semuels, “The City That Believed in Desegregation,” Atlantic, March 27, 2015, htt
ps://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/the-city-that-believed-in-desegregation/388532.

  65. Semuels, “The City That Believed in Desegregation.”

  66. “Redlining Louisville: The History of Race, Class, and Real Estate,” Redlining Louisville, Louisville/Jefferson County Information Consortium, December 14, 2017, https://www.lojic.org/redlining-louisville-news.

  67. “Redlining Louisville: Racial Capitalism and Real Estate”; Brentin Mock, “Louisville Confronts Its Redlining Past and Present,” Bloomberg CityLab, February 21, 2017, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/02/louisville-confronts-its-redlining-past-and-present/517125; “City Begins Community Conversation to Combat Redlining,” City News, February 14, 2017, https://louisvilleky.gov/news/city-begins-community-conversation-combat-redlining; “Redlining Community Dialogue,” Louisville, KY, government website, https://louisvilleky.gov/government/redevelopment-strategies/redlining-community-dialogue.

  68. “Housing Needs Assessment,” Louisville, KY, government website, https://louisvilleky.gov/government/housing-community-development/housing-needs-assessment.

  69. Savannah Eadens, “Viral Photo Shows Line of White People Between Police, Black Protesters at Thursday Rally,” Louisville Courier Journal, https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/2020/05/29/breonna-taylor-photo-white-women-between-police-black-protesters/5286416002.

  70. Semuels, “The City That Believed in Desegregation.”

  71. Gregory Acs, Rolf Pendall, Mark Treskon, and Amy Khare, The Cost of Segregation National Trends and the Case of Chicago, 1990–2010 (Urban Institute, March 2017), 18–24, https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/89201/the_cost_of_segregation_final_0.pdf.

  72. Raj Chetty et al., “The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series, October 2018, https://www.nber.org/papers/w25147.pdf.

  73. Richard H. Sander et al., Moving Toward Integration.

  74. R. A. Lenhardt, “Localities as Equality Innovators,” Stanford Journal of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties 7 (2011): 265, 269, 291; see also Olatunde C. A. Johnson, “The Local Turn; Innovation and Diffusion in Civil Rights Law,” Law & Contemporary Problems 79 (2016): 115.

  CHAPTER 7: NEIGHBORHOOD EFFECTS

  1. Lakia Barnett’s self-published books are available for purchase on Amazon and her streaming radio show, Facing Purpose, can be found online and through her public Facebook page; see http://streaminginspiration.net/?page_id=26328, accessed October 3, 2018.

  2. Justin Jouvenal et al., “D.C. Family Homeless Shelter Beset by Dysfunction, Decay,” Washington Post, July 12, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-family-homeless-shelter-beset-by-dysfunction-decay/2014/07/12/3bbb7f50-f739-11e3-a3a5–42be35962a52_story.html?noredirect=on.

  3. Eloise Pasachoff, “Special Education, Poverty, and the Limits of Private Enforcement,” Notre Dame Law Review 86 (2011): 1413–93; “A Guide to the Individualized Education Program,” US Department of Education, https://www2.ed.gov/parents/needs/speced/iepguide/index.html, accessed August 12, 2019.

  4. Alison Bell, Barbara Sard, and Becky Koepnick, “Prohibiting Discrimination Against Renters Using Housing Vouchers Improves Results,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, December 10, 2018, https://www.cbpp.org/research/housing/prohibiting-discrimination-against-renters-using-housing-vouchers-improves-results.

  5. “Garfield Elementary School,” District of Columbia Public Schools, http://profiles.dcps.dc.gov/scorecard/Garfield+Elementary+School.

  6. Peter Bergam et al., “Creating Moves to Opportunity: Experimental Evidence on Barriers to Neighborhood Choice,” Harvard University (2020), https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/lkatz/files/cmto_paper.pdf.

  7. See generally Elizabeth Julian, “Making the Case for Housing Mobility: The CMTO Study in Seattle,” Poverty & Race 28, no. 2 (2019): 10, https://prrac.org/newsletters/may-aug2019.pdf.

  8. “The Opportunity Atlas,” Opportunity Insights, https://www.opportunityatlas.org, accessed November 10, 2018. See also Emily Bardger and Quoctrung Bui, “Detailed Maps Show How Neighborhoods Shape Children for Life,” New York Times, October 1, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/upshot/maps-neighborhoods-shape-child-poverty.html.

  9. Maury Elementary School,” GreatSchools, https://www.greatschools.org/washington-dc/washington/28-Maury-Elementary-School.

  10. “Maury Elementary School,” District of Columbia Public Schools, http://profiles.dcps.dc.gov/scorecard/Maury+Elementary+School.

  11. John R. Logan and Brian J. Stults, “The Persistence of Segregation in the Metropolis: New Findings from the 2010 Census,” US2010 Project (2011).

  12. Patrick Sharkey, “Neighborhoods and the Black-White Mobility Gap,” Economic Mobility Project, Pew Charitable Trust (2009).

  13. Robert J. Sampson, “Durable Effects of Concentrated Disadvantage on Verbal Ability Among African American Children,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 3 (2008): 845–52; Geoffrey T. Wodtke, “Neighborhood Effects in Temporal Perspective: The Impact of Long-Term Exposure to Concentrated Disadvantage on High School Graduation,” American Sociological Review 76 (2011): 713.

  14. Carolyn E. Cutrona, Gail Wallace, and Kristen A. Wesner, “Neighborhood Characteristics and Depression: An Examination of Stress Processes,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 15, no. 4 (2006): 188–92.

  15. Gary W. Evans and Pilyoung Kim, “Childhood Poverty, Chronic Stress, Self-Regulation and Coping,” Child Development Perspectives 7, no. 1 (2013): 43–48.

  16. Douglas S. Massey, “Why Death Haunts Black Lives,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2017). See also Sampson, Great American City.

  17. Liam Downey and Brian Hawkins, “Race, Income, and Environmental Inequality in the United States,” Sociological Perspectives 51, no. 4 (2008); Robert J. Sampson and Alix S. Winter, “The Racial Ecology of Lead Poisoning: Toxic Inequality in Chicago Neighborhoods: 1995–2013,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 13, no. 2 (2016); Matthew Desmond and Monica C. Bell, “Housing, Poverty, and the Law,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 11 (2015).

  18. Desmond and Bell, “Housing, Poverty, and the Law,” 22; Liam Downey, “Environmental Racial Inequality in Detroit,” Social Forces 85, no. 2 (2006); Paul Mohai and Robin Saha, “Racial Inequality in the Distribution of Hazardous Waste: A National-Level Reassessment,” Social Problems 54, no. 3 (2007); Jeremy Pais, Kyle Crowder, and Liam Downey, “Unequal Trajectories: Racial and Class Differences in Residential Exposure to Industrial Hazard,” Social Forces 92, no. 3 (2014).

  19. Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich, “How Decades of Racist Housing Policy Left Neighborhoods Sweltering,” New York Times, August 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/24/climate/racism-redlining-cities-global-warming.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage; Jeremy S. Hoffman, Vivek Shandas, and Nicholas Pendleton, “The Effects of Historical Housing Policies on Resident Exposure to Intra-Urban Heat: A Study of 108 US Urban Areas,” Climate (2020): 6, https://www.mdpi.com/2225–1154/8/1/12/htm.

  20. Massey, “Why Death Haunts Black Lives,” 1–2. See also Bruce McEwen and Elizabeth Norton Lasley, The End of Stress as We Know It (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2002); Julia Burdick-Will et al., “Converging Evidence for Neighborhood Effects on Children’s Test Scores: An Experimental, Quasi-Experimental, and Observational Comparison,” paper prepared for the Brookings Institution, Project on Social Inequality and Educational Disadvantage, 2010; Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane, Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011); Patrick S. Sharkey and Robert J. Sampson, “Violence, Cognition, and Neighborhood Inequality in America,” in Social Neuroscience: Brain, Mind, and Society, ed. Russel K. Schutt, Larry J. Seidman, and Matcheri S. Keshavan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Belinda L. Needham et al., “Neighborhood Characteristics and Leukocyte Telomere Length:
The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis,” Health Place 28 (2014); Mijung Park et al., “Where You Live May Make You Old: The Association Between Perceived Poor Neighborhood Quality and Leukocyte Telomere Length,” Plos One 10, no. 6 (2015); Arline T. Geronimus et al., “Race/Ethnicity, Poverty, Urban Stressors and Telomere Length in a Detroit Community-Based Sample,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 56, no. 2 (2015).

  21. Olga Khazan, “Being Black in America Can Be Hazardous to Your Health,” Atlantic, July/August 2018, 77–86.

  22. Kelly M. Bower et al., “The Intersection of Neighborhood Racial Segregation, Poverty, and Urbanicity and Its Impact on Food Store Availability in the United States,” Preventative Medicine 58 (2014): 2, 4.

  23. Christopher Muller, Robert J. Sampson, and Alix S. Winter, “Environmental Inequality: The Social Causes and Consequences of Lead Exposure,” Annual Review of Sociology 44 (2018).

  24. Virginia Gordan, “Lawsuit: State’s Emergency Manager Law Discriminates Against Black Communities,” NPR: Michigan Radio, December 6, 2017, https://www.michiganradio.org/post/lawsuit-states-emergency-manager-law-discriminates-against-black-communities.

  25. Paul Egan, “Flint Water Mystery: How Was the Decision Made?” Detroit Free Press, November 21, 2015, https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2015/11/21/snyders-top-aide-talked-flint-water-supply-alternatives/76037130.

  26. Melissa Denchak, “Flint Water Crisis: Everything You Need to Know,” National Resources Defense Council, November 8, 2018, https://www.nrdc.org/stories/flint-water-crisis-everything-you-need-know; Merit Kennedy, “Lead-Laced Water in Flint: A Step-by-Step Look at the Makings of a Crisis,” The Two Way, NPR, April 20, 2016, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/04/20/465545378/lead-laced-water-in-flint-a-step-by-step-look-at-the-makings-of-a-crisis.

  27. Mona Hanna-Attisha, “Elevated Blood Lead Levels in Children Associated with the Flint Drinking Water Crisis: A Spatial Analysis of Risk and Public Health Response,” American Journal of Public Health 106, no. 2 (2016): 283–86; “Flint Water Advisory Task Force: Final Report,” Office of Governor Rick Snyder, State of Michigan (March 2016), 6; Josh Sanburn, “Flint Water Crisis May Cost the City $400 Million in Long-Term Social Costs,” Time, August 8, 2016, http://time.com/4441471/flint-water-lead-poisoning-costs.