Memphis public schools have long suffered under the image of being an underperforming education system, with the state having asserted control of some of the district's underperforming schools during the 2010s. In the most recent state proficiency tests released in February, the results indicated only 11% of students are on track to mastering skills appropriate for their grade level.
Beyond those numbers lies a story about how the intersection of wealth, government policy, and the ability to own property have led to systemic inequality that persists to this very day in almost every major metropolitan city in the United States. Memphis is representative of how decades of inequality can create a segregation of public schools that perpetuates itself beyond Brown v. Board of Education and justifies itself through a selfishness that American society tolerates.
Memphis-Shelby County Schools are in the process of a “Re-Imagining 901” plan, meant as a series of reforms that include better teacher-student ratios, raising teacher pay, increasing the number of K-8 grade schools, and more support for bilingual education. The Memphis area public school district is the 23rd largest in the country, with a minority student population of 91%, most of which are Black. By the district’s own measure, 84% of the students are deemed to be economically disadvantaged, with almost 40% of Memphis’ children living in poverty. In 2020, the district identified almost 2,000 students who were homeless. The level of poverty is such within the city that entire swaths are considered to be “food deserts,” where lack of transportation and the distance between neighborhoods to supermarkets has impacted child nutrition.
But there’s another side to these numbers: a side with lawsuits, a state legislature enabling school secessions, enormous racial and economic disparities between different localities in the same city, and a lot of historical baggage that cuts deep at one of the systemic problems of inequality for the nation as a whole. The Memphis area has operated under a segregated school system for decades … and continues to do so in the present day. This issue exists because it’s tolerated by many in the public through rationalizations with terms like property values and community obligations.
As we gear up for a midterm election where there will be lots of bickering over education policy as it applies to debates over critical race theory, school library censorship, and the treatment of transgender kids, the disparities in Memphis, which are true for many school districts all over the country, speaks to how we as a country approach education issues. Because if a community can’t own up to the racial and economic problems self-evident in their education system, how can we expect them to be honest about teaching a history class? And if people want to look at some of the root causes of inequality in our culture, well … we do it to our own children.
public education as a government policy
One of the most significant figures in the creation of the American public school system was Horace Mann, a 19th-century advocate of every child receiving a basic education funded by local taxes. Mann believed public education was the basis of good citizenship. This idea, which is still at the core of arguments over social safety-net policies in the present day, is that it’s much better for a society overall, and in the long-run cheaper, to spend taxpayer dollars educating children as they grow than housing them later in prisons as ignorant adult criminals.
Moreover, at one of the most fundamental levels of a society, a public school in many ways defines a community. The act of creating a school encompasses people within a chosen area coming together to pool their resources, construct a building, hire teachers, and choose the information to be taught. We can see it in the arguments over which books get to be in a school’s library. We can see it in the politics of teaching history. And one of the big ways those values have been evident, for as long as there have been public schools, is in choosing who is included—or excluded—from going to that school.
As pointed out by Rebekah Barber and Billy Corriher in an article for Facing South, one of the focuses of reconstruction policies after the Civil War was creating public school systems in southern states. In response to the Reconstruction Acts passed by Congress, changes to southern state constitutions required public funding of education for Americans of all races. Just as Mann advocated for a public education system leading to a better society, the hope among Reconstruction advocates was that these new education reforms being embedded into southern governments would lead to “a new egalitarian social order.”
However, the new egalitarian social order didn’t come to pass.
As Reconstruction was rescinded and the Jim Crow era began, policies of “separate but equal” were put in place with Reconstruction policies, like public education, altered to accommodate systemic racism at various levels throughout society. (The post-Civil War constitutions of South Carolina and Louisiana were specifically changed to outlaw racial segregation in the public schools that were established, but were amended after Reconstruction to allow it.)
From there, an ugly history of inequality and oppression moved forward across schools, lunch counters, and all forms of public accommodations, with the struggle to change it taking the better part of another century to even start correcting.
But therein lies the rub. When people think of segregation, it’s usually with a mental picture where ignorance and intolerance is endemic to rednecks and hicks in pickup trucks with Confederate battle flags longing for “whites only” water fountains. Historically, the sad reality is the blue areas of the country have just as much of a problem: Some of the most segregated cities in the country have names like Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Trenton.
While people in places north of the Mason-Dixon line weren’t as explicit in their intent as Southerners with Jim Crow, the same tactics of appeals to ignorance and selfishness were used to divide and differentiate neighborhoods. Instead of proudly claiming segregation was in defense of Southern culture and traditions, structural racism in housing and schools became a fact because of property values.
According to a 2017 analysis by The Washington Post, less than half of the school districts in this country could be considered integrated. If one wants to look at a big reason why the problem of school segregation persists into the 21st century, it can be summed up in two words: real estate.
School segregation, discriminatory housing policies, and the inequality of public schools
In his 2017 book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein detailed how policies in the New Deal-era Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) set the stage for nationwide patterns of segregation in major cities that persist to the present day. Both the FHA and HOLC were created in response to the high number of mortgage defaults during the Great Depression. The FHA would guarantee mortgages in order to secure loans for home borrowers, and the HOLC would help Americans refinance mortgages in default to prevent foreclosure. However, both entities had policies of “redlining” which restricted loans in Black neighborhoods, near Black neighborhoods, or for the use of Black folks to buy outside Black neighborhoods.
The Underwriting Manual of the FHA specifically states “incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to live in the same communities.” It also recommends that highways should be used to separate communities by race (the I-20 in Atlanta, Georgia—the east-west corridor that connects with I-75 and I-85 in Atlanta’s center—was specifically intended to be “the boundary between the white and Negro communities”). The HOLC created maps that graded neighborhoods based on risk, wherein minorities were considered high-risk for mortgage lenders under the justification that Black homeownership would decrease property values. Scholars who’ve gone through the notes of those who created the maps found descriptions where minorities are likened to a contagion, where walls and building structures are said to “prevent their spread” into white areas.
It’s from these decisions that a cascade of current-day problems originate, including school segregation and inequality. Differences in the wealth gap between Blacks and whites can be explained by federal housing policy, since a big part of the average American’s wealth is tied to the equity they hold in property. Property that may have been bought by grandparents, passed through family, or could be sold in order to finance other opportunities remained out of reach to segments of society. An analysis of 2019 census data by Pew Research Center found that 58% of households headed by Black adults rent their homes, as well as 52% of Hispanic/Latino-led households, compared to just 27.9% of non-Hispanic whites who rent. A study released last October by Zillow found that Black people in Memphis paid on average 8% more in rent than whites.
By depriving Black people and other minorities of the opportunity to build wealth through property, the federal government knee-capped entire generations from upward mobility, and the ability to integrate into other areas. In the 21st century, there have been studies that have found African Americans and Latinos need higher incomes than whites to live in certain neighborhoods and pay higher interest rates for mortgages than whites with similar incomes. An article by Vanessa Gregory in The New York Times detailed how the recent boom in housing prices left behind Black neighborhoods and Black homeowners.
[Paula] Campbell’s house, for example, is 4,000 square feet, with curved interior doorways and 12-foot ceilings. … They paid about $300,000 in cash, drawing in part on the retirement savings she earned during her 25 years working as a lieutenant for the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office. But it’s assessed at only $150,000.
Campbell said that if you took her house “and dumped it in Germantown or Cordova or Central Gardens,” which are predominantly white neighborhoods and suburbs, it would be worth twice as much. ... Owner-occupied homes in predominantly African American neighborhoods are worth, on average, half as much as those in neighborhoods with no Black residents, according to a 2018 Brookings Institution and Gallup report that examined metropolitan areas. From 1980 to 2015, homes in white neighborhoods appreciated at twice the rate of those in communities of color, according to another recent study.
By redlining neighborhoods and instituting policies that confined minorities to certain areas, it created conditions that set up schools that were doomed for failure. Since public schools are funded by property taxes, how exactly does one get proper funding out of neighborhoods where banks and housing authorities have written off the property as high-risk and devalued it? And since the performance of the schools in an area is usually a factor in a home buyer’s search and tied into a community’s property values, it becomes a feedback loop where underfunded schools in depressed areas have poor results feeding the image of the neighborhood being bad and decreasing the potential tax base of people who want to live and invest there. And, in the past decade, these divisions of class and race have deepened in many areas.
what happens when an unspoken segregation is tolerated by a community
For most of my childhood, I grew up in a small town just outside of Memphis, Tennessee. What I recall most about that time is the level of dysfunction and waste the artificial divisions created. The city of Memphis is majority Black, with 64% of the population being Black, but the small towns and rural areas of Shelby County, which surround Memphis, are predominantly white, and have much lower levels of poverty and higher standards of living. This is accentuated by separate city and county governments, where the city government is represented by African Americans at multiple levels usually in an antagonistic relationship with a historically more conservative (and whiter) county government.
Diverse Poverty Rates in Memphis, Shelby County, Tennessee and the United States
2020 Povery Rate |
Overall |
Under
Age 18
|
Adult
(18-59)
|
Senior
(60+)
|
Non-Hispanic
White
|
Black
|
Latino |
Asian |
United States |
12.8% |
17.5% |
12.2% |
9.7% |
9.3% |
22.1% |
18.3% |
10.6% |
Tennessee |
14.6% |
20.8% |
13.9% |
10.1% |
11.6% |
24.3% |
24.5% |
10.1% |
Shelby County, TN
|
19.0% |
29.9% |
16.5% |
11.9% |
7.8% |
26.2% |
25.0% |
10.0% |
Memphis City, TN |
24.6% |
39.6% |
21.1% |
15.3% |
11.3% |
29.5% |
29.3% |
17.1% |
Memphis,
TN-MS-Ar Metro Area
|
17.3% |
27.2% |
15.2% |
10.8% |
8.1% |
25.3% |
24.5% |
9.3% |
(Source: Dr. Elena Delavega of the School of Social Work at the University of Memphis, and Dr. Gregory M. Blumenthal of GMBS Consulting)
Until 2013, the public schools were divided into two separate school systems. The Memphis City Schools served about 100,000 children within the city, which were in communities that were 85% Black with a median family income of $32,000 per year. Well into the 2000s, proper air conditioning in schools remained a problem to the point it was not unheard of for classes to go half-days because it was too hot for children to safely attend a class under those conditions.
The Shelby County School system, however, encompassing about 50,000 students, was largely in middle-class communities, and upper-middle-class suburbs and towns, where the median family income was $92,000 per year, but only 38% Black. Even within the Shelby County School system, it was possible for enormous racial disparities between schools. Two schools, separated by 10 miles, could be 82% white and 94% Black. The racial and socio-economic divisions in the area had been driven, in part, by school desegregation and white flight from the urban center. According to an analysis by University of Memphis law professor Daniel Kiel, integration plans and court-ordered busing during the 1970s led to 40,000 of the city’s 71,000 white students abandoning the system in four years, fleeing to the suburbs.
In 2010 and 2011, the school board, city council, and voters within the city of Memphis attempted to force a merger of both school systems. This move was driven by city officials who were concerned about the school district’s funding, and moves by the state government that would potentially create a system where county taxes would pay only for county schools, and city taxes pay only for city schools. Given the economic disparity between the city and county, as well as the racial disparity, it would create a budget and equality gap for the city schools, estimated to have needed a 15-25% increase in property taxes within the city to close. Though the situation would ultimately involve multiple lawsuits and much consternation, the merger ultimately occurred.
But it didn’t end there. In 2013, the intervention of the Tennessee state legislature, pushed by representatives from Shelby County, led to a law that allowed municipalities with at least 1,500 students to pull out and create their own school systems without the approval of the district it leaves behind. Six suburban towns within Shelby County seceded from the school district, being indicative of a trend where 128 communities have attempted to break off to form smaller school districts. Over 70 areas around the nation, many affluent and white, have seceded from larger school districts since 2000.
The result in the Memphis area caused what remained of the Shelby County school district to suffer budget cuts, shuttering almost two-dozen schools, and layoffs of hundreds of teachers. Given the demographics of the tax base in the six breakaway school districts, they were able to provide “more money per pupil than the Memphis-serving Shelby County,” while having an average student poverty rate of just 11% between them.
Shelby County Demographic Data for 2017
|
Student-age population |
Student-age poverty Rate |
Percent nonwhite |
median property value |
Shelby County |
133,350 |
31% |
93% |
$104,900 |
arlington |
3,921 |
6% |
25% |
$216,400 |
bartlett |
10,720 |
12% |
38% |
$172,300 |
collierville |
9,991 |
10% |
37% |
$286,700 |
Germantown |
7,055 |
6% |
26% |
$302,800 |
Lakeland |
1,639 |
9% |
25% |
$259,600 |
millington |
2,869 |
22% |
56% |
$113,300 |
(Source: EdBuild)
The justifications for creating these suburban districts use familiar phrases to anyone that’s followed politics over the past few decades. Politicians claim that matters such as schools are better suited to “local control,” even when the local population is a continuing shrinking number that seems to encompass only certain types of people. But the bigger picture is that Memphis is not one community. It is, in the words of someone who has studied the history of the city, “a series of smaller communities that are often looking out for their own best interests.”
Looking for solutions
That division speaks to a waste of time, effort, and children’s futures occurring in most American cities. Now the questions that come to mind: “How do we fix this?” “How do we create communities that are communities?” “How does a society unwind the problem of housing and schools in a world where people live in Homeowners Associations that forbid certain colors of mailboxes because of the threat to property values?”
Pres. Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society-era Congress recognized the issues with housing inequality, passing the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and forbidding housing discrimination against protected classes. However, the act had several limitations, including putting the burden of enforcement on victims. Also, for the better part of almost five decades, both Republican and Democratic administrations refused to use the act as a nudge to push localities toward knocking down barriers to integration. Given the history of the U.S. government in perpetuating discriminatory behavior in housing, the Fair Housing Act explicitly calls on the U.S. government in “all executive departments and agencies” to affirmatively further fair housing in its policies and funding. As outlined by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, there has historically been a reluctance by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and various administrations to set performance standards for cities and towns that are federal grant recipients.
In 2015, Pres. Barack Obama issued the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) Rule, which required local governments to create goals toward integration of housing, or they would risk losing federal housing dollars. During the 2020 campaign, Donald Trump rescinded the rule, claiming he was protecting the “suburban lifestyle dream” from crime and the loss of property values. In June of last year, the Biden administration reinstated the rule. It’s unlikely that just that rule change will solve decades, let alone centuries, of discrimination. But it was and is a step in the right direction, and becomes extremely important when thinking of housing, education, and poverty as a nexus of future mobility. A 2015 study by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence F. Katz indicated that when children were moved from a high-poverty neighborhood to a low-poverty neighborhood before the age of 13, it raised their incomes as adults by 31%, improved the chance of becoming a college student, and reduced teen pregnancy.
The choices get trickier when dealing directly with school segregation. In fact, if one looks online for proposals to deal with present-day segregation, such as the Strength in Diversity Act, the possible solutions are either ambiguous or familiar options. The act would basically provide planning grants to research the issue and implement special programs or transportation for students, like busing. The option of desegregation through busing has been extremely controversial in the past, but there have been recent examples of its use.
Another option would be rezoning. When one looks at school zoning with school districts that are segregated, it’s basically the equivalent of gerrymandering. In the same way congressional districts are made to be white and Republican or minority-majority and more Democratic friendly, school districts are divided using the same process. So integration would entail undoing the gerrymander.
None of this would be easy. All of it would be fought tooth and nail by forces who would want to preserve the status quo for their own interests. But a better, fairer America that might be able to shed some of what has seemed like intractable problems of discrimination and poverty and maybe rise up out of it.