Concerned father takes aim at Nashville schools plan

By Janell Ross
Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Keith Caldwell isn’t the kind of parent people expect to drive local school board policy.

Caldwell, the 10th of 11 children, was born to a single mother and raised in a Nashville Housing project. He became a father at 19. He isn’t rich. He doesn’t hold a public office and he isn’t particularly connected to anyone who does.

But Caldwell, and the father of two school-age children, might have single-handedly thrown up the biggest hurdle standing between Metro Nashville Public Schools and its plan next year to stop busing children from some of the city’s poorest and mostly black neighborhoods to schools in wealthier and mostly white communities.

In January, Caldwell, 41, filed a complaint against the district with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. This month, he was told that the agency is launching an investigation.

Caldwell’s complaint is calling attention to a growing trend in school-assignment policy that is putting more students in racially and economically homogenous schools – something experts say is widening the racial achievement gap in public schools.

A January report by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA found that white, affluent children are most likely to attend one of the nation’s “hypersegregated schools” than any other group. Test scores for those children tend hit or exceed national proficiency levels, the report said. But in schools where poor children of color are concentrated, conditions are more likely than not to widen the achievement gap.

 “What the school board did, I don’t care what they call it, is roll back the clock in Nashville,” said Caldwell, a heating and air conditioning technician turned community activist. “You are going to see these schools that are almost totally black and brown, overwhelmingly poor and in these same places schools that aren’t truly guaranteed the extra resources to address the needs kids in these kinds of schools have.”

Test scores for Nashville students have fallen short of federal progress goals for five years. And this school year, those test scores have landed the district under partial state control.

In the 2007-2008 school year, 91.6 percent of white elementary and middle school students in the district scored at the proficient advanced level on standardized math exams, while 79.9 percent of black and 84 percent of Latino students did the same. But the district’s biggest achievement gaps reveal themselves in other ways.

Just under  81 percent of the district’s economically disadvantaged students were deemed proficient or advanced, 74 percent of students with limited English proficiency met the same standards and only 59 percent of those who have disabilities did the same.

Nashville school officials say the move toward neighborhood schools will save millions in transportation costs and make it easier for more parents to get involved at their children’s schools. The combination will produce better test scores, they claim.

“This is local innovation, not resegregation,” Metro Schools Board president David Fox said. “We’re trying to do what’s good for all children.”

Nashville’s solution to its student performance problem is anything but unique. Schools across the county – in the Midwest, the Northeast but even faster in the South – are resegregating.

Beginning in the 1990s, neighborhood school plans began replacing court-ordered and voluntary desegregation school-assignment plans. And, as early as the 1950s, but continuing today, break-away school districts are forming, said Erica Frankenberg, a researcher with UCLA’s Civil Rights Project.

The net effect: The nation’s public schools are in danger of becoming as segregated today as they were 40 years ago, said Frankenberg.

“We know from study after study that there are both academic and significant socialization benefits that are derived for attending integrated schools,” said Frankenberg. “Quality teachers tend to remain at less segregated schools. That’s what makes the difference.”

In Nashville, while the city is 64 percent white, the public schools population is just 34 percent white. From the very first school year that court-ordered integration began in the city in 1971, just over 7,000 white students left the district for private schools and surrounding counties. In many cases, the children never returned. Thirty-eight years later, Nashville’s public schools serve nearly 24,000 fewer students than it did in 1970. Some opponents of the new student-assignment plan say these are the numbers that are driving the change.

Steve Murdock, a Rice University demographer and former Census Bureau director, said that, until now, the nation has been able live with the knowledge that large numbers of poor students are clustered in some of the nation’s lowest-performing schools with the least-experienced teachers.

The way he sees it, the nation’s day of reckoning is coming. If the high school and college graduation rates of non-white students don’t grow with the population, the nation’s ability to hold on to high-paying jobs in growth industries is going to be severely limited, he said.

“It is – as the cliché goes – all connected,” Murdock said. “We have to wake up to those facts. If we don’t, we’re dooming the country to a poorer and more unstable future.”

Janell Ross is a reporter for The Tennessean in Nashville

Index of Black-White Achievement Gap Stories