This case study mapped patterns of disproportionality in Advanced Placement (AP) access, enrollment, and completion for systemically excluded students through secondary data analysis of the Civil Rights Data Collection (2015-6), and documents the degree of segregation within two diverse school districts. Although there was relatively robust…

In this reflective essay, the author recalls his socialization to White Supremacist ideology as a child in Virginia in the 1950s as a way to consider how racist perspectives are perpetuated across generations.

In 1955, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church called for the racial desegregation of Episcopal institutions: parishes, seminaries, and schools. The study of Episcopal school desegregation reveals a fundamental paradox: Episcopal theology promoted desegregation but "white flight" spurred Episcopal school growth. The question of…

Whether students of color are more or less likely to be identified as having disabilities than similarly situated students who are White in U.S. states with histories of de jure and de facto racial segregation is currently unknown. Unadjusted analyses of large samples of students attending elementary and middle schools in the U.S. South yielded…

"Gerrymandering" is known best as a tool to manipulate boundaries for voting districts, but school districts have long used the same tool to manipulate school boundaries. The author used geospatial techniques--mapping various kinds of demographic data onto school boundaries--to examine public school attendance zones and their effect on…

In light of contemporary school choice proposals and the 60th anniversary of the Southern Manifesto, the Prince Edward County, Virginia public schools crisis provides interesting historical discussion. Prince Edward County (PEC), a rural community in central Virginia, was one of five school districts represented in the 1954 "Brown v. Board of…

In this study, I employ geospatial techniques to assess the impact of school attendance zone "gerrymandering" on the racial/ethnic segregation of schools, using a large national sample of 15,290 attendance zones in 663 districts. I estimate the effect of gerrymandering on school diversity and school district segregation by comparing the…

In this article, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley illuminates the challenges and opportunities posed by demographic change in suburban school systems. As expanding student populations stretch the enrollment capacities of existing schools in suburban communities, new schools are built and attendance lines are redrawn. This redistricting process can be used…

In this classroom simulation, students travel back in time to 1945, when racism was institutionalized in many states through segregation. Though students cannot literally travel back to the Jim Crow era, teachers can create a situation that brings home the point of injustice and the choices individuals are faced with in such situations. Suddenly,…

In this paper we share findings of a textbook analysis in which we explored the treatment of segregated education in eight, widely-used secondary United States history and government textbooks. We positioned our findings within the historiography related to the African American school experience which challenges the notion that the lack of…

Schools in the United States have experienced changes in their demographic profile during the last half century. During this changing time, schools have experienced court-involved desegregation and have experienced fluctuations in their populations with regard to both race and socioeconomic status. Existing studies on segregation have focused…

This article examines the educational leadership of the first African American female principal in Richmond, Virginia: Mrs. Ethel Thompson Overby. It seeks to ascertain, through a historical framework utilizing critical race theory, how this particular educational and instructional leader conceptualized academic achievement given the context of…

Describes the historical efforts of economically, politically, and socially oppressed black communities across the segregated U.S. south to give their children a quality education, highlighting rural Prince Edward County, Virginia. In an attempt to circumvent Brown v. Board of Education (1954), white leaders closed every public school in the…

In this article, the author discusses how the matter of civil rights, and in particular the treatment of black people at the hands of white people, was conveyed to him most powerfully by three men of Harvard. The first was his high school headmaster, Herbert W. Smith, who introduced their class to the horrors of apartheid through the writings of…

The building that once housed the only primary school for blacks in Lee County, Virginia, is now the Appalachian African-American Cultural Center. Besides preserving Appalachian black history, it hosts an annual Race Unity Day; houses a library of black literature; and sponsors workshops on racism, where blacks and whites can discuss racial issues…