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There are two things for us to work through before you get to the task of how to desegregate your school district. The first is to get the school level data for the district you choose, which I will show you how to do with any school district in Virginia. It will be a similar process for other states, but you might need to call someone or explore a website to get started.
The second is to think through what segregation means. Looking at some basic data for Richmond Public Schools’ elementary schools, we can see that in some schools Black students comprise about thirteen percent of the total school population, while in other schools ninety-five percent of the students are Black. In other words, some specific schools are examples of “racially isolated” schools, while others are more racially mixed. Many education studies are interested in the concentration of poor and/or minority students in schools and the primary data that they use is the percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced lunch. Then they define what is “concentrated” poverty. Some studies of segregation do the same with race: they report the percentage of students who are Black (or Latino or Asian) and then make a judgement (rooted in previous literature) about what is a concentration.
Explore this table: what stands out to you, how would you describe the school system to someone, what else do you want to know, what seems most important? Here is a blog post on residential segregation in the city. Read it and then think about how school segregation reflects or differs from residential segregation in Richmond.
| School Name | Total Students | Total Black Students | Percent Black | Total White, Non-Hispanic Students | Percent White, Non-Hispanic |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bellevue Elementary | 271 | 244 | 90% | 9 | 3% |
| Blackwell Elementary | 679 | 576 | 85% | 7 | 1% |
| Broad Rock Elementary | 874 | 512 | 59% | 21 | 2% |
| Chimborazo Elementary | 474 | 441 | 93% | 25 | 5% |
| E.S.H. Greene Elementary | 640 | 83 | 13% | 12 | 2% |
| Elizabeth D. Redd Elementary | 442 | 293 | 66% | 12 | 3% |
| Fairfield Court Elementary | 491 | 472 | 96% | 2 | 0% |
| G.H. Reid Elementary | 686 | 355 | 52% | 7 | 1% |
| George Mason Elementary | 1046 | 527 | 50% | 416 | 40% |
| George W. Carver Elementary | 485 | 448 | 92% | 5 | 1% |
| Ginter Park Elementary | 511 | 492 | 96% | 7 | 1% |
| J.B. Fisher Elementary | 348 | 210 | 60% | 45 | 13% |
| J.E.B. Stuart Elementary | 353 | 323 | 92% | 5 | 1% |
| J.L. Francis Elementary | 551 | 330 | 60% | 19 | 3% |
| John B. Cary Elementary | 260 | 215 | 83% | 21 | 8% |
| Linwood Holton Elementary | 593 | 342 | 58% | 198 | 33% |
| Mary Munford Elementary | 485 | 62 | 13% | 356 | 73% |
| Miles Jones Elementary | 635 | 449 | 71% | 19 | 3% |
| Oak Grove/Bellemeade Elementary | 680 | 517 | 76% | 14 | 2% |
| Overby-Sheppard Elementary | 376 | 351 | 93% | 3 | 1% |
| Patrick Henry School Of Science And Arts | 315 | 181 | 57% | 99 | 31% |
| Southampton Elementary | 402 | 342 | 85% | 19 | 5% |
| Swansboro Elementary | 262 | 232 | 89% | 8 | 3% |
| Westover Hills Elementary | 420 | 359 | 85% | 26 | 6% |
| William Fox Elementary | 554 | 101 | 18% | 354 | 64% |
| Woodville Elementary | 477 | 454 | 95% | 3 | 1% |
I know a little bit about Richmond, which helps me evaluate the data. Most of the data for schools I am familiar with seems accurate, but I used to live next to George Mason, a neighborhood school, and half of its students are not white. I also doubted that it has 1000 students, which is quite a bit larger than the next biggest school. A couple phone calls and emails got me this explanation:
George Mason’s enrollment number appears higher because it includes “virtual students”. Those students must have a designated home school for reporting purposes and George Mason ES is currently being used. We have approximately 658 virtual elementary students that should be deducted from the total enrollment listed for George Mason. I hope this helps!
The problem is that I don’t know the race of those 658 “virtual” students (nor do I really know what a “virtual student” is), so I will eliminate the school from my analysis.
My children attend Patrick Henry, a public not-for-profit charter school, and I was a little surprised to see that it is 57% Black. I usually describe it as “60-70% Black”. When I looked at the grade by grade data I saw that Kindergarten is 47% Black, Third Grade (my daughter’s grade) is 60% Black and Fifth Grade is 67% Black. My characterization is accurate for the older grades, but not the younger grades. White people (like me) often overestimate the number of Black people in a group, by the way, so I checked the data to make sure that my data seems valid, but also to see if my estimating reflected that documented bias. The grade by grade data also reveals another bit of information; the school has fewer white students in each grade.
You will collect the same kind of data before class on Tuesday. I recommend that you study a school district that you lived in at some point, but you can choose a different school system if you want. This Washington Post article describes a study that found that the number of Virginia schools that are “racially isolated” has grown. It mentions Prince William County, Fairfax County, and Arlington County as relatively wealthy counties that still have some number of schools that have more than 75% of students who are non-white and qualify for free lunch. (So even if your experience in these places suggests an integrated school system, the data might complicate that.) To get data on Virginia schools, start at the Department of Education homepage.
On the left side of the page is a link to “Statistics and Reports” and then on the right side of the page are links to different kinds of data. For now we will focus on “Enrollment and Demographics.” Then click on the “Fall Membership” link. From here, you can download one massive excel sheet with demographic data by grade for every school in the state, which will require you to sort, filter and delete extra data. Click on “Fall Membership Reports” and then choose the 2017-2018 file for “School Summaries by Ethnicity, Grade, and Gender” which will download a big excel file that has more data than you need. However, it is generally good to get finer grained data and aggregate it yourself, then to get data that doesn’t quite tell you what you need to know.
When you have this big excel file, you will have to edit it. (If you don’t have Excel on your computer, I think that you can find it on computers in campus computer labs. If you prefer to use google spreadsheets you should be able to upload this to your google drive and open it in spreadsheets.) Make sure that you enable editing in the spreadsheet. I find it helpful to make sure I can see the header rows, so I recommend deleting the four rows at the top, then go to “View,” choose “Freeze Panes” and “Freeze top row.” Then search for the school district you are studying. At this point you can either cut and paste the header row and all the rows for your school district into a separate spreadsheet OR delete all the rows that are not your school district. When I deleted everything above Richmond it seemed like I had somehow deleted EVERYTHING, but when I put my cursor into the header row and moved down one space, there was all my Richmond data. Phew! Now delete the rest of the data (the school districts below yours). You might save the final row, which has the “state totals” but I found it easier to just make a new “RPS totals” row under my data. (To write a formula in Excel: “=sum(F2:F263)” will add up the values in every cell from F2 to F263. You will have a different number of rows, of course, so just select the cells you want added. Then you can copy the formula into every column in the row.)
The data is still too detailed – I have every public school in the city and a breakdown by grade, race, and gender – but I like stopping here to write a couple of sentences about the whole school system. “RPS has a total of 25,015 students and 17,294 are Black, 3,862 are Latino, and 3,030 are white. In other words, Latinos, who make up 6.5% of the city’s population comprise more of the student body than whites, who are almost 45% of the city’s population” (U.S. Census). I can use this later and I won’t have to go find the data again.
However, I w