Four years ago, while covering Seattle schools’ push to reform its advanced learning program, I visited Thurgood Marshall Elementary and saw clear racial differences between the advanced learning program and general education classrooms.
At a school named for the Supreme Court justice and civil rights attorney who argued for the end of school segregation, the irony was impossible to ignore. As I later discovered in the district’s archives, Thurgood Marshall and other schools had been this way for years. The gifted program was used as a tool 40 years ago to entice white families to enroll their children in schools where students of color made up the majority.
The programs weren’t intended to be racially exclusive, but in practice, most of the pupils were white and Asian — which researchers attribute to racially biased referrals and IQ tests that may overlook English learners and kids without access to private educational enrichment. The programs created a system of segregation within school buildings, which is why the district has changed its evaluation process, and plans to get rid of the cohort model, which groups advanced learners separately from other kids.
Until that assignment, my knowledge of school integration efforts was limited mostly to the American South. But here I was, here we all are, in the middle of more than 50 years’ worth of local attempts to address one of the oldest problems in American schools.
Last summer, my colleague Lauren Flannery and I set out to understand the history of Seattle’s battle to integrate classrooms. We built a database of school demographics starting with the early 1970s. We recorded the racial breakdown of school enrollments through history, looking for trends. And we sifted through thousands of pages of archives to find pivotal moments in this history. Our interview subjects, some of whom responded to a call-out by my colleague Jenn Smith, brought those moments alive.
Seattle’s school demographics prior to the 2000s are not digitized, so I took pictures of paper reports from the district’s archives and scanned them into spreadsheets. Flannery, a graphics developer who designed the online interactives for this story, and I manually entered and checked addresses and school names, many of which have changed over the decades.
To see trends geographically, we divided the city into north, south and central — and divided those regions into east and west halves. We wanted to focus on the Central Area, the city’s historically Black neighborhood, and the southeast region, which today is home to many Seattle schools that are majority students of color.
To measure the degree of segregation, we consulted Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher and professor at the University of Washington.He recommended the dissimilarity index calculation, widely used in academia and government research, which gave us a number that represents how well the schools, as a collective, mirror the overall district demographics.
Beginning in 1978, students — and mostly students of color — were required to be bused to schools out of their neighborhood in an attempt to reduce segregation. This led into the most integrated period in Seattle schools history until the busing program ended in the late 1990s. After that, we saw an immediate spike in segregation, while the district’s overall demographics remained the same.
School demographics are meaningful to families. This was especially true for parents of color who told me of the value they place on a school where their child isn’t the only one of their background. In the same way that parents can look up test scores, some families want access to historical data on school demographic changes, especially in this age of rapid gentrification across the city. We now offer an online tool to do just that.
Seattle tried many ways to integrate schools, some of which made things worse, some of which made things better, and most of which did not last.