In April of this year a U.S. District Court Judge approved Gardendale, Alabama’s decision to secede from its own school district in order to form its own more exclusive one. While the original school district encompassed a broad range of diverse students from various neighborhoods, the new Gardendale one would be nearly entirely white students from affluent neighborhoods. The succession has attracted a large amount of media attention, and caused many to speak out against this modern segregation of the school district. But the reality is that this isn’t just happening in Gardendale, it is everywhere and it is much subtler than a major move like a school district secession.
Think about the schools in your district, some are likely really nice and have great reputations; others are far worse, run down with disciplinary issues and receiving poor test scores year after year. Now picture the demographics at each of these schools, which school do affluent white students attend and which school has more lower income minority students?
Over the past 40 years or so, school districts have been increasingly more segregated, despite the segregation of schools being deemed
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Much of this is due to the implementation of neighborhood schools and the requirement of some counties that students must attend their neighborhood school. This created a situation in which schools that were built in poorer neighborhoods filled with poor students, while schools that were built in affluent neighborhoods are packed with wealthy ones. Many governments have tried to eliminate this problem by implementing the school choice system, that would allow students to choose what school they go to after a certain age. However limited access to transportation, the creation of highly selective charter schools, and limited school choices cause this policy to backfire; reinforcing the resegregation that was already taking