Half of Hartford’s schoolkids attend integrated schools, thanks to a legal strategy that might work elsewhere.
By: Rachel M. Cohen
Hartford, Connecticut, is struggling. Teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, the state’s tiny capital wrestles with many of the same economic challenges as other predominantly poor post-industrial cities along the East Coast. Yet Hartford boasts one remarkably unique feature: Nearly half of its public school students attend desegregated schools.
In most places, desegregation was a 20th-century phenomenon that was pulled apart by a skeptical Supreme Court and political backlash from white families. But in Hartford, it’s still happening, thanks to Sheff v. O’Neill, a 1996 state Supreme Court decision in which the court ruled that the region’s racially segregated schools denied Hartford children their constitutional right to an equal education. By suing the state rather than the federal government, the plaintiffs did not need to prove the state’s intent to discriminate (a high legal bar to reach), and instead focused on Connecticut’s obligation to provide all students with equal opportunity. It was a novel legal strategy at the time, and remains so today.
Over the past two decades, Connecticut has slowly but surely funded the creation of integrated magnet schools both within Hartford and in the surrounding suburbs, and paid for Hartford students to attend predominately white schools outside their city’s borders. The magnets—which have proved popular and academically distinguished—come with some rules: No more than 75 percent of a school’s student body can be black or Latino, and, correspondingly, no less than 25 percent can be white or Asian.
But some Hartford leaders have tired of Sheff, which reduces their authority over city schools, and encourages students to look beyond Hartford for public education. A number of Hartford parents have also grown frustrated that their children who can’t land spots in the coveted magnets are falling behind (52 percent of Hartford students are still enrolled in segregated neighborhood schools). Connecticut’s worsening fiscal crisis has also ramped up Sheff resistance from state officials, who have signaled—implicitly and explicitly—their desire to scale back the legal remedy.
So nearly three decades after they first filed suit, the plaintiffs are headed back to court—and longtime observers say they’ve never seen the two parties so far from an agreement. The state wants not only to be freed from court oversight, but also to reduce the number of white students the existing magnet schools must accept, a proposal supporters say will open up more opportunities for marginalized students, and critics say will cripple the goal of integration. The fight is being closely watched by civil rights advocates across the country, who want to know if Hartford and Sheff are a viable new model for school integration—or a dead end.
“I figured this would be a long-haul effort,” says Elizabeth Horton Sheff, an African American community activist, and the lead plaintiff for Sheff since the late 1980s. “But I did not expect this kind of resistance to a constitutional question that’s been asked and answered.”
CONNECTICUT IS AFFLUENT, predominantly white, and largely suburban. Like other New England states, Connecticut largely missed the migration of African Americans from the South, and Latinos from Mexico and the Caribbean. For decades, the state’s relatively few African Americans mostly clustered in Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven—a pattern born out of the state’s racist housing laws, which had barred black residents from owning land, forcing them into ghettos where renting was cheaper.
The Sheff lawsuit began with John Brittain, an African American civil rights attorney who arrived to teach at the University of Connecticut School of Law in 1977. Before then, Brittain had litigated school desegregation cases in Mississippi, and soon after his arrival he began studying the demographics of Connecticut’s schools and neighborhoods, to see if similar legal action might be necessary.
By 1983, Brittain had plans to move forward with a federal school desegregation case. Yet one challenge was a rapidly changing legal landscape following a 1974 U.S. Supreme Court decision, which said that unless it could be shown that a district deliberately sought to discriminate by race, it could not be held responsible for school segregation. Still, Brittain and his team felt they could prove intent.
At the last minute however, they pulled the plug. “Like a NASA shuttle launching, we aborted,” he tells me. One factor motivating the decision, Brittain says, was a sense that the community was not ready, that Northerners viewed desegregation as something only necessary for Southerners reckoning with Jim Crow.
But five years later, in 1988, everything changed. The state’s then-education commissioner, Gerald Tirozzi, published a report concluding that school segregation was a growing trend in Connecticut, with 80 percent of the state’s minority students concentrated within 14 of its 165 school districts. Following the release of the explosive report, the education commissioner emphasized the state’s collective responsibility for the problem and proposed financial incentives for school districts to voluntarily reduce segregation, but stressed that if this proved ineffectual, the state education board should consider a mandatory desegregation plan. It was—and still is—very unusual to have state officials propose strong desegregation initiatives rather than have those initiatives designed by courts.
Sheff was named for Milo Sheff, a black fourth-grade student in Hartford, and his mother, Elizabeth. Sixteen other children were named as plaintiffs—four more black children, six Latino, and six white. It was brought not only for Hartford students stuck in impoverished schools, but also for suburban students “deprived of the opportunity to associate with, and learn from, the minority children” in Hartford, as the complaint read. Sheff lawyers argued that inequality by both race and poverty denied the plaintiffs their constitutional right to an equal education.
Connecticut’s Supreme Court issued its landmark 5–4 ruling in the spring of 1996, holding that “racial and ethnic segregation has a pervasive and invidious impact on schools”—and violated the state’s constitution. (The court ignored the plaintiffs’ poverty argument.) Instead of outlining a remedy, however, the court ordered the governor and the legislature to develop a solution.
Continue for complete article: Desegregated, Differently
By: Rachel M. Cohen
Hartford, Connecticut, is struggling. Teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, the state’s tiny capital wrestles with many of the same economic challenges as other predominantly poor post-industrial cities along the East Coast. Yet Hartford boasts one remarkably unique feature: Nearly half of its public school students attend desegregated schools.
In most places, desegregation was a 20th-century phenomenon that was pulled apart by a skeptical Supreme Court and political backlash from white families. But in Hartford, it’s still happening, thanks to Sheff v. O’Neill, a 1996 state Supreme Court decision in which the court ruled that the region’s racially segregated schools denied Hartford children their constitutional right to an equal education. By suing the state rather than the federal government, the plaintiffs did not need to prove the state’s intent to discriminate (a high legal bar to reach), and instead focused on Connecticut’s obligation to provide all students with equal opportunity. It was a novel legal strategy at the time, and remains so today.
Over the past two decades, Connecticut has slowly but surely funded the creation of integrated magnet schools both within Hartford and in the surrounding suburbs, and paid for Hartford students to attend predominately white schools outside their city’s borders. The magnets—which have proved popular and academically distinguished—come with some rules: No more than 75 percent of a school’s student body can be black or Latino, and, correspondingly, no less than 25 percent can be white or Asian.
But some Hartford leaders have tired of Sheff, which reduces their authority over city schools, and encourages students to look beyond Hartford for public education. A number of Hartford parents have also grown frustrated that their children who can’t land spots in the coveted magnets are falling behind (52 percent of Hartford students are still enrolled in segregated neighborhood schools). Connecticut’s worsening fiscal crisis has also ramped up Sheff resistance from state officials, who have signaled—implicitly and explicitly—their desire to scale back the legal remedy.
So nearly three decades after they first filed suit, the plaintiffs are headed back to court—and longtime observers say they’ve never seen the two parties so far from an agreement. The state wants not only to be freed from court oversight, but also to reduce the number of white students the existing magnet schools must accept, a proposal supporters say will open up more opportunities for marginalized students, and critics say will cripple the goal of integration. The fight is being closely watched by civil rights advocates across the country, who want to know if Hartford and Sheff are a viable new model for school integration—or a dead end.
“I figured this would be a long-haul effort,” says Elizabeth Horton Sheff, an African American community activist, and the lead plaintiff for Sheff since the late 1980s. “But I did not expect this kind of resistance to a constitutional question that’s been asked and answered.”
CONNECTICUT IS AFFLUENT, predominantly white, and largely suburban. Like other New England states, Connecticut largely missed the migration of African Americans from the South, and Latinos from Mexico and the Caribbean. For decades, the state’s relatively few African Americans mostly clustered in Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven—a pattern born out of the state’s racist housing laws, which had barred black residents from owning land, forcing them into ghettos where renting was cheaper.
The Sheff lawsuit began with John Brittain, an African American civil rights attorney who arrived to teach at the University of Connecticut School of Law in 1977. Before then, Brittain had litigated school desegregation cases in Mississippi, and soon after his arrival he began studying the demographics of Connecticut’s schools and neighborhoods, to see if similar legal action might be necessary.
By 1983, Brittain had plans to move forward with a federal school desegregation case. Yet one challenge was a rapidly changing legal landscape following a 1974 U.S. Supreme Court decision, which said that unless it could be shown that a district deliberately sought to discriminate by race, it could not be held responsible for school segregation. Still, Brittain and his team felt they could prove intent.
At the last minute however, they pulled the plug. “Like a NASA shuttle launching, we aborted,” he tells me. One factor motivating the decision, Brittain says, was a sense that the community was not ready, that Northerners viewed desegregation as something only necessary for Southerners reckoning with Jim Crow.
But five years later, in 1988, everything changed. The state’s then-education commissioner, Gerald Tirozzi, published a report concluding that school segregation was a growing trend in Connecticut, with 80 percent of the state’s minority students concentrated within 14 of its 165 school districts. Following the release of the explosive report, the education commissioner emphasized the state’s collective responsibility for the problem and proposed financial incentives for school districts to voluntarily reduce segregation, but stressed that if this proved ineffectual, the state education board should consider a mandatory desegregation plan. It was—and still is—very unusual to have state officials propose strong desegregation initiatives rather than have those initiatives designed by courts.
Sheff was named for Milo Sheff, a black fourth-grade student in Hartford, and his mother, Elizabeth. Sixteen other children were named as plaintiffs—four more black children, six Latino, and six white. It was brought not only for Hartford students stuck in impoverished schools, but also for suburban students “deprived of the opportunity to associate with, and learn from, the minority children” in Hartford, as the complaint read. Sheff lawyers argued that inequality by both race and poverty denied the plaintiffs their constitutional right to an equal education.
Connecticut’s Supreme Court issued its landmark 5–4 ruling in the spring of 1996, holding that “racial and ethnic segregation has a pervasive and invidious impact on schools”—and violated the state’s constitution. (The court ignored the plaintiffs’ poverty argument.) Instead of outlining a remedy, however, the court ordered the governor and the legislature to develop a solution.
Continue for complete article: Desegregated, Differently
