Amid new calls for policies that aim to address segregation in New York City public schools, research examining the efficacy of schools desegregation in 1970s Nashville “offers important lessons for the present,” writes TC’s Ansley Erickson, Associate Professor of History and Education, in a new opinion piece for the Washington Post.
Ansley Erickson, Associate Professor of History and Education. Photo courtesy of TC Archives.
The most important, Erickson asserts, is that “in many ways, desegregation works.” She cites research showing that desegregation in the 1970s and 1980s contributed to “major increases in achievement levels in school and improvements in life outcomes for black students nationally, without harming outcomes for white children.” Erickson also notes work by TC sociologist Amy Stuart Wells showing that desegregation improved students’ social learning as well.
But Nashville’s story also teaches us that “Desegregation — whether past, present or future — depends on thousands of small decisions: where students will go to school, with whom, with what teachers, what curriculum, what supports,” writes Erickson. The city’s attainment of “statistical desegregation” failed to ensure “equal concern about the education of all students or equality in the process of desegregation. In Nashville, as in many places across the country, white citizens and their allies in education and government made sure to protect what they perceived to be their interests even as their city desegregated.”
Erickson’s is the author of Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits (2016). She leads the Harlem Education History Project, co-directs the Center on History and Education and is affiliated with its Institute for Urban and Minority Education.
Read the Washington Post article here.