The New Face of Segregation

At 3:45 the buses roll in. From Club Boulevard, from Powe, from all over Durham, they move down Gregson and Green and Watts streets, at each block stopping to loose their cargo of white children. Each child, stepping from the bus, shoulders his or her L.L. Bean backpack and walks past a BMW and into one of the comfortable houses that line Trinity Park's leaf-dappled streets. The buses roll on through the center of the neighborhood, lighter with fewer passengers, now passing George Watts, the brick-faced elementary school, where black and Hispanic children are gathered in after-school programs. Less than one in 24 of the children at Watts is white, and for more than nine out of 10, their families have sufficiently low income that they qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. Last year, less than 36 percent of the current fourth graders in the building tested at grade level in math. They scored only slightly better in reading.

Nestled between Duke's East Campus and Durham's downtown, Trinity Park is one of the more affluent neighborhoods in Durham. Home to Duke professors and staff, Medical Center employees and Research Triangle professionals, the neighborhood was named by Money Magazine as one of the three best in the Raleigh-Durham area. The tree-lined streets are overwhelmingly residential and usually peaceful. Houses in the neighborhood go on the market at prices as high as $600,000. Many of the stately homes date back to the beginning of the century, when East Campus was home to Trinity College.

In addition to the Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist churches and the park for which the neighborhood is named, Watts Elementary School is a focal point in the neighborhood. Standing on Watts Street between Dacian and Urban avenues, the school was built in 1916 after the fledgling community petitioned the Durham City School Board for an elementary school. It remained exclusively white until the end of the 1960s, when court orders forced the Durham City Schools to desegregate. At the end of the 1980s Watts was 65 percent black and 35 percent white, and neighborhood parents were still committed to the local school; in 1989, they organized to prevent its closure.

But in 1992, the Durham City Schools and Durham County Schools merged to make one school district. The ensuing few years brought significant change for most schools in the county.

"Before merger, this was one of the premier elementary schools," Watts principal Carol Marshall says. "After merger, when they redrew the lines, a couple of things happened here. One was that our attendance zone went into downtown and scooped the Kent Street area on that side. We got a lot of the federal housing and two homeless shelters. So the demographics changed dramatically, and there was a large increase in the student population. They were supposed to have 460 children, and they ended up with almost 600 children."

At the same time, the district created magnet schools--like Club Boulevard Humanities Magnet School--that specialized in certain subjects and could draw students from all over Durham.

"The magnet schools were targeted for the city schools that needed the most help," says Lee Ann Tilley, a member of the Trinity Park Association community board, whose two children attended Watts during the merger. "And Watts was doing fine. It was nicely integrated and had an active PTA and had a more diverse student body. So they didn't make Watts a magnet school. We had no idea the negative impact it would have on the school."

Following the merger and the creation of the magnet schools, Watts experienced a string of brief administrative tenures and offered no strong response to the rapid shift in demographics that Marshall says made Watts into a "totally different school."

In 1998-1999, the year before Marshall arrived, Watts' test scores yielded it the designation of Low Scoring School in the North Carolina ABCs of Public Education. Since then, test scores have improved--although they remain low--and the 2001-02 year earned Watts School of Progress status.

Despite the improvement, Marshall says there are still only four Trinity Park families with children at Watts. "The lack of students from this neighborhood makes Watts seem very strange, because we have this school in the middle of the neighborhood that nobody sends their kids to," says David Jensen, president of the Trinity Park Association.

"What you see in this neighborhood is a bit of a microcosm of American public schools," Duke professor Charles Clotfelter says from his office in the Sanford Institute of Public Policy. "One of the situations that has arisen in different places is changing demographics leading to movements either by changing residential location or by taking children from one school to another. That, in turn, sets up a feedback effect, whereby each of these decisions impacts the racial composition, which then has an effect on other people's decisions."

Resegregation has occurred nationally over the last 25 years, as courts have loosened their influence on desegregation policies, recently going so far as expressly ordering school districts not to place students according to race. This has made racial balancing in schools nearly impossible, Clotfelter says.

When white parents begin pulling their children out of a school, he explains, this influences others to pull theirs out. When the proportion of non-white students exceeds a certain tipping point, white parents are much more likely to pull their students out of the school, and white flight--either through moving physically or moving the children to different schools--ensues.

"There's no reason why that [tipping point] needs to be a universal," Clotfelter says. "It is most likely something that is dependent on a lot of factors, including the characteristics of the school, the children, the groups involved, attitudes, alternatives, a lot of things like that."

In the Durham Public Schools, where more than 68 percent of students are non-white, and some of the schools that Trinity Park residents are "fleeing" to are 60 to 70 percent non-white, the tipping point is quite high. Neighborhood children stayed in the school when it was 65 percent non-white in the 1980s. Only when the percentage rose and better alternatives appeared did parents begin leaving schools in earnest. District-wide, segregation in Durham has fallen from .33 in 1994-95 to .29 in 2000-01 on an index Clotfelter uses in his research (where 0 represents perfect racial balance and 1 describes completely segregated schools). But this decrease in segregation likely reflects the drawing of suburban children into magnet schools that had previously been overwhelmingly black. During the same period, North Carolina's segregation rose from .14 to .20.

Clotfelter, who has a Ph. D. in economics from Harvard, has been teaching at Duke since 1979. He has written a number of papers on segregation, desegregation and resegregation, among other issues. Although the tabletops and floor of Clotfelter's office are covered with material for his book on race and education, he cannot definitively state the effects of desegregation or resegregation. "There is a mild opinion in the direction that racial diversity helps disadvantaged kids and doesn't hurt advantaged kids," Clotfelter says, with a tinge of embarrassment in his voice. "But nobody really knows for sure. It sounds like something people ought to know real well, but there've been a lot of studies and they come to somewhat different conclusions."

"One of the things we liked about this neighborhood when we moved in here was the local school," says Carolyn Kreuger, who settled in Trinity Park with her husband two years ago. "There was a neighborhood school--I was pregnant at the time we moved in--that my child could walk to.

"Then we found out that none of our neighbors--none of their children--go to Watts."

Rather than accept the conventional wisdom that Watts was no good, Kreuger, who is on the Trinity Park Association board, became active in the school. Among other things, she has worked with the neighborhood association to compile resource lists of residents with skills the school could use, and she organized a tour of neighborhood gardens for summer school students learning about gardening.

But now she is working on her most difficult project with Watts.

"We've contacted some people in the neighborhood and said, 'We would really like kids my son's age, two-year-old age... to consider going back to Watts,'" Kreuger says. "And we'd like to consider it as a group, because it doesn't make sense for a single child to go back in and not have a peer group. But over the next three years, we'd really like to work with this identified group of parents and talk about what we want out of education for our kids. Can we find a way to bring our children back to Watts and back as a group?"

For neighborhood association president Jensen, who has a one-year old daughter he would like to send to Watts if the situation is right, the efforts are particularly interesting. In the past, students have returned to Watts alone, felt isolated, and left. "The consensus is we need to have a playgroup-cohort, if you will, go to the school at the same time so you have your school friends and they're also your neighborhood friends and you expand from there," he says.

Kreuger has contacted a list of 15 to 20 families with two-year-old children and parents who are dedicated to the public school system. In addition, she believes that 10 to 15 more families might give the school a serious look if the rest of the neighborhood did. Kreuger feels that 12 to 15 children are needed to achieve a "critical mass" that would propel Trinity Park children back into Watts.

When Kreuger pitches the school to other Trinity Park parents, she has several selling points. One by-product of the school's test scores was an effort by the state and city to reduce class sizes. Today, no K-3 class can have more than 15 students, and the largest class in the school is 20. The facility is in excellent shape, having just been renovated in the 1990s. And the image--and convenience--of the neighborhood school still resonate with many parents.

One tool used by social scientists to analyze situations such as resegregation is prisoner's dilemma. In the case of Watts and Trinity Park, parents may perceive that they get the best outcome when their children stay at the local elementary school along with the other neighborhood children. If, however, they send their child to Watts and other parents leave, they fear their child will be miserable and isolated. So when parents make the decision as individuals, they choose to send their children to other schools, a decision which is perceived as the safest choice.

"It's a very interesting social experiment being suggested there," Clotfelter explains. "If you apply the simple prisoner's dilemma game, some kind of coalition among potential leavers not to leave might be an optimal outcome. And that perhaps is what's being accomplished in this movement."

Kreuger is building the coalition and trying to educate parents about the merits of the school. Particularly, she feels that Watts' low test scores mislead many local parents. "Because they have a student base that started with low scores, they're always going to be a little bit lower on the overall scale," she says. "But if you look at the improvement year-to-year and month-to-month, they've really made some impressive strides."

In the short term, Kreuger is working to bring the neighborhood and the school closer together through more projects. Building confidence in the school can only come through more exposure, she says.

Other techniques to achieve the same end have been attempted at other Durham schools. "One wonderful thing [is] happening at E.K. Powe, a neighborhood school that has faced some of the same issues at Watts," says David Stein, the Educational Partnership Coordinator in Duke's Office of Community Affairs. "A former E.K. Powe teacher has started a playgroup where two-year-olds come into Powe... and they have some fifth graders from Powe reading to them in the media center so the parents really get a feel for the school."

Stein, who coordinates Duke's efforts in seven Durham schools, has worked on securing volunteer work on Watts' exterior and playground drainage system from Duke contractors. In addition, he has helped the school develop a number of programs to improve test scores and education, and arranged for the construction of an amphitheater near the school playground. Kreuger is working to find performers for shows that neighborhood and school children could attend together.

"I do hope that, in one way or the other, we form a better bond between the neighborhood and Watts," Kreuger says. "It's to our advantage, as a neighborhood, to make our neighborhood school that's still here the best it can possibly be."