Piney Woods is a co-educational, Christian college preparatory high school. With over 2,000 acres of land, it has a 250-acre farm that its 100 students tend to daily while caring for the animals and learning about crops. Tuition is $45,000, though every current student receives at least some financial assistance. William Crossley, the school’s fifth president and the first to be an alumnus, spoke to The 74’s Sierra Lyons about Piney Woods’s survival and its parallels to his personal education journey.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Before Brown v. Board of Education, there were about 100 Black boarding schools across the country. What does it mean to you to be leading one of the last four that remain?

It’s an interesting thing that many of these institutions have sort of gone by the wayside. But in our case, we recognize that the challenge [of] providing high-quality educational opportunity for young people, particularly low-income young people and people of color — that challenge still exists for us as a nation. 

Piney Woods has a 250-acre farm and over 1,000 acres of wildlife. What opportunities does the land allow for students to learn hands-on? What’s a typical student’s day like?

We say ,”The campus is our classroom, the land is our lab.” Yesterday, we had students down on the farm caring for the animals. We’ve got eight horses, 60 to 65 head of cattle, roosters, chickens, goats, sheep and some farm dogs. There’s something about caring for animals, and there’s something about working with one’s hands, that connects to one’s brain.

We’re starting a farmer’s market here. The kids are helping to grow that, and we will teach them entrepreneurship. The kids have to sit down and do business and marketing plans. Those become part of how we decide what to sell in the market, which is on our campus. It’s not just for our young people, but it’s for our community, too. 

We do study things in the history books, but we also go to the site of Emmett Till’s death here in Mississippi. We go to the Civil Rights Museum here, and we go to the preserved slave cabins on plantation land in Natchez. We go to Memphis and we see the hotel where Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and we go to the founding site of this institution and see where Lawrence C. Jones was brave enough to find a way to start this enterprise, and we’re all here because of what he did. 

And so we literally live that history and we do it in science because we have five ponds on our campus. And so when we’re testing for bacteria, we’ll get the water out of the faucet, and then we’ll get the rainwater that made its way into the pond and our students will do comparative analysis on what’s in the water. 

Historically, you will have seen pictures of a classroom in 1920 with the desks all lined up and the teacher in front of a blackboard. Then people show a similar classroom today with desks all lined up, with the teacher in front of the whiteboard. One of the things we try to do is break out of that to help our young people understand that to live is to learn and to learn is to live. We don’t make this distinction that you’re in school so you have to sit at this desk a certain way. Our students field calls at our switchboard, our students call our donors and thank them for supporting us with scholarship funds. They call admitted students and say, “Hey, I understand you’ve been admitted to Piney Woods. Well, I’m a 10th-grade student and we’ll both be together next year, and I wanted to see if you had any questions.” Our students go out and carry the message of this institution all over this state and nation, and so it really is learning practiced through living.

How did Piney Wood survive as all those other schools were closing?

One of the things is that we understood our mission, and we try to situate our mission and our vision in the period in which we live. Prior to Brown, Piney Woods issued associate degrees. Once the junior college/community college systems began to allow Black people to come, we recognized that the need was not as great. And so our program adjusted, and we stopped issuing associate degrees. It did not mean that the mission was not still viable. It’s no secret that you can pretty much track an individual’s educational progress by the income levels of their families. If you come from a family with a higher income, you’re that much more likely to succeed and have access to higher-quality education. Part of what we wanted to do was to ensure that we’re still addressing that challenge. You have to adjust to what’s happening in the world but still question what’s the relevance of your mission.

Piney Woods has had an alumni community that’s come forward to support its work and that sacrifices to make sure Piney Woods can still exist and do this work. Piney Woods has an independent board of directors. Sometimes these schools were run by churches, and they sort of went the way of the congregation or denomination and didn’t have as much control over how it advanced. Particularly during days of segregation, there were a number of these institutions that received state support because states didn’t want integration, so they would send some money to the Black boarding schools, which would essentially allow them to avoid integration. When the money left, these institutions couldn’t operate. Piney Woods operated independently of that for most of our existence. I think leadership matters. Piney Woods had strong leadership from our founder, but then we’ve had strong leadership from other folks who preceded me, and our goal from the start has been about building next-generation leadership in all that we do.

This month marks 70 years since the Brown v. Board ruling. Following the decision, many Black teachers and principals were dismissed. What generational impact do you believe this has had on Black students?

You know the old saying, “if you can see it, you can be it.” When Black males have one Black male teacher in elementary grades, their chances of success increase exponentially in school. To some extent, that was true for myself. I grew up on the south side of Chicago and I had teachers who were white, who were Black, but for the most part, they were female. I can remember one male teacher that I had along the way, but who was white, and then the folks in charge were typically white. We didn’t have Black models in leadership at the classroom level, or even at the local school level, and so we are pioneers. Piney Woods is by no means an all-Black staff. We have a diverse leadership structure here that I hope sets a standard for our young people to see.

Laurence Clifton Jones founded the school to educate the children of impoverished Black sharecroppers. With that history in mind, how has Piney Woods remained a safe haven for students who may have financial hardships or face other forms of marginalization?

This is near and dear to me because I will confess that there were moments when this institution faced financial challenges and some thought the answer would be to pursue more exclusively — essentially, people who could pay tuition. Lawrence Jones founded Piney Woods with $1.65. The ability to pay tuition has never been how we [decided] who would get this kind of an opportunity. Our board has worked diligently to ensure that we stay true to that from a mission standpoint. If you can afford to contribute more, we ask you to make a bigger contribution. But if a family doesn’t have the funds, no child is turned away for an inability to pay his or her way. Every young person who is here today has a scholarship. If there are folks who want to come and don’t want a scholarship, we welcome them, too.

The reason we can do that is that members of our community … we have something called the Circle of Faith that they sometimes will recommend a student and they will send contributions to help support that student’s education. Across this nation, the community of supporters makes this kind of work possible.

What does it cost to attend?

About $45,000 per student per year. That’s with room and board and really all their expenses. We don’t say if you want to be on the basketball team, you have to pay an extra fee. Once you’re here, you’ll be part of whatever’s happening, The National Association of Independent Schools pegs the cost of attending a boarding program like ours … we are 50% less than the average boarding school costs in this nation, and we successfully get all of our young people admitted to postsecondary options: community, college, college, military, etc.

You are the first principal to be a former student. How did your time as a student impact your view of education and opportunity in rural Mississippi?

My experience before coming here to Piney Woods was not a good one. I grew up in difficult neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago. My life changed when I came to this institution, and it took me some time to realize that. I was having leadership opportunities that I don’t know I would have ever had, had I stayed back in a public school at home. My grades and my GPA were well beyond where I would have been had I stayed home.

I got a chance to go to the University of Chicago as an undergraduate. We lived with my grandmother, and she lived about a 15-minute drive from the university. Nobody from our neighborhood went to the University of Chicago. I had driven by it my whole life but I didn’t even know it was a university. Nobody in my family had gone to college. Maybe my last year in high school at Piney Woods and my first year in college at the University of Chicago, it dawned on me that the people I grew up with didn’t have the opportunities that I had. I knew my cousins and folks at church. I also knew that I wasn’t as smart as some, I just had had an opportunity that they didn’t, because Piney Woods had given me that opportunity. I had really at that point in my life said, “This is unfair. It’s unfair for me to be at the University of Chicago and for my cousin to be in Joliet federal prison. That sort of ignited my passion to ensure that we were making educational opportunities available despite the accident of one’s birth, and that’s what this place has done for 115 years. And when I spend my life doing that, that’s the most fulfilling thing I can imagine.

Before returning to Piney Woods, you worked as senior adviser in the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education. What was your experience with returning to Piney Woods after having such an aerial view of education in the country?

I actually started my career in the classroom. I was teaching in Chicago Public Schools and was volunteering for a first-time-ever candidate for Illinois state Senate from our little district in South Side Chicago named Barack Obama, who went on to do some other things after he got into the Illinois legislature. So I started there and I became really frustrated with the bureaucracy. I wanted to find a path that I could make change on. I didn’t think I could do that with the 26 kids I had in my class, I went to law school, I ended up in a senior position working in government trying to change educational disparity, and Piney Woods sort of came along. 

So I went from this space of working on policy to working directly with people. That was life-changing. I was no longer just putting a policy on the table — I was sitting across the table from a young person who was making a decision about whether to go to college or which college to go to. Or the young person who was sometimes making adult decisions about whether to even remain in school. In many ways, I went from a kind of work that felt very transactional in Washington, D.C., to work that I know is transformational in nature here on the ground. It’s been really a thrill and a delight, because I literally get to touch and sit and really know the people whose lives are being changed by the work we’re doing.

Piney Woods is 20 miles south of Jackson, in the state with the nation’s largest Black population. When policymakers and education leaders are discussing school choice, what specific needs for Black parents and students in the rural South do you believe should be considered?

When I was in D.C., my daughter was on a soccer team, and they lost every game. Sometimes they just lost because the other team had superior skills. But many times they lost 1 to 0, and the one goal the other team made sometimes had gone in accidentally. The reason the ball was able to go in accidentally is because it consistently was on my daughter’s team’s side of the field, which meant that they were always on defense. Another person could, just by sheer luck, put points on the board.

I think that Black kids growing up in America often live their lives on defense. The expectations of them are low. When a Black child fails in school, nobody’s surprised, and that’s a problem. This place changes that. We say this is where you belong, that we expect you to excel and to achieve, and you’re not going to live life on defense. Quite the contrary. We expect you to put points on the board.

One of the things we offer is an atmosphere that says you’re a part of this community. You’re a part of, dare I say, this family. Just as my two daughters aren’t allowed to say, “I can’t do it,” neither are you. There’s a whole field of scholarship from Tocqueville on the impact of community and advancing and turning around its members. The solutions often live on the ground in the community. I think we can choose whether to subject our kids to a mass-production factory model, one-size-fits-all notion of learning, or a personalized, culturally supportive environment in which every single young person is expected to achieve in their own right. I think we do the latter, and we’ve had success, certainly for my 10 years, but for 115 years. I hope that serves as a lesson for us as a nation about the kinds of spaces we should make for the best learning outcomes for young people.

When the time comes, how do you hope to leave the school better than how you found it?

This place was started in the middle of nowhere with almost nothing but a burning desire and passion to have an impact on the lives of others. People invested in that and it came to fruition. Lawrence C. Jones, our founder, described it as “a resistless urge to help people build better lives for themselves and their communities.” I got to be here because people who didn’t know my name, and long before I ever got [here], invested in this space on the belief that someday somebody like me might come through.

I tell our students it so deeply humbles me to think that our enslaved fought for freedom that they never would personally realize, but they fought for those freedoms for future generations and people invested in me in ways that I can’t fully measure. I hope that someone will say, “He did his absolute best to pay it forward, that he did his absolute best to ensure that this institution would become a regenerative community that gives more to the world than it ever takes from it.” If we can position this work to go out and have that kind of an impact, then I think we will have done our work well.

This Friday, May 17, marks the 70th anniversary — the landmark United States Supreme Court ruling that ordered an end to racial segregation in American public schools. And while resistance to desegregation never went away, there was a window of time – particularly in the late 20th and early 21st Century — in which many states and localities, including North Carolina and several of its counties, made enormous headway in building much more diverse and better integrated public school systems.

As a new report from researchers at NC State makes clear, however, that momentum in our state has waned and now things are trending strongly in the opposite direction.

The report is entitled . It was published earlier this month by the , and recently NC Newsline interviewed one of the authors, NC State professor of education, Jennifer Ayscue.

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According to Ayscue, the gist of what she and her colleagues, Victor Cadilla, Mary Kathryn Oyaga, and Cassandra Rubinstein found is that while overall public school enrollment in North Carolina has steadily become more diverse, patterns of segregation in individual schools have greatly intensified.

And this, she says, is worrisome news since, as was noted in the release accompanying the report, “…segregated schools are systematically linked to unequal educational opportunities and outcomes, while desegregated schools are associated with numerous short-term, long-term, academic, and nonacademic outcomes for individuals and society.”

In addition to chronicling the resegregation of North Carolina schools, the report points to several potential tools and tactics for policymakers to employ in combating this trend – though almost all would buck recent trends at the state legislature and in the Department of Public Instruction. These include:

• School districts should design voluntary school desegregation policies that could include student reassignment, controlled-choice attendance and the development of more magnet schools.
• DPI should provide incentives to districts and schools via grants and technical assistance.
• State lawmakers should enact stronger charter school regulations that require the provision of transportation and free school meals, while also amending the state voucher program to include civil rights protections and greater transparency and accountability.

It should be noted that the report does not address segregation in private schools and that a) private school enrollment in North Carolina has , and b) that private schools are generally more segregated than public schools.

The following numbers are from :

41% – growth in overall North Carolina public school enrollment from 1989-90 to 2021-22 (from 1,074,120 to 1,517,300)

45% White, 25% Black, 20% Hispanic, 5% Multiracial, 4% Asian, and 1% American Indian – racial/ethnic breakdown of students in 2021-22

67% White, 30% Black, 1% Hispanic, 2% all others – racial/ethnic breakdown in 1989-90

13.5% – share of all North Carolina public schools in 2021-22 that were “intensely segregated schools of color” (schools that enroll 90-100% students of color)

3.5% – share that were intensely segregated in 1989-90

0.9% – share of North Carolina public schools in 2021-22 that were “hyper-segregated schools of color” (schools that enroll 99-100% students of color)

0.7% – share that were hyper-segregated in 1989-90

23.5% – share of charter schools in 2021-22 that were intensely segregated

6.0% – share of charter schools in 2021-22 that were hyper-segregated

1 out of 4 – share of Black student who attend intensely segregated schools

1 out of 5 – share of Hispanic students

82.6% – of the students attending intensely segregated schools of color, the share who were recipients of free or reduced-price lunch, indicating a double segregation of students by race and poverty

61.3% and 55.3%, respectively – percentage of low-income students in schools attended by typical Black and Hispanic students

38.0% and 29.4%, respectively – percentage of low-income students in schools attended by typical White and Asian students

58.9% ­– the typical White student attended a school where 58.9% of the students were White, even though White students only comprised 45% of the total state enrollment

41.2% – the typical Black student attended a school where 41.2% of the students were Black, even though Black students accounted for 25% of the state’s enrollment

28.3% – the percentage of White students at a school attended by the typical Black student

68.6% – despite accounting for less than half of the state’s enrollment in 2021-22, 68.6% of White students attended majority White schools

to explore the report.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. NC Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Rob Schofield for questions: info@ncnewsline.com. Follow NC Newsline on and .

In the first of its kind , researchers unveil troubling laws, loopholes and trends that undermine the legacy of Brown v. Board, in which the supreme court ruled “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and violate the Fourteenth Amendment.

Public schools today are not required to explain or prove why they are denying a student enrollment. Paired with pressure to stack classrooms with “easier to educate” kids, school administrators say this leads to practices of denying Black, brown, low-income students and those with disabilities enrollment to public school, without consequence.

The report argues discrimination has also been made widespread by allowing – and in four states, requiring – districts to use and enforce school attendance zones, which often mirror racist housing maps from the , separating children by home addresses. Schools contract with private investigators, prosecute or fine parents who defy zone lines via address sharing. Only one state, Connecticut, has decriminalized the common practice.

Researchers say the need to reform and undermine the weight home addresses have on educational outcomes is more urgent than ever, as many districts start to weigh closures and consolidations, leaving thousands of children, , hanging in the balance.

“You can’t be turned away from school because of your race, but if all of the Black people live on one side of the line, all the white people live on the other side of the line, it’s OK to draw the line and assign kids to school based on that,” said Tim DeRoche, coauthor of the report and founder of Available to All, a watchdog organization.

In the wake of Brown, courts took charge, taking on dozens of cases and stamping out explicit racial segregation, particularly in the south. 

“But they never came back around to fulfill that promise, that public schools had to be available to all in equal terms,” DeRoche said. “There’s all these other ways that we sort kids into schools that give advantages to people who have money or live in the right part of town. The courts have just neglected to take that up and frankly, the legislatures have failed to take that up as well.”

The report makes the case for better legal protections, like requiring districts to operate open enrollment zones for families within a 3-mile radius, reserve seats for nonresidents, publish data on enrollment application and denials, and, when schools do reach capacity, require lotteries, common practice at public charter schools.

It also provides a legal profile for each state, outlining their stance on laws that govern public school admissions. In 36 states, for instance, families couldn’t appeal their public school assignment even if they wanted to; Arkansas and California are among the few to explicitly protect the right to appeal to a neutral party.

In Tampa, for example, a predominantly Black elementary school closed, its grade level reading proficiency rates at 11%. Instead of sending any of the few hundred students to the coveted school where 80% read at grade level minutes away from their homes, they were bused to poorer performing, majority minority schools further away, citing capacity constraints. 

“When you see school closures, the politics comes out. You can see the exclusion very clearly,” said DeRoche.

Low-income students, students of color and those with disabilities are those most often excluded. “Thereʼs this systemic pressure to sort of stack your school with kids who are easier to educate,” said a former administrator cited in the report.

Certain students — unhoused, migrant, incarcerated students or those with disabilities or in foster care — are supposed to be protected from enrollment discrimination by federal law, allowed to continue attending original schools in the event of moves. 

Still, the vast majority of decisions lay in the hands of administrators, whose admission practices fly under the radar, unrequired to publish data or provide written reasoning. “In some states with strong open enrollment laws, such as Arizona and Wisconsin, districts are allowed to use unverified claims of capacity constraints to keep children with disabilities from enrolling,” the report states.

As one school psychologist with Los Angeles Unified described to The 74, “I’ve seen [zones] weaponized, too … used more as a tool to get rid of students that are engaging in more problem behavior. ‘Well, their address isn’t even in our residence.’”

The school psychologist, speaking on condition of anonymity, witnessed kids get turned away about 15 times this school year. Some common reasons given to families — always verbally, never written — is that their school is full of capacity, can’t accommodate the student’s IEP, or, in one case, “we don’t enroll in April.”

A few times, students were pushed out after mentioning moves offhand to teachers who said, “well, you cause too much havoc in my classroom. So I’m gonna let somebody know.” Some were able to stay because parents were “more assertive,” in meetings with administrators, who then backed off. 

“A lot of the parents don’t know their rights – some of them are just trying to survive so they don’t have the time to go fight the district and be like, ‘oh, my kid’s not being enrolled.’ These families get taken advantage of more often.”

Such was the case in the four counties around Philadelphia, where a public radio investigation revealed the hundreds of kids kicked out of the districts each year for residency fraud were overwhelmingly . Pennsylvania does not have any law or process set for families who want to appeal admissions decisions.

But changing district attendance zone lines is no easy feat.

In , parents flooded houses within the zone for sought-after Lincoln Elementary. When the district considered withdrawing boundary lines, parents were outraged and plans fizzled. Ultimately the state allocated $20 million for the school to build an annex and add more seats, even though hundreds sat empty at schools in the neighborhood. 

“They’re trying to protect these families who feel like, ‘oh, I’ve already paid for my kids’ school via my mortgage,’” said DeRoche. 

Available to All presents an alternative: even if attendance zones were redrawn, other protections like laws to require 15% of seats be reserved for nonresident families or using a lottery once seats are filled, wouldn’t force middle- or higher- income families out of quality schools they’ve invested in via housing. 

Lines were not redrawn; Lincoln Elementary only became more accessible for the wealthy, predominantly white families who could afford to live in the attendance zone.

“[Educational redlining] is a part of the fabric of our lives and we all kind of take it for granted. We’re just trying to call it out and make people look at it straight in the face.” 

Disclosure: Stand Together provides financial support to Available to All and The 74. Andy Rotherham co-founded Bellwether Education Partners. He sits on The 74’s board of directors.

A recent decision by the Louisiana Supreme Court handed a decisive win to backers of a long-running campaign to create a new, overwhelmingly white Baton Rouge-area school system, further concentrating poverty in the remaining, majority-Black part of the district. 

When finalized, the secession will likely cost East Baton Rouge Parish Public Schools 10,000 students and 25% of its $700 million budget, school board member and former board president Dadrius Lanus estimated. 

“This is all rooted in institutional racism,” he said in an interview. “It’s about what white, middle-class people want for their kids.” 

Barring complications, it will be the fifth time in nearly a quarter-century that part of the district has broken off and formed its own school system. Currently, the district — Louisiana’s second-largest — has 40,000 students. Ninety percent are impoverished. 

A complicated tangle of laws governs the creation of new school districts, with the most straightforward path being the formation of a new municipality corresponding to the area seeking to break away. A decade ago, residents of the affluent southeast quadrant of the parish began campaigning to , St. George.

In 2019, 54% of the area’s residents voted to incorporate as a standalone municipality. Baton Rouge leaders sued, and in late April the state’s high court ruled in favor of the new city’s proponents. Republican Gov. Jeff Landry will now appoint St. George’s first mayor and five city council members.

The St. George area is represented by East Baton Rouge School Board member Nathan Rust, who backed the breakaway. Rust could not immediately be reached for comment, but his campaign website includes a statement decrying the condition of local schools.

“Our schools in District 6 are overcrowded and fraught with violence, disruption and an exodus of quality teachers,” it states. “After 20 years of Board Tenure, how is this the best public education offered to our children?” Many parents, it adds, “resort to spending their hard-earned money on private schools because they have no better option.”

In 2109, The 74 published a deep dive into a decades-long school integration scheme that shaped the district, the first four secessions and the potential implications of a St. George . Under the terms of a desegregation order — no longer in force — many East Baton Rouge students attend magnet schools that are spread throughout the district. Consequently, many children who live in the most impoverished neighborhoods — many still devastated by recent floods — attend schools in the St. George area. 

According to Lanus, the existing district has 90 days to “annex” the 10 existing schools and two properties where it had planned to build schools within the new city’s boundaries — all of which were purchased or built by parish taxpayers. St. George residents would then have a choice: pay to build their own schools, or attempt to buy existing school facilities and lots from the East Baton Rouge district. As yet unknown is whether the district would be willing to sell and, if not, how many students would be bused into the new city to attend existing district schools. 

The secession would also shift an unknown but significant amount of local tax revenue to the new city, further straining the East Baton Rouge district’s coffers. Lanus estimates the district will lose some $150 million in per-pupil state and federal aid, plus money that is supposed to flow to children in poverty, magnet school students and those receiving special education or gifted-and-talented services.  

“I can’t tell you how many calls I’ve gotten from parents saying, ‘What’s going to happen to my kids?’ ” said Lanus. “We don’t have any time to waste.”

Correction: Dadrius Lanus’s term as East Baton Rouge Parish School Board president ended Jan. 11, 2024.

Since the mid-20th century, the town of Highland Park has resisted annexation and today operates a separate, roughly 6,700-student school district that is surrounded on all sides by the 139,723-student Dallas Independent School District. Student demographics between the two school systems — and the services they’re able to offer — are markedly different, from New America’s Education Funding Equity Initiative, which explores how school district borders across the U.S. create racial and economic segregation — often intentionally. 

Included in the report is that allows users to explore school district segregation by race and class in their own communities. 

In Dallas, students of color comprise 94% of enrollment and in Highland Park,  just 18%. Such segregation extends beyond race. In Highland Park, less than 4% of students live in poverty. In the Dallas school system, a quarter of kids are impoverished, with some of the city’s most underserved neighborhoods just a stone’s throw from Highland Park. 

Such jarring school district disparities, which create real-world gaps in learning opportunities for students, exist across the country. America’s patchwork school district borders carry serious consequences for communities and children’s academic outcomes, according to the report by New America, a left-leaning think tank based in Washington, D.C. Nationally, about 30% of school funding is generated by local property taxes, a reality that creates haves and have-nots between property-wealthy districts and those that serve predominantly low-income families. 

Much of the disparities can be blamed on inequitable housing policies, such as redlining and , which were explicitly implemented to segregate neighborhoods along race and class lines, ultimately showing up “not just in residential patterns but also in school budgets,” said Zahava Stadler, a project director at New America who shared the findings of her research during a workshop last week at the SXSW EDU conference in Austin, Texas. 

“These are policy choices that are being made not just in the way we’ve designed school funding systems, but also in the way we actively maintain school funding systems year to year,” she said. “All of those things are policy choices that are being made by state policymakers every single year.”  

In total, researchers analyzed more than 13,000 school districts across the country, along with more than 25,000 pairs of neighboring school district borders, to identify how such arbitrary divisions work to generate inequality. Nationwide, they found that, on average, enrollment of students of color fluctuated by 14 percentage points between neighboring school districts. Along the 100 most racially segregated school district borders, however, the average difference was 78 percentage points. In other words, in one school district, students of color comprised 2% of the total enrollment while, in a district directly next door, they accounted for 80% of the student body. 

Economic segregation was similarly stark. On average, the enrollment of impoverished students fluctuated by 5.2 percentage points between neighboring school districts. Yet along the 100 most economically segregated school district borders, researchers found the average divide was roughly six times that, at 31 percentage points. One example, the Utica, New York, school district where 33% of students live in poverty, compared to the neighboring New Hartford district where 5% do. 

While school district border changes have been used by communities interested in concentrating their affluence, Stadler said the opposite — district consolidation — should be viewed as “a tool in the toolbox of creating more equitable school districts,” establishing schools that are more diverse while ensuring that all students have fairer access to educational resources. 

But local context matters. Simply merging school districts to eliminate racial and economic segregation isn’t always the most equitable solution, the report argues, as each area has its own individual policies and contexts. In South Dakota, for example, researchers observed striking racial and economic segregation between the predominantly white Custer School District and the neighboring Oglala Lakota School District, located on the high-poverty Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Indigenous students represent 96% of enrollment on the reservation and less than 4% in Custer. 

An influx of federal and state dollars has left the Oglala Lakota County Schools among South Dakota’s best-funded, but they remain among its lowest-performing. These high levels of funding “do not ensure our children a rich education,” Diana Cournoyer, executive director of the National Indian Education Association, argues in the report. Along with historical challenges and the scars of trauma and colonialism, Cournoyer said, the reservation’s schools also have to contend with bureaucracy and limitations on how they can spend those government dollars. That creates barriers in how they can use funds “to address the unique needs of Native students, which results in inequitable access to opportunities.” 

Despite the imbalance in school resources, Cournoyer notes that students on the reservation benefit from cultural and language support — something they could miss if they attended schools in Custer, even with its “nicer facilities and more advanced technology.” The city and its school district were named for George Armstrong Custer, a U.S. commander who fought and killed Indigenous people on the Great Plains before his defeat at Little Bighorn. 

“They would not be in a school environment that reflects or values their native culture,” Cournoyer wrote. “They would be isolated, away from the protection of their family and tribal leadership. They would be more likely to encounter racism and stereotyping, making them less comfortable with expressing their Native identity.”

As a teenager in the 1950s he followed and documented the South Carolina case that challenged segregation in public education. Briggs was eventually appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court where it became one of five cases consolidated into what is now known as Brown v. Board of Education. 

Williams, now 86, still reflects on the injustices he witnessed in South Carolina in the wake of the case: most petitioners lost their jobs and some were driven out of town. The consequences have reverberated for generations.

“They were ostracized in their own community,” he told The 74. 

Since the 1960s, Williams has asserted that the 20 parents of Briggs v. Elliott faced a second injustice: They were forgotten. Despite being the first of the five cases to make it to the Supreme Court, Briggs was not chosen as the lead case and was therefore relegated to the position of “et al.” in the seminal Brown v. Board’s name. This naming meant that despite the families’ sacrifices, their stories were removed from the foreground, according to Williams. For decades, he has been advocating for a correction, asking over 100 attorneys to take on a case that would challenge the ordering — and the naming — of Brown. 

In some ways, Williams is a hidden figure among hidden figures, who took up the cause of renaming Brown even before Nathaniel Briggs, the 76-year-old son of the lead plaintiff in Briggs v. Elliott, Harry Briggs, came on board and before South Carolina attorney and civil rights organizer Tom Mullikin agreed to argue it pro bono. 

Mullikin would spend years interviewing the families from the original Briggs case before filing before the U.S. Supreme Court in November 2023. Earlier this month, the justices denied the petition without comment.

“I would do it again,” Mullikin told The 74. “I would spend another four years doing it. And I’ll spend the rest of my life talking about it because it’s an injustice. Sometimes, there’s a price to being first. And in this case, there’s no denying that people lost their lives, their economic fortunes, and their livelihoods because of their courage and stepping out.”

While on its face a legal battle, the quest to rename the landmark Brown case lays bare how steep that price was and how lasting its painful legacy. For Nathaniel Briggs, it was the dissolution of his family. His father was fired from his job as a gas station attendant; his mother from hers as a motel maid. 

His father began working at a family member’s farm but when he took his cotton to market, Briggs said, people refused to buy it because of the association with his last name. In 1957, out of options, his father moved to Miami. At the time, Briggs was 9 years old. He was devastated when his father was forced to leave the family behind.

“Once a month he would call. I’d hear my dad’s voice for a couple of minutes … I’d put those coins in the old, black dial-up telephone thing, and I’d hear my dad’s voice.”

South Carolina — and the stories of the Briggses and the other families in Clarendon County — have remained largely invisible, despite the notoriety of the titular Brown case, according to Nathaniel Briggs.

“The original signees of this petition, the seniors, they’re all dead,” he said. “So I’m saying, who can speak for dry bones? Me. I’ll speak for those dry bones that cannot speak for themselves … Don’t let this nation, a historian, or a writer write you out of the picture.”

A clerical error or a strategic move? 

The Supreme Court brief that Mullikin filed on behalf of Nathaniel Briggs, as well as Beatrice Brown Rivers and Ethel Brown Marshall, two of the signatories of the original South Carolina petition, asserted that Brown had been incorrectly named due to a clerical error.

Thurgood Marshall, the civil rights attorney and first Black Supreme Court justice, filed in the fall of 1950. Initially, Black parents in Clarendon County were just requesting school buses for their children. But by the time the case was ultimately filed against R.W. Elliott, the school board president, the parents were challenging segregation in its entirety. 

Eventually, Briggs was appealed through the court system and was the first of the five consolidated cases to reach the Supreme Court. It was returned back to the lower district court in 1952. According to Mullikin’s brief, when the case again made its way to the Supreme Court for the second time “the Clerk inadvertently docketed the Briggs case after Brown instead of placing it back as the first case filed. This inadvertent clerical misstep deprived the petitioners their rightful place in history in spite of the great physical, emotional, and financial risks taken by each petitioner. The petitioners request that their place in history be restored by the simple act of reordering the petitioners to the just and accurate place.” 

Mullikin noted that there may be people who view this case as an attempt to pit the involved families against each other, but that to his knowledge “there’s none of that happening.”

“This is in no way to marginalize what [the Brown family] went through or the importance of their case. It’s simply a matter of factual accounting of which case is first. In no way was our collective efforts meant to marginalize or minimize the sacrifice that those families made.”

“We’re not in any conflict with what the Brown case stands for, but we are in conflict with the naming of it,” Williams, the civil rights photographer, said. 

Cheryl Brown Henderson, the daughter of the lead plaintiff in the Brown lawsuit, declined to comment on the record. In an interview with she said that while she did not oppose the South Carolina effort, she had expressed her misgivings to the South Carolina descendants. She told the outlet that the Brown Foundation for Educational Equity, Excellence and Research had worked to promote the history and legacies of all five cases that made up the Brown and Bolling decisions.

Some historians believe that Brown was given preference for strategic reasons: that the lead case would have an easier path coming out of a “border state” like Kansas vs. a Deep South state like South Carolina and in Brown, the court potentially saw a chance to push the school segregation issue out of the Jim Crow South and onto a national platform.

Going home to Clarendon County

After the original court filing, the Briggs family splintered; with Nathaniel, his mother, sister and brother attempting to reunite with his father in Florida, leaving their grandmother behind, and other brothers moving north to New York City. 

A year later, the Florida family members returned to South Carolina. Briggs enrolled in Scott’s Branch High School, the subject of Briggs v. Elliot and which remained segregated despite the high court’s ruling almost a decade before. Even at the all-Black high school, Briggs said he faced discrimination because of his last name. “Not all of the teachers liked the Briggs children because you’re upsetting a system,” he said.

Those hardships prompted another move by the rest of the family to New York City in the early 1960s. Today, Briggs lives in New Jersey but has returned to South Carolina every year for the past six decades.

“I love my community,” he said. 

In 2014, almost 100% of the schools in Clarendon County were de facto segregated. 

“Most of the white students attend private schools while black students attend public schools, which are still notoriously underfunded,” Mullikin wrote in his brief. Scott’s Branch Middle/High School has a 95.7% minority enrollment and 100% of the students are economically disadvantaged, according to the brief, despite the county of 31,000 being almost evenly split demographically.

In some ways, these numbers are unsurprising since school segregation is still a core feature of American public education, said Ansley Erickson, associate professor of history and education policy and co-director of the Center on History and Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. In 2021, approximately 60% of Black and Hispanic public school students attended schools where 75% or more of students were students of color.

It is important to recognize the burden desegregation efforts put on Black families, she added.

“The key thing that [the Briggs] case can bring to our attention is how much work desegregation required of Black students and families,” she said. “The Supreme Court decision in Brown was not self-executing, meaning that it didn’t automatically tell districts what to do. It established the legal standard, and then made it possible for districts to be sued by local families and attorneys. And that means that it shifted the labor onto families like the Briggses, families like the Browns, families like hundreds that we could name if we look at every local school district that was segregated, and where someone brought the case to court. And that labor is tremendous.”

“Every one of these local districts should recognize the people who did this labor on behalf of justice.”

Plaintiffs had sought the Supreme Court decision to short-circuit the standard trial court process, asking the justices to rule that the existence of racially imbalanced Twin Cities schools by itself proved their case.

If the families who brought the 2015 suit, Alejandro Cruz-Guzman vs. State of Minnesota, move forward, they will not have to prove that the state intended to create segregated schools. They will need to show only that schools in each community ended up with racial imbalances.

They will, however, have to demonstrate that those enrollment patterns deprive some groups of students of the “adequate” education they are guaranteed under the state constitution. Over the last quarter-century, Minnesota has required traditional school districts to make good-faith efforts toward integration, resulting in a tangle of ineffective “voluntary” rules.

In trying to craft rules that conform to the law, officials have not been able to prove that racial isolation per se results in poor academic outcomes. Nonetheless, the task forces and policymakers have repeatedly concluded that a large bipartisan majority of people value diverse schools for moral and cultural reasons. 

The decision overturns a ruling from a state appellate court, which held that only “intentional segregation of the type described by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education” would violate the state constitution.

The lawsuit asks the court to find that Minnesota laws allowing students to attend schools outside their home districts and in public charter schools contribute to segregation. Charter schools are specifically exempted from the state’s integration rules, which require districts to make good-faith efforts to foster diversity. The plaintiffs asked the court to overturn the relevant portion of the charter school law. 

In response, a number of charter schools were allowed to join the case. While students apply for seats in blind lotteries, a number of Minnesota charters now enroll students almost entirely of a single race or culture. Several of the schools that joined the suit dramatically outperform their traditional district counterparts, complicating the plaintiffs’ argument that racial imbalances alone deny students their right to an adequate education.

If the plaintiffs prevail, attorneys for the charter schools have argued, the high-performing schools would be hard-pressed to continue with their culturally affirming models — which serve the families who sought them out — while responding to pressure to enroll a racial and ethnic cross-section of students. 

In the main opinion, the justices made a distinction between state and district policies that exclude particular groups of students — intentionally isolating or segregating children — and the existence of racial imbalances. 

Newly installed Chief Justice Natalie Hudson, the first Black woman to hold the post, issued a blistering dissent, arguing that “de facto segregation” in Twin Cities schools by definition violates the state’s constitution. 

Attorneys for the plaintiffs have not yet said whether they plan to proceed to trial.

Education activists are expressing disappointment with a judge’s long-awaited ruling that found a racial imbalance in numerous New Jersey school districts, but not widespread segregation statewide.

Retired Supreme Court Justice Gary Stein, chairman of the New Jersey Coalition for Diverse and Inclusive Schools, which launched the , called Friday’s ruling “hard to understand.”

“It’s like saying to a patient, you have cancer in your lungs, but not the rest of your body, so we’re not going to do anything about it,” Stein told the New Jersey Monitor.

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Mercer County Superior Court Judge Robert Lougy’s  agrees with the plaintiffs — a coalition of students, school districts, and organizations including the NAACP and Latino Action Network — that they “demonstrated marked and persistent racial imbalance” in schools across the state that the state has failed to remedy. But he also found that they “fail to prove the state’s entire education system is unconstitutionally segregated because of race or ethnicity.”

The plaintiffs sought to have Lougy rule before trial that the state was liable for school segregation. The defendants, which include the state Board of Education, asked him to dismiss the case. He largely declined both requests.

Larry Lustberg, attorney for Latino Action Network, said in a statement to the New Jersey Monitor that the matter might be set for trial, but it’s unclear what facts would be tried because the court rejected most of the state’s defenses.

He said there are four options: a trial, a settlement discussion, either party could file a motion for reconsideration, or either party could file a motion to have an appeal heard.

“We are trying to sort that through,” he said.

The state Attorney General’s Office, which argued the case on behalf of the defendants, said it is still reviewing the decision and declined to comment further.

The lawsuit hinges on the accusation that because of a state requirement mandating children attend the schools in towns where they live, schools in New Jersey are heavily segregated. The plaintiffs cite examples like Paterson, where the public schools are nearly 70% Latino and 20% Black, and West Milford, where students of color make up less than 15% of the school population.

In the 674 public school districts serving 1.3 million students, about 585,000 Black and Latino students attend public schools with student populations that are more than 75% non-white, the lawsuit says, citing 2017 data. More than half of those students attend schools that are more than 90% non-white.

Julie Borst is the executive director of Save Our Schools, a nonprofit school advocacy organization that was not involved in the lawsuit but supports its mission. She said she was disappointed but not surprised by Lougy’s opinion.

She argued that a trial could be good for the public to better understand this issue. Potential remedies to school segregation — like busing students to other districts or specialized magnet schools — are complicated, and could confuse parents, she said.

“Maybe this ends up being better because now it becomes more public. People will get to learn about it,” Borst said. “Maybe that hopefully spurs more discussion about what this looks like and what resources are really needed.”

Stein criticized the lengthy process it took to arrive at an opinion that does not plainly lay out what the next steps are. He called the delays “very difficult to understand.”

The case was first filed in 2018 following a  that alleged New Jersey’s public schools are among the most segregated in the nation. Oral arguments did not begin until March 2022, and the judge released his opinion 18 months later. New Jersey’s courts dealt with a backlog throughout the pandemic and continue to face a shortage of judges across the state, contributing to some delays in cases like this.

“I believe that the New Jersey Judiciary has to move much more quickly than it has been on this very, very significant issue for our state’s African American and Latino students,” he said. “Some of the students in this case have graduated from high school and moved on.”

And now that this may go to trial, it could drag on for months or years. Borst worries about what this means for another generation of students attending segregated schools. She doesn’t think the state will seek out a solution or overhaul school residency requirements without an order from a judge.

“I feel like we’re in the status quo. They’ve been safe and very comfortable not doing anything for all this time, so I can’t imagine that this decision is going to move the needle on that at all,” she said.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com. Follow New Jersey Monitor on and .

“They were both segregated middle schools,” said Akeshia Craven-Howell, who until recently was assistant superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, overseeing student school assignments. 

“Sedgefield Middle School serves students primarily from lower socioeconomic communities and Alexander Graham serves students from communities with primarily higher socioeconomic factors.”

But in 2019, the district, fueled by strong parent advocacy, tried something new. It mixed the two buildings’ student populations by creating a combined attendance area and rearranging which elementary schools sent students to which middle schools.

“We were able to create two middle schools that were much more socioeconomically diverse,” said Craven-Howell, who now works as an advisor for Bellwether Education Partners.

Across the country, thousands of schools closely resemble the segregated Sedgefield and Alexander Graham, a new U.S. Government Accountability Office reveals. 

Over 7,800 predominantly same-race schools, it finds, are located within just five miles of a different same-race school. Widening the radius to 10 miles swells the total to over 13,500. 

Those cases may represent “low-hanging fruit” for integration efforts, said Craven-Howell. 

“It doesn’t require a significant trade-off with home-to-school distance, which I think is often a barrier for some families when they think about school diversity.”

A strong majority of parents say they would like to see schools increase their racial and socioeconomic balance, but support wanes when the undertaking involves busing programs or further travel, according to from The Century Foundation. Opponents of integration schemes often cite lengthy bus rides in their resistance to the plans.

In many cases, however, such a sacrifice is not required, said Richard Kahlenberg, the organization’s director of K-12 equity.

“It’s so often true that people will say, ‘We would love integrated schools, but it’s just not logistically possible because of distances,’” he told The 74.

That’s often a false dichotomy.

“Distance, in many cases, is not an excuse for segregation,” he said.

‘Wrong side of the tracks’

Roughly a third of the 13,500 schools identified in the federal report belong to the same school system as their counterpart campus, meaning possible desegregation efforts would lie directly in the hands of district leaders. 

Some 9 in 10 have a pair across district lines, which can entrench racial imbalances between campuses, said report co-author Jacqueline Nowicki. (The percentages, 32% and 90%, add to more than 100% because some schools have pairs both within and outside of their district.)

“Where we choose to draw school district boundaries, … that matters a lot as to where kids are going to schools,” the GAO education director told The 74.

“School district lines are not God-given,” added Kahlenberg. Florida and several other states, for example, use large county-based school systems to help balance their classrooms racially and socioeconomically.

Using 2020-21 data, the most recent figures available from the U.S. Education Department’s Common Core of Data, Nowicki’s team found that over a third of U.S. students — roughly 18.5 million — attend predominantly same-race schools. They applied the “predominantly same-race” label to schools where students of a single race or ethnicity make up at least 75% of the enrollment. The percentage of highly segregated U.S. schools decreased slightly from 2016, the last time the GAO investigated the issue. But given increases in diversity over that time span, including more students who identify as Asian or Hispanic, the researcher doesn’t see the numbers as particularly encouraging. 

The share of students of color attending highly segregated schools, which tend disproportionately to also be high-poverty schools, ticked up, she pointed out. Those campuses, on average, have worse academic outcomes compared to their wealthier peers.

“What does it mean, in a country that’s increasingly becoming more diverse, to have large portions of kids going to school only with other kids who look like themselves?” said Nowicki.

The reasons why the U.S. continues to have divided classrooms stretch far into the past, her agency’s report explains. In one major example, redlining, a federal 1930s practice of denying home loans to borrowers of color while supplying them to white candidates, systematically reduced Black homeownership and codified racial divisions between neighborhoods. The impacts of the discriminatory policy continue to haunt education outcomes to this day. 

“This is where phrases like ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ have come from,” said the GAO director.

‘The city that made desegregation work’

In the case of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the recent school integration push comes on the heels of a back-and-forth history after Brown v. Board of Education.

Charlotte was as “the city that made desegregation work.” After the landmark 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education ruling upheld the district’s busing scheme, the city’s integration plan became a model for cities across the southern U.S. — which in the current day are than other regions of the country.

“Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s proudest achievement of the past 20 years is not the city’s impressive new skyline or its strong, growing economy. Its proudest achievement is its fully integrated schools,” the Charlotte Observer editorial board in 1984.

But after a 1999 decision struck down court-mandated desegregation requirements, campuses in the area quickly became — with between its 180 schools.

In 2014, the area received sobering news: a by Harvard University researchers ranked Charlotte dead last out of 50 American cities in upward mobility, or the likelihood of low-income youth rising out of poverty.

The report blamed two main factors for the abysmal assessment: racial segregation and school quality.

“One of the predictors of low levels of social mobility is school and neighborhood segregation,” explained Kahlenberg.

When the 140,000-student district resurrected decades-old conversations on how to integrate its schools, the memory of past efforts remained vivid for many residents. There was an appetite for the changes, but they still proved difficult, said Craven-Howell. In merging communities that had different socioeconomic makeups, the district had to be careful to make sure the voices and needs of wealthier parents did not drown out those of lower-income families.

But the effort has been a success thus far, said the former Charlotte-Mecklenburg administrator, and they have begun to move the needle on integration. However, they affect only a small share of campuses. She hopes the district will continue to build on its progress and “identify opportunities to replicate some of the great work that was done six years ago,” the last time it reviewed student school assignments.

Charlotte is not alone in the push. The district is a member of The Century Foundation’s , a network of 27 school systems, 17 charter school networks and 13 housing organizations across the country undertaking efforts to chip away at segregation in their schools and communities. Though they account for only a tiny fraction of the 13,500 segregated school pairs identified by the GAO report, Craven-Howell believes they demonstrate what’s possible. 

“There are districts all over the country who are thinking about [integration], who are trying things,” she said. “It’s not the case that a district has to embark on this work without there being any models or examples to look to.”

And as for Sedgefield and Alexander Graham, the Charlotte middle schools that combined their student bodies in 2019, the change has worked, said Craven-Howell.

“People don’t think about it as the two schools and the two communities that paired. They really have become a single community.”

But until recently, it remained unclear what impact the decision had on California’s Chicano students.

This spring, in a published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, scholars Francisca Antman and Kalena Cortes filled the gap with the first-ever quantitative analysis of the case’s long-run impacts. 

Participating in desegregation, they found, led to a significant increase in educational attainment for Mexican-American students. Those born after the ruling completed nearly a full year of schooling more than a comparison cohort born 10 years prior and were nearly 20% more likely to graduate from high school. In the decades following the case, Chicano students in highly segregated counties were able to cut by more than half the disparity in their schooling outcomes with those of Chicano students in minimally segregated counties.

“What we see is really a dramatic rise in educational attainment for Hispanics after the end of de jure segregation,” said Antman, an associate professor of economics at the University of Colorado Boulder. That finding, she noted, held true “particularly in those areas that we think were most likely to be segregated.”

In California before the Mendez decision, segregating Mexican-American students into separate schools was common practice, driven to a large extent by . Those who advocated for separate schools claimed Hispanic students were unclean, intellectually inferior and lacking English language skills — even though Mexican-American youth who did not speak Spanish were also segregated.

Today, Latino residents make up of the U.S. population and an even of the nation’s public school student body. Yet Latino youth continue to be . Analyzing the Mendez decision is key to understanding the present circumstances for Latino students and families, the authors .

With desegregation, Antman explained, “Hispanic students [began to] have access to white classrooms or schools that they didn’t before” — meaning more resources and improved facilities. Though exact data on the flow of financial resources does not exist, she and her co-author hypothesize that such shifts may have triggered the outsized benefits for Chicano youth.

At the same time, education outcomes improved for all learners, Mexican-American and white students alike.

“Educational attainment is rising for all groups,” she said, adding that students nationwide tended to complete more schooling over the time period her study observed.

There is no official record of which areas separated Mexican-American students into separate schools as exists for school segregation in the American South — posing a major obstacle to research on the topic. That did not stop Antman and Cortes.

“A lot of times, researchers only pursue questions that they can answer [cleanly with existing data],” said the CU Boulder economist. But “sometimes the question is so important that you want to pursue it even if you can’t get the absolute best, clearest answer.”

She and her co-author got around the limitation by using 1940 census data to create a proxy measure for segregation levels. According to historical accounts, areas with the highest share of Hispanics in their population were the locales with the most rampant segregation. The researchers then identified the top quarter of California counties with the highest share of Hispanic residents and compared them to the bottom quarter with the least to represent high- and low-segregation counties.

In another key hurdle, records are also absent on how effectively each school district followed through on the desegregation effort. Implementation varied at the local level with some districts opening separate schools or maintaining segregation in certain grade levels while desegregating others. The authors account for the messy rollout using what’s called an “intent-to-treat” approach that includes all students in their analysis, regardless of their district’s follow through on desegregation. The method simply measures the effect of students’ exposure to the legal change. If anything, the approach would understate the impacts of integration, the authors explain, by grouping students who experienced desegregation together with those who remained separated.

As with the Brown case, impacts grew over time, Antman and Cortes found. Mexican-American students who were toddlers at the time of Mendez were likely to complete more total years of schooling than those who were in primary school (who in turn were more likely to see higher educational attainment than their older peers). Achievement gaps between Chicano and white students closed over time.

Compared to cohorts that began school before Mendez, those who matriculated after segregation was outlawed were 18.4% more likely to graduate from junior high school and 19.4% more likely to graduate from high school, the analysis revealed.

Fast forward to the current day, and school segregation levels nationwide have — with a for Latino students, who continue to have than any other racial or ethnic group in the U.S. and have been hit especially hard by the pandemic. With that backdrop, Antman said her results underscore the continued need for integration.

“Some might might say, ‘Well, would it really matter to desegregate [in the present day]?’” she said. “This certainly would suggest that it would matter very much.”

New York City schools are reeling from COVID-19 and have yet to fully assess the damage wrought by three academic years of disrupted instruction. Adams will take charge amid concern for missed learning and disenrollment, in addition to issues that pre-date the pandemic, including and .

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With mayoral control, Adams has wide discretion over the Department of Education, though how deeply he will seek to leave his imprint on the city’s roughly 1,600 schools over the next four years is unclear. Though mayoral control is technically set to expire in 2022, Adams is to request an extension from the state.

Multiple Adams to tap his close advisor David Banks, founder of the Eagle Academy for Young Men, as the next schools chancellor. But the Brooklyn native may also maintain current Chancellor Meisha Porter, a longtime NYC public school teacher and administrator who is a friend and former employee of Banks.

The mayor-elect is a retired police captain known for his within the department, and will be only the second Black New Yorker elected to run City Hall. His commitment to education is closely tied to his experiences with the criminal justice system.

“If we don’t educate, we will incarcerate,” he said in a recent mayoral debate.

Adams also shared that, as a young person, he struggled with a learning disability that went undiagnosed until college. 

“I overcame a learning disability and went to college and was able to obtain my degrees. And now I will be the mayor in charge of the entire Department of Education,” he joked in his Tuesday night.

Adams plans to expand screening for dyslexia in city schools, and has articulated his intent to reconceptualize the education system as “birth to career” rather than K-12, including an emphasis on career and technical education.

But even as he prepares to take office, few specifics of the incoming mayor’s education agenda are known. 

Here are three key issues that will demand his attention:

1 Gifted & talented education

In October, Mayor Bill de Blasio made headlines for announcing that he planned to overhaul the city’s gifted and talented education program, long criticized for its stark failure to include Black, Hispanic and other students. 

The program, which uses a single test administered to 4-year olds to determine admission, serves about 2,500 of the city’s roughly 65,000 kindergarten students each year. De Blasio announced that he sought to scrap the test and implement “” for all youngsters through second grade, with screening for subject-specific advanced coursework not coming until the start of third grade.

Adams, however, said that he plans to keep and expand the city’s gifted program. In a debate, he noted that he intended to make the tests opt-out, rather than opt-in, so that more families have access.

“This way, we would catch all the children who are capable of being gifted and talented,” said Adams.

But the mayor-elect has also signaled that he harbors misgivings over the program’s admission process.

“I don’t believe a 4-year old taking an exam should determine the rest of their school experience,” he said during an Oct. 20 debate.

For older students, Adams entrance tests to the city’s selective high schools, which have infamously let in of Black students. Teen activists calling for integration of the city’s schools have also demanded their overhaul and have a federal civil rights complaint pending against the use of all NYC school screening practices.

2 Student vaccine mandates

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endorsed coronavirus vaccines for children ages 5 to 11 on Tuesday, meaning virtually all K-12 students are now eligible for shots. 

Naturally, questions swirl over whether the nation’s largest school system will require children to be inoculated. De Blasio enforced the city’s vaccine mandate for school staff, which took effect in early October and of teachers to receive their shots, but he has taken a softer approach on student vaccinations. The outgoing mayor has supported schools to set up clinics, but has not gone as far as to require shots. On Wednesday, he announced that every school serving students aged 5 through 11 will host vaccination sites starting Monday.

Adams, however, is mulling student vaccine mandates, and has said he is “open to having the remote options of education” for unvaccinated learners.

K-12 vaccine mandates for students remain relatively rare, with a handful of California school systems, including Los Angeles and Oakland, as well as Hoboken, New Jersey among the only districts with such policies.

3 Disenrollment

Enrollment in New York City schools dropped 1.9 percent this year, with 938,000 students now in traditional public schools, down from 955,000 last year and slightly over 1 million in the 2019-20 school year.

Though the relative drop is less than other major cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, the continued bleeding of students provides further evidence of the profound disruption that the pandemic has had on NYC public education. The Department of Education has yet to release figures on the share of students missing so much school that they may be academically at risk, and some officials fear that wide swaths of students, especially in under-resourced communities, may be disengaged from school.

Re-engaging disconnected students will be a chief challenge of the mayor-elect’s effort to bounce back from pandemic schooling.

​​As district schools lost students, enrollment in independently run city charter schools rose 3.2 percent this year, to 143,000, following national trends. Adams has said that he intends to keep the current cap on charter schools, while also adding that successful models should be duplicated and failing ones shut down. De Blasio was known for his battles with the city’s charter sector.

“We look forward to working closely with [Mayor-elect Eric Adams] and his administration to create a partnership that will benefit all NYC public school students, including the 143,000 attending charter schools,” said James Merriman, CEO of the New York City Charter School Center in a statement.