The Politics of School Districting: A Case Study in Upstate New York (Case Study‪)‬

Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Plessy doctrine of "separate but equal" in 1953 in Brown v. Board of Education, the nation has not moved steadily towards the envisioned ideal of equal educational opportunity--a requisite of which, the Brown court found, would be the abolition of racial segregation in schooling. Rather, our school system still is far too "separate and unequal." After spending many hours over a period of many years in high-poverty and high-minority central city schools, Jean Anyon (1997) described practices of "ghetto schooling" and Jonathan Kozol (2006) condemned what he calls our system of "apartheid education." Gary Orfield and his colleagues at The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, who have been publishing annual reports on the demographics of public schooling in the U.S., recently documented an "educational landscape that is increasingly multiracial yet, simultaneously, separate and unequal" (Orfield & Lee, 2006). To the now-expansive literature on the causes and consequences of segregation in schooling and of inequality in educational opportunity in the United States, I would like to add a call for more attention to the politics of school districting--that is, to how and why districts are created, in the service of whose interests, and with what consequences for students. (1) Towards that end, this article reconstructs the solidification of a school district in upstate New York, the Spackenkill Union Free Schools, a six-mile-wide district in the town of Poughkeepsie. In a battle with the New York State Education Department in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Spackenkill schools succeeded in avoiding consolidation with their poorer, larger, and far more diverse neighboring district, the Poughkeepsie City Schools. (The town of Poughkeepsie includes both the city of Poughkeepsie and the community known as Spackenkill.)