The fiftieth anniversary of Brown vs. Board
and the need to reduce class size
by Leonie Haimson
May 17, 2004
It seems as though with the celebration of the anniversary of Brown vs. the Board of Education, countless articles have appeared on whether the effects of integration have proven to be disappointing, especially as there still exists a substantial achievement gap between the races. In relation to this, I wanted to bring to your attention the most interesting news article I’ve read on Brown, as well as a related finding that has recently been released. The two of them together point out one of the reasons the achievement gap has proved so especially stubborn, even after Brown, and why reducing class size is more important now than even before this historic decision.
First of all, the survival of the achievement gap should be no surprise to anyone, since students of color are still more likely to be in schools with fewer resources, and especially, in larger classes, even though we’ve known for decades that one of the most effective ways to reduce the achievement gap is to reduce class size. (See Educational Testing Service, Parsing the Achievement Gap, 2003, chart on p.15, showing that higher percentage of minority students are in classes of 25 or over.)
But the fact that minority students are in larger classes, even after Brown, also has disadvantaged them in another way. Last month, an article in USA Today pointed out that when schools across the country became integrated, one of the unforeseen consequences was that many black teachers and principals throughout the nation lost their jobs, as white administrators didn’t want to hire them for the newly integrated schools.
As a result, most black and Hispanic students still have only white teachers to this day. The article revealed that in 2000, 38% of public schools had not a single teacher of color. We also know that nationally, only 6% of teachers overall are black, and shockingly, this figure has actually decreased since 1991, when the profession was 8% black. Even in large urban school districts, where the student body is largely minority, only about 18% of teachers are black and 9% Hispanic .
Why is any of this important or relevant to class size?
There has long been a debate in the research as to whether it matters academically if students are of the same race as their teachers, and if so, why this should be. Thomas Dee, professor at Swarthmore, had an article in the spring issue of Education Next, in which he analyzed data from the STAR study, one of the few times teachers have been randomly assigned to different classes, to see if this large-scale experiment would shed light on this very issue. Sure enough, he found that both white and black students learned more when they had teachers of their same race.
According to Dee, students did better every year they taught by a same-race teacher, and these benefits were cumulative; others fell further behind every year that they had a teacher of a different race. So to some extent, then, the racial disparity of the teaching force, which has been an unfortunate consequence of Brown, has likely contributed to the survival of the achievement gap among minority students that integration was meant to solve, since it is now much less likely that they will have a teacher of their own race.
But there is an even more interesting finding in the unabridged version of Dee’s article, soon to appear in The Review of Economics and Statistics, but for some reason omitted from the abridged version in Education NEXT: For students who were assigned to smaller classes with teachers of a different race, the differences in achievement were so small as to be statistically insignificant. Indeed, both white and black students did better in small classes, no matter what their teachers’ racial background.
These findings are especially illuminating, since they suggest yet another reason why reducing class size here in NYC and elsewhere is so important:
When teachers have so many students that they cannot get to know each of them individually, it is likely that they are forced to ration their time by affording only some of them the full benefit of their attention. It is not surprising that their efforts are usually focused on those students with whom they can easiest identify, especially those who sit in the front and seem eager to connect with them. The same phenomenon probably occurs on the students’ side – but if they too are able to get to know their teacher as an individual as a result of being in a smaller class, the barrier of their own racial stereotypes can be more easily transcended. As LouAnne Johnson has written, the LA teacher whose memoirs inspired the movie “Dangerous Minds, “When classes are small enough to allow individual student-teacher interaction, a minor miracle occurs: Teachers teach and students learn.”
The article from USA Today follows.
Leonie Haimson
Class Size Matters
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Thousands of black teachers lost jobs
April 28. 2004
In the spring of 1953, with the Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation case pending in the U.S. Supreme Court, Wendell Godwin, superintendent of schools in Topeka, sent letters to black elementary school teachers. Painfully polite, the letters couldn't mask the message: If segregation dies, you will lose your jobs.
"Our Board will proceed on the assumption that the majority of people in Topeka will not want to employ negro teachers next year for White children," he wrote.
A year later, the high court declared segregation unconstitutional. Over the next 20 years, thousands of black educators in Topeka and elsewhere lost their jobs. Researchers say the firings decimated the black teaching force and educational tradition, helping set the stage for decades of poor performance by black students.
It's a little-known and unintended consequence of the ruling, but observers say the nation is still paying the price. "By and large, this culture of black teaching died with Brown ," says Vanessa Siddle Walker of Emory University, author of Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South.
In 1954, about 82,000 black teachers were responsible for teaching 2 million black children. In the 11 years immediately following Brown, more than 38,000 black teachers and administrators in 17 Southern and border states lost their jobs.
In Arkansas, for instance, virtually no black educators were hired in desegregated districts from 1958 to 1968. In Texas, 5,000 "substandard" white teachers were employed, while certified black teachers "were told to go into other lines of work," says Carol Karpinski, an independent researcher and New York City educator.
Black principals fared even worse. By some estimates, 90% lost their jobs in 11 Southern states. Many were fired, and others retired. Still others lost their jobs for minor transgressions, such as failing to hold monthly fire drills. Those who stayed often were demoted to assistant principal or to coaching or teaching jobs. Others were offered clerical or even janitorial work.
In 1964, Florida had black principals in all 67 school districts. Ten years later, with integration underway and the black school-aged population growing, only 40 districts had black principals.
In North Carolina, the number of black principals dropped from 620 to 40 from 1967 to 1971.
Because school districts usually closed down all-black schools during desegregation, black educators were easier to fire, despite often having better credentials than their white peers.
National Education Association data from the period show that 85% of minority teachers had college degrees, compared with 75% of white teachers.
"It's not just that they were trained," Walker says. "They were well-trained." But their jobs were still imperiled, researchers say.
In June 1955, a group of white residents in Greenville, Miss., demanded that local school boards fire black teachers who were registered voters. That August, the Georgia State Board of Education adopted a resolution barring teachers from membership in the NAACP.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government power to stop the firings, but observers say enforcement was spotty. Teachers got little help from unions — in the mid-1950s, the American Teachers Association, an all-black union, was too weak, and the larger National Education Association "was controlled by prejudiced people," says Helen Pate-Bain, NEA's president from 1970-71.
Teachers' attitudes have changed since Pate-Bain first attended NEA's annual meeting in 1959. "The big conversation was against integration of schools. Teachers had to grow up as well."
By the mid-1960s, even integration supporters were worrying that black students weren't always being well-served in their new schools, that Brown could bring about "a wholesale destruction of the black educational tradition," says historian David Cecelski, author of Along Freedom Road : Hyde County, North Carolina and the Fate of Black Schools in the South.
"By that point, the Southern grass roots, African-Americans, were growing ambivalent about school integration in this very profound way," he says. "And not school integration per se, but the way in which Brown's legacy was being enacted. Many parents were regretting it."
Losing so many black teachers only helped sour more families on Brown.
"It took a chunk out of the black middle class," says Linda Tillman of Wayne State University.
Educators say the effects are still with us: From 1975 to 1985, the number of black students majoring in education dropped by 66%, says Mildred Hudson, chief executive officer of Recruiting New Teachers, a Massachusetts organization that helps train and retain teachers. "Those of us who would have been teachers stopped majoring in education."
In 2000, 84% of teachers were white, while only 61% of students were white. Blacks make up about 17% of public school students but fewer than 8% of teachers; in 2000, 38% of public schools had not a single teacher of color.
The NAACP anticipated some job losses. In 1955, it created a "Department of Teacher Information and Security." At the time, a U.S. Health, Education and Welfare Department attorney observed, "In a war, there must be some casualties, and perhaps the black teachers will be the casualties in the fight for equal education of black students."
J.K. Haynes, head of the Black Louisiana Education Association, put it more bluntly: "In any great social change, someone is likely to lose his job."
