Hobson v. Hansen and the decline of DC schools

Background: the author is better known on the Internet by his alias, Tracing Woodgrains. Here's his post about co-founding Center for Educational Progress.

From the article:

The Washington school system [Dr. Hansen] was headed for was very different from the Omaha system he left: a southern school system, strictly segregated since its creation and managed not by the local city but by a school board appointed by the federal judges (part-time non-specialist volunteers, in charge of setting the overall direction for the school system), a board-appointed superintendent (in charge of carrying out the day-to-day operations of the district in line with the board’s directions), and Congress itself (in charge of funding and apportionment). All clashed repeatedly over questions of control and direction. Since 1906, the Board had been mandated by law to contain a mix of six men and three women; by tradition from that point forward, two of the men and one of the women were black. The superintendent position was usually stable, with Hobart Corning—the superintendent when Dr. Hansen joined—serving for twelve years from 1946 to 1958 and his longest-serving predecessor Frank Ballou serving from 1920 through his retirement in 1943.

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The District’s population was transforming by the time Hansen arrived. Its white enrollment had peaked at 59,500 in 1935, when the system had only 33,500 black students. By 1945, the white student population had declined to 50,000, while the black population had grown to 39,000. This led to repeated tensions in the system, particularly around assignment to schools: as white student populations shrunk and black populations grew, administrators would periodically close white schools and reopen them as black schools, as white students protested the loss of their schools while the black community protested the receipt of white hand-me-downs. By 1947, 45 percent of the district’s population was black, and 72 percent of its construction budget was going towards black schools, with numbers only increasing from there.

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[T]he white and black schools tended to use various schemes to group students by ability. Most notable within the black system was its decision to run a single academic high school, Dunbar High, for the most academically driven black students from around the District, while sorting those who were less academically inclined into one of the District’s two other black high schools. The decision bore fruit, with the school drawing a highly educated faculty, preparing generations of black leaders, and standing as a national model for black excellence.

Into this system came Hansen, a committed liberal institutionalist who believed in the public schools as America’s most important social institution, a “traditional” educator at a time when traditionalism was already out of fashion, an integrationist and believer in colorblindness in a segregated world. Hansen believed that professional educators should be firmly in charge of schools with outside forces staying out. He championed basic, skills-focused education, ability grouping, and phonics for reading—something he noted had fallen out of favor in the 1920s as having become too highly technical and an end in itself before “revolutionists” rejected it instead of reforming it. When he was later made director of elementary schools, he immediately set about bringing phonics to the white schools that scorned it.

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In what became known as the Corning Plan, the D.C. school district made several decisions: All schools would be desegregated as quickly and completely as possible, each one with new boundaries and the option for students to stay in their currently enrolled schools, school personnel would be appointed and promoted on the basis of merit, and the transition would be accomplished by natural and orderly means. In September 1954, D.C. students walked into integrated schools for the first time, with a smooth and uneventful first day.

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The clearest tragedy during the early desegregation process was the administration’s decision to turn Dunbar High School, like the rest of the newly integrated high schools, into a local neighborhood school instead of the magnet school it had been. Dunbar teachers faced an uptick in learning and disciplinary problems in their classes, dwindling enrollments in advanced classes and a newfound need for remedial ones. As the Board debated its 1954 plan, it did not spare a thought for what would happen to Dunbar. The idea of preserving some of what made the school special went unmentioned and unconsidered, and so the school went from producing the highest number of black PhDs of any school in the country to being just another neighborhood school.

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In 1960, Hansen saw the opportunity to put his elementary school ideals into action with the construction of a new school at the heart of a Southwest Washington urban development project. The Amidon School was to be his “put-up or shut-up operation,” a magnet school that would implement his ideal elementary school approach while inviting applications from around D.C. The focus of the Amidon was on teacher-directed, subject-matter-oriented instruction with demanding content, direct instruction, and difficult materials introduced early. Its reading instruction started young and kept phonics as its core, against the prevailing philosophy of education schools of its day. If his ideas fail when put to use, he said, he would abandon them. If they were effective, his staff would be willing to implement them more broadly.

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During this timeframe, the greatest complication the administration faced was the rapidly shifting racial composition and rapidly growing population within the city and its schools. [...] School populations would turn over almost completely, with a few schools (like the District’s Eastern High School) going from 100 percent white to more than 90 percent black within a five-year span. Hansen noted that the tipping point seemed to be around 30 percent black, after which white flight almost always became rapid and near-complete.

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Overall, the atmosphere between 1954 and 1962 was one of guarded optimism: real challenges, a top-to-bottom transformation of the District’s student body, but a general determination to make things work and in Hansen’s case an eagerness to implement his vision.

But towards the end of 1962, everything began to come crashing down.

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By 1966, Hansen’s formerly iron-strong hold on the District’s school board collapsed with the appointment of three new board members who explicitly opposed him. Most notable was the appointment of John A. Sessions, a former Cornell English professor and an education specialist for the AFL-CIO union, whose interest in “education parks” and distaste for Hansen set the stage for the destruction of the Amidon School.

The argument went as follows: The Amidon School is high-performing and attracts some well-off students to its student body. Nearby Bowen and Syphax Elementary Schools are not. Therefore, we should combine them and make students from all three schools attend two years in each school, so that the well-off parents are inspired to help the other schools. Hansen proposed letting the schools decide; the Board shot him down.

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Writing in 1970, the Washington Post’s prizewinning black journalist William Raspberry, considering the Tri-School Plan, called it an example of “hostage theory” in action. “The well-to-do parents would see to it that their children got a good education. All the poor parents had to do was see to it that their children were in the same classrooms. That was the theory. […] Now instead of one good and two bad schools, Southwest Washington has three bad ones.”

“We moved from Virginia into Washington to get our children into the Amidon,” one mother said. “The handful of agitators that proposed combining the Amidon with the two other elementary schools hit below the belt. One of them said on television that the people who objected didn’t want their children to go to school with Negroes. We came to southwest Washington to put our children in an integrated school. We came back to Washington because we wanted our kids to go to school with Negroes—and poor kids.” They left the school.

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[In Hobson v. Hansen], Judge Wright concludes that while Hansen was “motivated by a desire to respond - according to his own philosophy - to an educational crisis in the District school system” rather than intended racial discrimination, the district’s ability grouping served as “a denial of equal educational opportunity to the poor and a majority of the Negroes79 attending school in the nation’s capital.” In other words, he asserts that while Hansen did not apparently intend to discriminate, the system’s disparate impact made it unconstitutional.80

Much of Judge Wright’s decision rests on his objections to tests, which he treats as intended to uncover “the maximum educational potential” of students. “One of the fundamental purposes of track theory,” he claims, “is that students’ potential can be determined.”81 He condemns the use of aptitude tests on low income black children, because “the impoverished circumstances that characterize the disadvantaged child” make it “virtually impossible to tell whether the test score reflects lack of ability—or simply lack of opportunity.”

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As a result of all of this, he concludes that the effect of the track system is to unconstitutionally “deny a majority of District students their right to equal educational opportunity” and that it “simply must be abolished,” as must any system which “fails in fact to bring the great majority of children into the mainstream of public education.”

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The Wright decision, then, stepped into an active and contentious dispute in the social sciences, misrepresenting the consensus of the fields while condemning as unconstitutional a pedagogical decision made on the basis of that same body of research without evidence of racial malice. As his core piece of evidence against the merit of testing and ability grouping, he used a study that used evidence of adults being tested, then learning well inside ability-grouped classrooms.

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In the wake of the abolition of the track system, former basic track students (of which many were clinically mentally disabled) were simply placed in regular classes. The chairman of Parents United to Help the D.C. Mentally Retarded reached out first to Superintendent Manning, then to Julius Hobson, asking for help. He estimated 10,000 mentally disabled students in the district who had more intense needs than mere slow learners, with the district’s replacement for ability grouping, a pullout program for math and reading, being woefully insufficient. He warned that when those students try to compete in normal classroom situations, they “undergo ridicule, become frustrated and more withdrawn, develop severe emotional problems from being unable to compete, lose all confidence in themselves, and instead of making progress, recede in their learning ability.” Those children, he noted, “have been in effect abandoned for the next 1-5 years.” A mother, crying, told a reporter, “My daughter was doing well in her basic class last year. Now she comes home from school crying every day because she can’t keep up with the other children. I just don’t know what to do.”

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Another blow hit District schools in 1970 with the toppling of Sidney Zevin, principal of the District’s last meaningfully integrated public high school. The first boycott Zevin faced was in September, 1954, when white students walked out of the junior high he taught at on the first day of desegregation. But in February 1970, it was no longer white segregationists boycotting him, but black militants. Chaos at the school had escalated—a biracial group of 35 radical teachers out of the 85-member faculty engaging in a prolonged power struggle with him, visits from the Black Panthers and Black United Front, an auditorium break-in with speeches calling for “revolution … by any means necessary,” daily false fire alarms, small fires set around the building, an unlit molotov cocktail in a second-floor classroom.

The school’s well-motivated black middle class had all but disappeared, with those who chose to come to Western from its open enrollment zone no longer allowed after Judge Wright’s decree. Classrooms contained students “from a third-grade reading level to the first year of college,” with pressure from critical teachers leading to near-total abandonment of ability grouping. The teacher who led the power struggle was a history teacher who spent his class periods showing Black Panther movies and, when the department head suggested some balance, a speech by the leader of the National Socialist White People’s Party. White parents at the school, when interviewed, said they wanted their kids to go to an integrated school, but not one where they felt resented and unwelcome.

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What of the system as a whole by the 1990s? Even the thought of caring about student performance had become almost anachronistic by the ‘90s. Its student population peaked in 1970 before entering a precipitious decline, leaving it with far more schools than it needed after a massive building program. By the 1980s, the District spent more money per student than in every other major school system. By the time they were considering closing Banneker, the city’s student population had dropped 50,000 from its peak while central office positions doubled and the District’s per-student budget swelled, with the superintendent at the time unsure even how many employees he had. Ever since Hansen’s time as superintendent, nobody else has led DC schools for as long, and very few for more than a few years.

There is no happy ending here. The system broke and it never, ever recovered.

We live in the shadow of the 1960s.