If a federal judge agrees to lift the Garland ISD desegregation order, it would spell the end of a half century of court supervision that district leaders and civil rights advocates say has benefited students of all races.
The U.S. Department of Justice is seeking to dismiss the 56-year-old court order that requires the district to follow a plan to ensure a “unitary, non-discriminatory school system.” The district’s board is expected to discuss their response to the move at a meeting Tuesday.
Officials in Garland ISD said they’re committed to making sure they offer a quality education to students of all backgrounds, no matter whether the order remains in place.
Ryan Raybould, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, filed a motion last month seeking to have Garland ISD’s decades-old desegregation order lifted. In the motion, Raybould called the order outdated and asked the judge to rule that the district had eliminated segregation from its schools.
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In an emailed statement, district spokesperson Typhani Braziel said the district “remains committed to systems and practices grounded in its belief that all means all,” no matter what the court decides.
Over the past 30 years, school districts have generally become more racially segregated after being released from desegregation orders, research suggests. But researchers say not every district re-segregates once court oversight ends.
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“There’s nothing that says just because you’re released from court oversight that you can’t still try to make sure that students of different racial or economic backgrounds have the same opportunities, and try to make sure that your schools are diverse,” said Sean Reardon, a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education.
Academic impacts of segregation
When it does happen, re-segregation doesn’t happen quickly, and districts generally don’t return to the levels of segregation they saw before court orders were enacted, said Reardon.
In a study released in 2012 and updated in 2021, Reardon and a team of researchers looked at what happened in hundreds of districts that were released from desegregation orders between 1991-2008. In general, researchers found that segregation gradually returned after court oversight ended.
A number of factors drove that re-segregation, Reardon said. Residential segregation played a big part, he said. School districts had to make active efforts to have diverse schools in neighborhoods that were racially segregated, he said, and when they stopped making those efforts, schools reverted to looking more like their neighborhoods.
That’s a problem, Reardon said, because separate research indicates that segregation has academic impacts. Districts where schools are highly segregated tend to have wide achievement gaps between Black and Hispanic students and their white peers, he said, and those gaps get wider the longer students are in school.
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The effects are even more pronounced in districts that are highly segregated both racially and economically, he said — Black and Hispanic students tend to perform especially poorly when they’re segregated into schools with large concentrations of students in poverty.
But the end of desegregation policies wasn’t the only factor driving re-segregation, Reardon said. Since the 1990s, many cities across the country have seen charter schools make up a bigger piece of their public education systems.
The proliferation of charter schools seems to make a difference, he said: The districts where the most re-segregation has taken place tend to be the ones where charter school growth has been the strongest. In areas with few charter schools, districts that didn’t see the end of a desegregation order — either because they were never under a court order, or because federal courts left those orders in place — tended to see little re-segregation, he said.
Garland has six charter schools — two Harmony campuses, three IL Texas campuses and one Texas Can Academy campus.
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Reardon said the gradual nature of re-segregation most likely has to do with individual families making decisions about where to send their kids to school. If a student was bused to an elementary school in a different part of town as a part of a court-ordered desegregation plan, their parents might decide to keep them there even after the court order is lifted, he said. So the effects of the ends of those court orders might not show up until years later, when new cohorts of students are starting school.
Reardon said it’s also important to note that the effects of the end of desegregation orders don’t look the same everywhere. While some schools became more segregated after the end of court oversight, others didn’t. Researchers found that the re-segregation effects tended to be most pronounced in districts in the South, in elementary grades and in schools where segregation rates were lowest before court orders were lifted.
How Garland approached desegregation
Under Garland ISD’s desegregation plan, any student may request to attend any neighborhood campus or magnet school in the district. The policy limits the number of white students at any campus to within 20 percentage points of their representation in the district overall. Garland ISD officials said that plan will remain in place, no matter whether the court order is lifted.
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An 11-member panel —made up of three white members, three Black members, three Hispanic members and two Asian members — sends a report to a federal judge twice a year outlining the district’s racial and ethnic demographics, and spearheads efforts to recruit teachers of color and find scholarship money for students of color.
Garland ISD’s desegregation plan has been in place since 1970, and was modified in 1987, when the Garland chapter of the NAACP joined as a plaintiff. Ricky McNeal, the current president of the Garland NAACP, said the civil rights group’s relationship with the district has changed dramatically since those days. Through the 1980s and ’90s, the group’s interactions with district leaders and board members were confrontational and marked with hostility, he said.
More recently, McNeal said, district administrators and school board members have been more willing to look seriously at issues the organization has raised. That led to greater cooperation that benefited everyone in the district, not only Black students, he said.
As an example, he pointed to the district’s enrollment choice policy. That plan allows any student in the district — not just Black students — to take advantage of programs and activities at any campus, no matter where in the district they live.
“There has not been one policy change that the district has implemented that’s only benefited Black students,” he said.
Garland ISD has about 51,000 students and 67 campuses and magnet programs in the district. About 55% of its students are Hispanic, according to a December report, almost 18% are Black, almost 13% are white and 10% are Asian.
The Garland NAACP hasn’t taken a position on the motion to end the district’s desegregation order, and its general membership hasn’t had a chance to discuss the issue, McNeal said. For more than half a century, the order provided crucial guardrails that ensured district leaders operated with the best interests of all students in mind. But he said he’s confident that the district’s current leadership will continue to do so, whether the court order remains in place or not.
The Garland ISD school board is scheduled to meet at 5 p.m. Tuesday at the Harris Hill Administration Building, 601 S. Jupiter Road, Garland.
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