Educational Gerrymandering Sociology

Educational Gerrymandering to Avoid Racial Minorities
According to a Committee on Education, in 2015 a law was enacted in New York City requiring schools to annually report school demographics in community schools and high schools. This means that New York, a relatively progressive city, is making sure that their schools can stay racially diverse because other school districts in the United States may not be doing so. Gerrymandering has been commonly associated with politics and getting a large amount of votes. However, it is less known for splitting up school districts so racial minorities will not go to their school. It is then hurting the reputation of the schools that receive the minorities. This has been occurring silently, unnoticed,
Marc Aronson writes, “Blacks were hungry to learn once slavery was abolished. In the brief period of Reconstruction after the war, when blacks controlled state governments in the South, they established the systems of public education of all that exist to this day” (Aronson, 2007, p. 166). This quote from Race shows that blacks had a need to learn, to become more educated, and they did all they could do, to acquire that intelligence. This quote also shows that if blacks were given the opportunity to perform important jobs, they would do it well, because the systems they set up at the time are still used today. In addition, Aronson also wrote, “After whites had made sure that the Blair Bill, which paid for educating the blacks failed, the whites had succeeded in neglecting blacks. More than half of blacks in the South could not read, while eighty to ninety percent of whites could. Having made sure blacks could not learn, whites passed new laws that said you could vote only if you could read and explain a passage to the satisfaction of a local official” (Aronson, 2007, p. 167). Not only is this quote mentioning racism by making blacks unintelligible enough to not have the ability to vote, but it shows the beginning of gerrymandering educational districts. By changing the boundaries of schools, blacks could not
According to Salvatore Saporito of Social Science Research, “an analysis of 304 school districts, show that more irregularly shaped school attendance zones are correlated with lower levels of racial segregation in attendance zones after accounting for residential segregation” (Saporito, 2015). To simplify, this quote is stating that schools with stranger boundaries, due to gerrymandering, tend to have a less racial diversity in their schools of the 304 districts surveyed. If someone were to look into this further, they would see that because most of the rich, caucasian kids go to one school, the rest of the minorities would be forced to attend the schools that may be lacking in quality. To help further the facts that are being stated, Meredith Page of the University of Texas found, “Estimates suggest that, on average, school attendance zones and school districts are 15% and 14% less black-white diverse, respectively, than would be expected if their boundaries were not gerrymandered. Findings suggest that the gerrymandering of boundaries adds another layer of segregation to public education institutions, which are already segregated by residency” (Page, 2012). In reference to race, this quote/fact is showing that without gerrymandering occurring, the schools inhabited by the children would be