With the death of judge William Hungate, so too dies a dream for St. Louis, rich and poor, black and white: Can’t we all just go to school together?
By D.J. Wilson
Buried in the obituaries of former congressman and federal judge William Hungate in late June were references to a proposal he made but never pursued. After noting that the Hannibal, Mo., native filed the second article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon and later presided over the St. Louis area’s historic desegregation case as a federal judge, the obits only briefly mentioned Hungate’s whopper of an idea.
Many viewed it as more of a threat than a promise, but because Hungate was a federal judge, it wasn’t just an idle threat—he could have done it. He wasn’t a novice, politically or judicially. Hungate was the Democratic congressman from Missouri’s 9th Congressional District from 1964 to 1977, and he served on the U.S. District Court in St. Louis from 1979 to 1992. His idea was at once revolutionary and incendiary. Its mere mention earned him death threats; for two weeks federal marshals guarded him.
In the spring of 1982 Hungate warned school districts in the county that if they insisted on arguing in court that their schools were not, in fact, segregated and if they were ultimately found liable, the solution could include consolidating all 23 suburban school districts and the city’s school district into a single metropolitan school district, in which some white suburban students would be bused into the city.
In 1972 St. Louis resident Minnie Liddell had filed a class action lawsuit seeking equal protection under the law for black city students, claiming her child had received an inadequate public school education. An initial ruling found in favor of the city’s board of education, but that was overturned in 1980 when a panel of three judges in the 8th Circuit Court reversed the lower court, ruling that the city board of education failed to do enough to desegregate the school system even after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the separate but equal doctrine at the public school level in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Historically, Missouri had been a separate but equal state, and before 1954 suburban blacks were forced to travel to all-black city schools—Sumner High School for one—if they wanted a public education.
Hungate proposed his remedy of consolidating the school districts before he set a trial date of February 14, 1983, for the lawsuit. The conservative Globe-Democrat called the judge “Attila the Hungate.” If Hungate followed through on his proposal, the existence of one large metropolitan school district would have meant that some students from wealthy municipalities in the county could be sent to inner city schools while underprivileged children from the city took their places at suburban schools.
The suburban school districts—including parents, employees and elected school board members—did not take the news lightly. They scrambled to the negotiating table to avoid the abolition of their districts. Rather than risk disappearance, they agreed to a settlement of the desegregation suit that included the “voluntary” acceptance of some African-American students from the city and the chance for white suburban students to attend city magnet schools.
The successes and failures of that interdistrict transfer plan have been, and will continue to be, argued ad infinitum; it turned out to be the nation’s longest and most expensive school desegregation program. At its height, more than 13,000 African-American students from the city went to suburban schools. Overall, the voluntary district plan cost the state more than $1.6 billion.
Yet after all these years and all these struggles, it would be kind to say only that the St. Louis Public Schools have a lousy image: The district has been unaccredited since June, it is run by a three-person appointed transitional board and its enrollment continues to plummet. In 1980 the city school district had 62,000 students. Today, it has fewer than 30,000, while the 24 suburban districts—including the county’s Special School District—have slightly more than 100,000 students.
So it’s a legitimate question to ask: What would have happened if Hungate had made good on his promise and melded all these disparate districts into one metropolitan district serving the city and St. Louis County?
It could be argued that it’s a moot question from both a legal and a political standpoint. Legally, the desegregation case has been settled. Politically, no elected official with any instinct for survival would ever campaign to mix races, classes and incomes by taking such a drastic step. Yet as the city schools and inner-ring suburban districts (e.g., Wellston, Riverview Gardens) continue to struggle, it’s important to look at the role a district’s socioeconomic makeup plays in how effectively students are educated. Not surprisingly, districts that are pockets of poverty don’t do as well as districts with upscale demographics. As these disparities persist, the opportunity and outcome gaps between the haves and have-nots widen.
Local control of schools has been the 11th Commandment in America for eons, despite the fact that no other country in the developed world runs its schools this way. Yet for all the anxiety about American students falling behind those in other countries, there has been sparse talk about restructuring how U.S. school districts are formed or administered. And there’s a reason for that: Outside of a few metro areas such as Charlotte, N.C., and Louisville, Ky., it’s seldom attempted.
Lana Stein, chair of the political science department at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and the co-author of City Schools & City Politics: Institutions and Leadership in Pittsburgh, Boston and St. Louis, sees the balkanization of education as a contributor to the St. Louis region’s lack of cohesion. When the book was published in 1999, Stein thought Pittsburgh had the best system of the three cities, although now she says Boston does. In either scenario, St. Louis comes in third.
“We have our little identities: ‘I’m from Ferguson,’ ‘I’m from Mehlville,’ whatever. It’s rather parochial. If you had merged cities, you would get people looking at things in a larger scope,” says Stein. “The more people are together in a naturally occurring situation, they can learn more about others and break down all the old myths and stereotypes.”
Then, of course, there is the jurisdictional gerrymandering of privilege on the basis of tax revenue gained or lost by redefined school district boundaries. St. Louis County—with slightly more than a million people spread over 92 municipalities—carves up its territories into small and drastically different school districts.
Consider Clayton and Wellston. The two municipalities are only a few miles apart geographically, but in other ways they are galaxies apart. They have separate school districts. Wellston lost its accreditation in 1994, and again in 2003. In 2006, 64.9 percent of Clayton’s graduating high school class scored at or above the national average on the ACT. Of the 29 Wellston graduates who took the ACT in 2006, none scored at or above the national average.
That’s not to say that all of Wellston’s problems would be solved if it shared a district with Clayton. Small districts can be run well, and large districts can be run poorly. In fact, Susan Uchitelle, who served as executive director of the Voluntary Interdistrict Coordinating Council, the body that administered the school desegregation program, says it’s not fair to compare Wellston and Clayton. “Wellston, most unfortunately, in the past was so poorly run the kids never had a chance,” she says. “I would think Wellston kids under other circumstances could
do well.”
Then there are fiscal discrepancies. According to the 2000 census, the Clayton School District had an average household income of $107,454. Wellston’s was $25,645. Because of its higher-valued tax base, Clayton’s school tax is levied at a much lower rate than in Wellston ($3.77 per taxpayer in Clayton, compared to $5.36 per taxpayer in Wellston). In the 2006–07 school year, Clayton had 2,529 students. Wellston had 622.
Economies of scale would be one argument for a uni-district. With a uniform tax base across the region, allocation of resources—money, teachers, supplies and programs—could be more equitably spread. One predictable obstacle to better student achievement is concentrated poverty. A better mix of economic backgrounds leads to better overall results, says Todd Swanstrom, professor of public policy at Saint Louis University.
“Research shows if you have socioeconomically balanced schools, the experience in the classroom would be much better for the lower-income children and it would not pull down high-income children, so long as there is not a high concentration of children from poor families in any one school,” Swanstrom says.
Having too many school districts, some too tiny to justify their existence and others too all-inclusive of concentrated poverty, just makes matters worse: It inevitably leads to a version of educational redlining based on economics that traps poor students in beleaguered school districts.
“Fragmented school districts reinforce economic segregation,” Swanstrom says. “They have a definite impact on housing values, which in turn segregate people. They make a significant difference.”
Stein agrees. She thinks “middle-class values” actually tend to prevail in an economically integrated classroom and have a beneficial impact on students from poor backgrounds.
Uchitelle, who now is active with three charter schools in the city, says this approach has worked in Cambridge, Mass.
“They’re doing that in Cambridge now, where socioeconomics determine where kids go to school,” says Uchitelle. “The reason they do better when you mix students socioeconomically is because the whole expectation for the kids is different. They’re in an environment where they are expected to do well, where there’s no other alternative. And they do better.”
While Hungate’s initial proposal grew out of a lawsuit revolving around race, to say that the residents of the 24 St. Louis County school districts would be against having a single metro district is not necessarily to accuse them of racism. Many of them live there—or moved there—because they wanted good schools and familiar social relationships for their children.
Yet Stein believes merging districts would have revealed other forms
of discrimination.
“It would have meant having your child go to school with kids that you would consider were coming from inferior backgrounds,” she says. “There is a lot of prejudice against the poor. People would say they left the city ‘in order to go to a safer neighborhood with better schools for our children, and we’re not giving that up.’”
When Wellston lost its accreditation, a few of its students attended other public school districts, as allowed by state law. Some were accepted in Clayton. Now that the city school system has lost its accreditation, its students can apply to suburban districts, though most of those districts have said they will not accept city students. So far there has not been a legal challenge to that refusal.
Swanstrom sees the class chasm widening as affluent districts churn out qualified students who go on to college, and disadvantaged districts certify graduates who have trouble entering college. Those types of erratic educational experiences can hold a metro area back, Swanstrom says, pointing to Charlotte, N.C., as an example of a thriving metro area that was aided by its uni-district approach to public education. All of Mecklenberg County, which includes Charlotte, is covered by one school district.
“Research shows when you have a unified school district, it really does make a difference,” says Swanstrom. “Charlotte has done very well as a region. I would argue that part of that is due to its school system, which is not so driven by divisions, with the lower-income students dragging down overall performance. I think it’s a real factor in regional prosperity, though it’s hard
to prove.”
Whether a more egalitarian educational structure could aid regional prosperity, however, St. Louis missed its chance to find out 25 years ago.
