“Profound Changes” in Local School District Diversity Around Atlanta Region
Decatur Metro | June 4, 2015 | 2:04 pmSchool System Composition Change: Percentage-Point Change in Enrollment, by Race/Ethnicity, 2000-2014
The Atlanta Regional Commission has an interesting new post on their Tumblr site “33°N” which charts the current and changing diversity of local school districts in the Atlanta region, Decatur city included. Here’s a blurb…
As the 2014-2015 school year comes to a close, we thought it would be a good time to revisit the dramatic changes in the racial and ethnic compositions of local school systems. Naturally, these trends mirror general population trends, but, in many cases, the changes experienced in local school districts are even more dramatic than the overall population trends. In short, most school districts have seen large decreases in the share of White students enrolled, while experiencing concomitant increases in Asian, Black and Hispanic enrollment shares.
…Interestingly, the only two school districts that are bucking the overall trend are Atlanta Public Schools and the City Schools of Decatur. Both systems have experienced a decline in the share of Black enrollment while seeing an increase in the share of White enrollment.
Click over to their site to check out other charts that show the current breakdown of diversity in these districts as well as overall district-level of growth seen in the past 14 years.
Two of us with Ph.D.’s, we both use graphs all the time, and neither of us can interpret this. The bars for the ethnic groups needed to be separate. No?
You have to eyeball ’em when there’s more than one ethnicity making up the change. For example, in Decatur, black enrollment is down what looks like about 28% while white is up about 18%, Asian around 2%, Hispanic around 4% and Other around 3%.
Yes, that’s what we thought too. But with a graph you should be able to look at it immediately and get the message. This isn’t a good format.
This is sad. DHS used to be 50 percent black, 50 percent white.
DHS still is– or at least the senior class was pretty close. I think the change is happening with younger kids. But I agree that is is sad because the diversity of the school (diversity of all kinds, not just race) is part of what makes it so special. My kid has friends from school who are very different than she is, grew up in very different homes and have had very different life experiences. Great education!
And, i agree with Al– this graph sucks.
I agree. The racial and socioeconomic diversity is what brought me to Decatur a few years back. But soon after moving here I could see that things were headed in this direction.
Decatur High School really isn’t very diverse, especially when compared to high schools in north Dekalb and north Fulton. Georgia DOE has a great school-by-school breakdown of FTE student counts. Here’s some perspective:
-out of Decatur’s graduating class of about 240,there were 12 Latino students, 6 Asian students, 81 Black students, and 130 White students.
-Lakeside’s graduating class of about 435: 82 Latino, 40 Asian, 138 Black, 165 White
I think sometimes we think we see more diversity than there actually is. On the website you can see all the Decatur numbers for every school in the system.
https://app3.doe.k12.ga.us/ows-bin/owa/fte_pack_ethnicsex.entry_form
Thanks for the link. the data for Decatur by grade is pretty interesting. The story it tells is that the non-white representation is fairly consistent across the grades. The population surge in the schools is among white children, with a generational growth in multi-racial.
And I think the graph is fine, it makes sense to me and its easy to see the major trends and outliers.
wow super interesting!!
Yes clearly it shows that proportion of non-white students declines from HS to ES, but total numbers of non-white remain fairly constant. This suggests the decline in non-white students, as a proportion, is due primarily to influx (i.e., new students) of white race rather than black children leaving the system.
Although remember that in 2000, Decatur neighborhoods were pretty segregated, and the elementary schools even more so. College Heights, Fifth Avenue, and Oakhurst Elementary were something like 95% black whereas the others were largely white. I don’t have the exact numbers handy, but I remember being really surprised at them when we were looking into them while moving to Georgia in 2003 (we ended up moving into Oakhurst).
That’s not entirely true. Or it wasn’t by 2003. Glennwood was almost half and half around then, definitely by 2004. They probably redistricted the government housing to fix the imbalance.
This may be true, but the beauty was that everyone mixed together at Renfroe. They then had 7 years to make friends and get a great education just by being around folks who were different.
Right, I am not disputing the overall point that it is good to have diverse schools. But it is still worth remembering how segregated the schools in SW Decatur used to be.
Not sure I understand your point. There was a different racial makeup at those schools because they served the people who lived in those areas, which were predominately black. And segregated is not the right word.
I think Bulldog and TOK are saying the same thing with slight difference in meaning of “segregation”. I don’t think TOK is saying that ‘segregation’ means government sanctioned separation of the races (if that is what I understand Bulldog to imply — not sure). Instead, I think TOK is applying the meaning of segregation to be just the observable separation of races, e.g. “Atlanta has been historically segregated since the early 1900s with the northern areas being whiter than the southern areas”. So in that meaning, segregation does seem to be an appropriate word choice by TOK because these areas of Decatur have been recently historically black (Bulldog’s point) because of their racial makeup; thus, they are segregated (TOK’s point).
Agreed. There are different types of “segregation”. Going back to grade school social studies (which is about 3 decades ago, so my memories may not be perfect…) there are both de facto and de jure forms of segregation. De jure being the big evil one most people automatically thinks of, that being legal segregation by the government in the form of laws. ie: it is illegal for blacks to go to this school. De facto segregation being the “just how it is” segregation that seems to occur naturally due to human tendencies.
Right, Cappy Al, that’s what I meant. Scott tells the Oakhurst story below, but we moved in to Oakhurst right before the redistricting. The schools were a lot less diverse than the neighborhood overall, because most of the white families either sent their kids to private schools or moved out when their kids reached school age. There was a group of parents pushing to reverse that trend, including Julie Rhame. See the following story: https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=348&dat=20030309&id=I-gyAAAAIBAJ&sjid=_0QDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6860,2524014&hl=en .
The redistricting radically changed the racial makeup of Oakhurst at a stroke. I remember talking to one of the long-time teachers there after my son’s 3rd grade “moving on” ceremony, where she said a lot of the parents of the new students were pretty snotty and hostile to Mary Mack while dropping off their kids–which is too bad, although I understand that there was a lot of hurt at the time about Westchester being closed down.
Clairemont and Westchester also had plenty of students from the Decatur Housing Authority. I believe that Winnona Park did too for a while. Now regarding much further in the past, there’s claims that Westchester was built to avoid desegregated schools in the 1960s. But that would’ve been before white flight and the much later return of residents to their neighborhood schools.
Surprisingly, Decatur City has the third highest percentage of white students in the metro area (click through on the above link), just behind Cherokee and Forsyth. I really thought most all of the northern burbs would be the least diverse.
Right, but our senior class and our first grade classes have very different percentages of white students.
Yes, the difference between the Sr class and the 1st grade class demographics suggests Decatur may take over 1st place in highest white percentage of students in the greater metro area. I had hoped Decatur schools would have maintained more diversity.
+1
Worst graph maybe ever.
I’ll let y’all summarize and listen to what you have to say, because I’m not wasting my time trying to understand the graph. I’m not that smart.
Left side of graph (-) is for those races losing population share. Right side (+) are those races that gained population share.
Follow the link. The data set is presented in other formats. Atlanta and Decatur show results of gentrification. Not only is black enrollment down, but white enrollment increased. Those are only two systems with that dynamic, though DeKalb’s almost compared (white enrollment is surprisingly stable, down only 49 students and black enrollment down significantly.) Hispanic enrollment explosive in Gwinnett (up 36,000!) and Cobb.
Not just gentrification- a growing commitment to public schools. Some of it was likely due to recession, but majority is parents deciding to put kids in public vs private, and invest their time and efforts in public schools.
I’m afraid that that commitment to public schools is waning everywhere but perhaps in the city of Decatur.
Sadly, yes.
I get blank stares at work when I talk about how involved my wife (mother of our kids) is with the school system and how happy we are with it overall.
I work in Johns Creek (N. Fulton, Gwinnett, Forsyth area) in a majority WASP company. Most of my co-workers bitch about public schools.
+1
Some time ago, I ran into a teacher who left CSD because she moved to another metro Atlanta district. The thing she misses most is the parental involvement. She stated quality teachers, good funding and a solid administration are very positive attributes, but it’s involved parents that make a good school system great.
That’s interesting. This graph definitely shows the effects of inward migration to some — maybe heavy — degree but I’m sensing it also shows another trend: white people in many places abandoning public education.
Reminds me of a number of years I spent working in the suburbs of Montgomery, Alabama. I was doing research to understand the demographics and, looking at school data, you’d think the city’s suburbs were dominant majority black. But the reality is that they were majority white, often by a long shot. The difference was that, when people there talk about how they’ve “dealt with race,” what that means is that the vast majority of white kids now go to private Christian schools. They’ve abandoned their public schools to minority populations. (Obviously I’m speaking generally.) I wonder to what degree this is happening OTP?
I have always been bothered by the fact that the majority of the kids in Avondale Estates are shipped off to private schools. The now defunct Avondale High School could have been one of the most racially diverse schools around had it not been for the hesitation of the middle class / upper middle class to send their children there. As a result, the school ended up with less than stellar teachers, hardly any parental involvement, and hardly any diversity. All that contributed to the demise of the school and it’s ultimate closure. It’s really a shame because it could have been something special.
True. And it seems tied to political extremes on both ends of the spectrum. Those on the far right seem wrapped up in the hysteria over liberty-threatnin’ “government schools” (as Mr. Beck is prone to call them). And on the far left, it seems rooted in a belief that every child is so extraordinarily special that any education not fully tailored to their complex uniqueness will cripple them for life.
Folks in the middle gots to rise up!
Would you be willing to take the first leap with your kids? You may very well be right about what the school could have been, but those pioneer’s children would have suffered through a lousy education. That’s a tough thing to ask of parents.
It happened in Oakhurst, one year ahead of when we enrolled our daughter. A self-organizing group of white parents (I think they numbered eight families) took the initiative to really examine the school instead of just making rash and unfair judgments based solely on a playground filled entirely with black kids. What they found, among other things, is that Ms. Mack rocks and, through her leadership, the school was probably performing at a higher level than its circumstances of disadvantage would otherwise suggest.
Not that I’m suggesting a cause-effect but it was the next year that CSD redistricted to balance out our race stats, which made a lot of people a lot more comfortable to buy in to *all* Decatur schools (for what I’m sure was a host of diverse reasons, some more noble than others). My point is that I think these parents’ actions positively contributed to the larger political decisions that would follow. To your point, if a parental “front wave” is not met by follow-through action at a higher level (and there’s no guarantee that it will be), your kid’s education can be sacrificed in the process. There has to be more to just enrolling. Fair or not, I think such parents need to be tenacious.
Sounds like they did it right, and also had a fairly well run school to join. I don’t disagree with what you say (except for the generalization about why parents didn’t send their kids there), but CDS was in much better shape than DeKalb County Schools were/are.
“the fact that the majority of the kids in Avondale Estates are shipped off to private schools”
Is this true? A lot of AE kids attend the Museum School, which is public. There is also a fair bit of home schooling in AE. (Though I will guess that bothers you, too.)
At any rate, the legend I have heard (which I do not know to be true) is that many AE parents approached the local public school administration about how to improve the schools, and were essentially told to bugger off. Parental involvement has to be not only offered, but accepted.
Yes. What bothers me is that many parents send their children to private schools or charter schools that they create rather than coming together as Scott suggests and making the existing public school better. Parental involvement will be accepted if enough noise is made.
Whether it be Woodward, the Museum School (public, but a charter), St. Pius, or one of the other private options, the point is that kids are being taken out of the local community to go to school. So instead of having a street full of kids who all attend the same school, you end up having a street of kids who attend six different schools.
That same experience does not happen as often in Decatur. We are a community seven days a week, not just after 5 pm and on weekends.
You say less private, more public. Maybe we could just push the government out of running schools altogether, and have ALL kids go to non-government run schools in the neighborhood. Less public, more private.
I’ll just sit back now.
In other words, parents doing what they believe to be best for their families bothers you, at least when it comes to schooling.
Perhaps we should put a stop to such parental judgments. Better communities through coercion!
I think it bothers some of the parents who are sending their kids to the non-traditional public schools, too. The ideal for a lot of people is the “good, neighborhood” public school. They just don’t think the traditional public is good enough. Nobody said they should be compelled to send their kids to the regular public school. Saying something bothers you doesn’t equal saying it should be illegal.
Point taken — I was making a rhetorical point, not responding to anything Bulldog actually said. But generally, there are people out there who want to ban homeschooling, and there is plenty of opposition to charter schools, as well.
I’m not sure your rhetorical point or sarcasm was needed. Parents can make whatever decision they choose – I’m not stopping them nor do I want to. But it would be nice for a community to come together to support the local school or school system. Decatur didn’t get good overnight, and neither will anywhere else.
but wait, CSD is a charter system and the schools are charter system schools
Yes, the schools are part of a charter system, but they are not charter schools – very different animals, as it turns out.
It isn’t just Decatur where there is a growing recommitment to public schools. I know many families in the Grady feeder system that are committed to having their kids go all the way through- and have been very active in their school support.
As to those families with kids in schools as gorgeous and high performing as Johns Creek High School (it looks like a college campus!) and still complaining– talk about a culture of entitlement.
This is a great way to show a lot of data in an economical way. Populations are normalized so that the size differences between districts doesn’t matter. It shows that Dekalb Co has remained quite stable over 14 years.