Across the Railroad Tracks: Segregation and Education Inequality in Cincinnati
Elizabeth Spera
Sept 2021
The sunlight dapples across my sunroof as I drive through my hometown of Wyoming, Ohio; picturesque houses with lush front yards hide behind tall maples as I cruise past dog-walkers down Wyoming Avenue. As I continue south, houses merge into storefronts of small boutiques, a bakery, a dentist office. Just one block later, my tires bump over the metal of a railroad track, and I enter the community of Lockland. Devoid of trees and green grass, the streets are absent of passersby.
Adam Raby, current principal of Lockland junior and senior high schools, recently spoke to me about the harsh realities that his 174 high school students are forced to reckon with every day. He reminisced about his childhood growing up in Lockland, remarking, “Across the tracks, they all live in mansions. They stay on their side of the tracks and we stay on ours. When we played them in sports, okay, let’s go beat the rich kids.” The narrative in Wyoming has always mirrored this: kids joking about getting “shot up” in Lockland or warning against driving through the neighborhood at night. As Karl and Alma Taeuber, professors of sociology at University of Wisconsin-Madison, write, residential segregation “inhibits the development of informal, neighborly relations” and holds “serious implications for the present and future mobility opportunities” of residents (qtd. in Charles 167). Segregation has been a lightning rod in American politics for the past seventy years — and Cincinnati is no exception.
If you ask any Wyoming parent why they decided to move to this small suburb, their answer is always the same: “the schools.” As boasted on the Wyoming City Schools website, Wyoming High School students have a 98% graduation rate and earned over 16.2 million dollars in merit aid in 2020. 16.2 million dollars. However, a quick glance at the Lockland School District website spotlights a key difference between the two communities. Instead of boasting about student accomplishments with articles such as “Nine WHS Students Recognized by National Merit Scholarship Corporation” or “Wyoming Middle School Team Has Outstanding Performance at Power of the Pen Regional Tournament!” the Lockland website headlines read: “Homeless Flyer: Click here for information” and “Free Meal Distribution for Lockland Families.” Header sections are filled with information about staff, dining, and athletics, while academic information is limited to one small subsection titled “Student Links.” The Lockland High School graduation rate of 77% (“Ohio School Report Cards”), 8% lower than the Ohio average (“Ohio Education by the Numbers”), is nowhere to be found.
One school district with a median household income of $121, 071 — another with a median of $30, 101. One school with a Black and Hispanic population of 14.9% — another with a corresponding 53.1% (“Lockland, OH”; “Wyoming, OH”). Students of one neighborhood set up with an economic safety net their entire life — students of the other forced to fight against systemic injustice every step in the way. The bleak disparities between Wyoming and Lockland beg the questions: What mechanisms created such harsh inequities that neighborhoods separated by merely one set of railroad tracks live in two different realities? And what changes should be made to ensure all students receive the benefits of a quality education? In this paper, I explore the ways in which historical redlining and residential segregation engender education inequality between Wyoming and Lockland; further, I argue that the problematic implications of integration point towards classroom-based reforms as the most advantageous avenue to equal academic opportunities.
As Sungsoon Hwang, a professor of geography and sustainable urban development at DePaul University, explored in her 2015 Housing Policy Debate article, “Residential Segregation, Housing Submarkets, and Spatial Analysis: St. Louis and Cincinnati as a Case Study,” there are three coinciding factors that contribute to residential segregation. First, location preferences; second, spatial disadvantage; and third, institutional forces (Hwang 93). The first, location preference, is relatively simple; people prefer to live in neighborhoods with similar income levels and a homogeneous ethnic composition that matches their own. The second, spatial disadvantage, hinges on the idea that residential segregation is “caused by discrimination imposed on the socially disadvantaged” (Hwang 93). This takes place through the continued impact of Jim Crow laws and restrictive covenants, which, as Catherine Silva writes in “Racial Restrictive Covenants History,” are contractual agreements that “bind [property owners] not to sell, rent or otherwise convoy their property to specified groups because of race.”
In order to understand the third factor, institutional forces, one must use a historical lens. As a Rust Belt city, Cincinnati suffered harsh economic decline in the late 1900s which catalyzed a loss of manufacturing jobs, hitting blue-collar communities like Lockland especially hard (Raby), leading to increased economic inequality throughout the city ever since (Hwang 98). This history, combined with the nationwide practices of redlining, or “a discriminatory practice in which a mortgage lender denies loans… to certain areas of a community, often because of racial characteristics of the applicant’s neighborhood” (“Redlining”), as well as “inaccessible homeownership, zoning laws, and subdivision regulation” (Hwang 107), perpetuate the intersection of residential and racial segregation evident in Cincinnati today.
After the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in school violated the Fourteenth Amendment in Brown v. Board of Education, the American public widely believes that racial segregation ended; however, the “truth is that segregation today is, in many cases, worse” (Berlatsky). Supreme Court decisions in the 1990s reduced the number of legal integration implementation methods available by ending cross-district busing and removing local courts’ authority to supervise desegregation plans; ever since, cross-city racial divides have silently persisted. This covert racial and residential segregation have catalyzed generational socioeconomic inequality, as Gene Demby, American journalist and cohost of NPR’s podcast Code Switch, illustrates in the video Housing Segregation and Redlining in America: A Short History. He explains, “[H]omeownership is the major way Americans create wealth… but it is still today much harder for a Black person to get a mortgage or home loan than it is for a White person” (Demby 3:14 – 3:47). Socioeconomic status and race are intrinsically connected; African American unemployment rates are nearly twice as high as that of White Americans (“Ethnic and Racial Minorities & Socioeconomic Status”). More than seventy years after the end of legal segregation, Black and minority groups continue to face systemic inequality.
These effects are not limited to the neighborhoods in which people live; they have dramatic implications for educational access as well. Noah Berlatsky, a culture critic for NBC News, discussed this in his 2019 opinion piece, “White Parents Are Enabling School Segregation — If It Doesn’t Hurt Their Own Kids.” He writes, “U.S. public schools are funded by local property taxes, which means that wealthier neighborhoods have highly trained teachers with up-to-date technology and poor neighborhoods have out-of-date textbooks and crumbling buildings… Separate remains unequal in districts across the country.” For example, Lockland spends $2,682 less than Wyoming per student. Since Lockland High School’s total enrollment is 174 students (“Lockland High School,” U.S. News), they have $466,668 fewer to spend on new books, clean facilities, and programs that prepare for lives beyond the classroom (“Ohio School Report Cards”).
While Lockland High School has vastly more minority students than Wyoming, it is important to recognize that there is a large proportion of White students as well. It remains true that Black and minority students suffer the impacts of education inequality in larger numbers across America; however, regardless of race or ethnicity, each student is being failed by the system. Black or White, all Lockland students have fewer opportunities, fewer second chances, and a smaller safety net than any of their Wyoming counterparts. This corroborates Gregory Palardy’s conclusion from his 2018 American Educational Research Journal article “High School Socioeconomic Segregation and Student Attainment,” which finds that school segregation is actually more pronounced along socioeconomic than racial lines (715 – 16). In order to address this rampant inequality at the root, we need to shift our focus away from racial integration and onto the financial and resource disparities that exist between schools.
Attending a low-SES school holds dramatic implications for the academic achievement of each child, as Palardy explains that “the mean level of math pipeline progression was 1.77 standard deviations lower at low socioeconomic composition (SEC) schools… indicat[ing] that students at low SEC schools are comparatively far less likely to take advanced math coursework… and tend to deemphasize academics” (732). The Lockland School District website reinforces this claim, as browsers looking for academic resources must search for the small section titled “Student Links” sequestered under the sixth header. Instead of focusing purely on intellectual pursuits, low SEC schools are forced to tackle complex issues such as homelessness, food insecurity, and criminal justice. Mr. Raby, referring to the trauma his students have endured, explained, “Our kids are struggling… I just got done having a great conversation with a student, and I had to tell him you’ve seen more things in your life than I will ever see, and I’m sorry because you’re only 16.” Low-income schools do not simply function as schools; they are also tasked with the responsibility of being community resources, mental health centers, and support systems for their students.
Why does socioeconomic standing have such a dramatic impact on schools’ ability to educate the next generation? The answer seems straightforward. Schools with lower socioeconomic standing have less physical, human, and monetary resources. Because of this, teacher turnover is more prevalent in low SEC schools, as they are required to manage schools’ disciplinary climates and school safety, all at an average salary of $8,000 fewer than their higher SEC counterparts (Palardy 732). Further exacerbating disparities in academic attainment, teachers in low-income schools often tend to have less professional training as well; there are 30.7% more teachers at Wyoming that have master’s degrees than at Lockland (“Ohio School Report Cards”). In order to manage the intersection of socioeconomic challenges and disciplinary demands present in underprivileged schools, students deserve the highest quality teachers possible; however, their flight to more privileged schools is all too common.
Many teachers point to the propensity for student misbehavior as their impetus to leave low SEC schools, as Palardy states that administrators’ necessity to “focus on discipline may come at the expense of academics” (721). However, Mr. Raby hopes to reframe this narrative. He remarked, “Trauma is trauma. And I don’t know if it’s socioeconomic or not, but a lot of times we deal with a lot of trauma… and it comes down to unbreaking [it].” It is possible to empathize with the reality that low-income teachers face challenges that may push them to move schools while equally realizing that students’ misbehavior is evidence of their need for support.
When faced with such dramatic statistics that expose the heartbreaking reality for students at underprivileged schools, it is easy to point to segregation as the source of these issues and demand a re-commitment to desegregating schools. However, forcing integration of schools onto minority communities has vast problematic effects on students. In her 2014 article “The Problem of Integration,” Mary Patillo, a professor of sociology and African American studies at Northwestern University, writes that “instead of providing hard and concrete opportunities or equality that would make Black (or poor) people’s lives better, integration dwells on and is motivated by the relatively problematic nature of Black people and Black spaces, and posits proximity to Whiteness as the solution.” Simply pushing black and white children together in school isn’t going to solve the problem of systematic inequality any more than planting more trees on the Lockland side of the railroad tracks would make the neighborhood division any less obvious.
Further, it is imperative that proponents of integration listen to those actually living, working, and leading under-served communities. Mr. Raby points to the high proportion of students of color in his school as the backbone of Lockland’s “really unique environment.” He declared, “We don’t have a lot of race issues in our building, even with all the injustice and things that have kind of flared up in the past year… it’s never been a really big deal here when it comes to race.” Pushing and pulling communities based on the narrative that the “poor Black kids” need to be brought to “better schools” is fundamentally incorrect and will disrupt collaborative and caring communities like the one in Lockland schools.
Proponents of integration point to statistics such as those found by the Hechinger Report, a non-profit newsroom that covers education inequality, in their 2016 U.S. News article “Study: Children of Children Who Went to Desegregated Schools Reap Benefits, Too.” In this article Rucker Johnson, a professor of public policy at the University of California-Berkeley, compares younger siblings who spent more years in integrated schools with their older siblings, who experienced much of their education in segregated schools. He found that the younger siblings “graduated from high school and college in higher numbers, earned higher incomes, went on to more prestigious occupations” (Hechinger Report). However, it is critical to attribute these impressive results to their true catalyst — the fact that desegregated schools “had smaller class sizes and higher spending per student” (Hechinger Report). When the smoke clears, it is crucial to understand that high attainment levels can be achieved in schools like Lockland, so long as we support their students with as many resources as their Wyoming counterparts.
Cincinnati’s own history of desegregation is a mixed bag. As Lionel Brown and Kelvin Beckett explain in their 2007 article “Black and White in Cincinnati: Integrated or Quality Education?” the 1974 desegregation lawsuit Mona Bronson v. Cincinnati Board of Education turned the city’s education system on its head. In this suit, desegregation activists such as Mariam Spencer, the NAACP, and the Community Wide Task Force pressed the Cincinnati school board to “accept a mandatory desegregation plan”; however, since “federal courts accepted magnet schools as a legitimate method of desegregation… the board refused to consider any form of mandatory plan” and instead relied on magnet programs (Brown and Beckett 86). Magnet schools, as defined by Magnet Schools of America, are a type of public school that focuses on education themes such as STEM, fine and performing arts, career and technical education, and world languages. These schools are free, but because of their high demand, “most schools determine student acceptance by a lottery system” (“What are Magnet Schools”).
Contrary to the Cincinnati school board’s original plan, this reliance on magnet schools actually “increased racial segregation in Cincinnati schools” (Waltras 1997, qtd. in Brown and Beckett 280), as kids living outside of the Cincinnati Public School district are ineligible to apply for entrance into the magnet schools. As seen on the Cincinnati Public Schools’ website, the cities of Lockland and Wyoming both lie directly outside of these boundaries, and thus, their students are constrained to schools limited by residential segregation and unable to benefit from programs offered to inner-city kids. The band-aid of magnet schools for desegregation efforts has never addressed the rampant educational inequality present outside of Cincinnati proper.
As Cincinnati’s own history has demonstrated, it is nearly impossible to properly execute integration efforts. In cities like New York and Chicago, there is a classic pattern around integrating schools. Nikole Hannah-Jones describes this in her 2016 New York Times article “Choosing a School for my Daughter in a Segregated City.” First, a school with majority minority populations, low test scores, and low enrollment “languishes amid a community of affluence because white parents in the neighborhood refuse to send their children there” (Hannah-Jones). A small group of parents work hard to improve the school by writing grants and beginning arts programs, which then inspires more white and Asian parents to enroll their kids. However, the ripple effects of the new parents’ affluence marginalize the voices of the original Black and Latino parents (Hannah-Jones). Mary Patillo sums up this problematic effect: advocating for integration “stigmatizes Black people and Black spaces and valorizes Whiteness as both the symbol of opportunity and the measuring stick for equality.” Speaking over the voices of minorities and those actively working within these communities further marginalizes them and is not the solution to the persisting systemic inequality in Cincinnati and the American education system at large.
According to the Public School Review, Lockland High School places in the top 20% of public schools for diversity. At the community level, Lockland does not suffer from the residential segregation rampant across Cincinnati and America as a whole. Black and White families live in houses and sit in school desks side by side — the picture of the diversity supporters of Brown v. Board hoped one day to achieve. Yet, Lockland High School places in the bottom 50% of all public schools in Ohio for overall test scores. Only 40 – 49% of students achieve proficiency in reading, and even more astonishingly, only 11 – 19% of students achieve proficiency in math (“Lockland High School,” Public School Review). Racial diversity isn’t the problem: socioeconomic inequality is.
Near the end of the interview, I asked Mr. Raby, “In the perfect world, what would the state of Ohio and Department of Education do to help your school and your students thrive?” He responded without hesitation: “I would like to see more programs available… some more curriculum, some more things that would just help our students get excited.” Lockland used to teach cooking classes for their students, and Mr. Raby is working to create a financial literacy program; however, the former was cut because of funding and the latter is facing an uphill battle. He explained, “We’re operating bare-bone, honestly. Financially, we have to do what’s right to keep the doors open.” Since the American education system is built to value test scores over other curricula, programs that augment in-classroom learning and teach kids real-life skills are always the first to be cut.
Programs like Lockland’s cooking or financial literacy classes also have the potential to create tight-knit peer relationships within the school culture. According to Christopher Jencks and Susan Mayer, professor of social policy at Harvard University and professor of sociology at Northwestern University, respectively, “students with high achievement and motivation levels can help create a ‘culture of success’ in school, while students with low achievement and motivation levels can create a sense of deprivation and despair” (qtd. in Rumberger and Palardy 2005). These positive effects can take place through work groups, study groups, or programs like the ones Mr. Raby mentioned as they encourage the diffusion of motivation and academic aspirations throughout the school community (Rumberger and Palardy 2005).
It is possible to raise the quality of education all teachers provide, regardless of their level of professional education, so long as schools work to bring teaching practices in line with cognitive science. According to Natalie Wexler, author of the 2019 article “Why Integration Won’t Fix Educational Inequity,” many researchers are overlooking a fundamental problem in the education system: “what is being taught and how.” For example, the majority of teachers approach reading instruction by teaching “comprehension ‘skills and strategies’… but cognitive scientists have long known that the most important factor in reading comprehension isn’t generally applicable ‘skills’, it’s how much knowledge the reader has relating to the topic” (Wexler). However, low SEC students whose parents work long hours between multiple jobs may not be exposed to science, history, and the arts (key subject areas of many reading materials) outside of the classroom. Even in school settings, these subject areas are often the first cut due to lack of financial resources. Thus, a focus on reading comprehension in low SEC schools must be paired with continual investment in history, science, and the arts. If students lack this in-classroom support, they will remain “permanently behind — whether they’re in a classroom with white or affluent peers” (Wexler). Integration does not support students or their families; only classroom-based reform can provide the change students so desperately need.
Railroad tracks: a cliché overrepresented in Hollywood dramas, starkly demarcating the line between the “haves” and the “have-nots.” But at the divide between Wyoming and Lockland, Ohio, the railroad tracks represent more than that. They are our government’s continued failures to students in impoverished neighborhoods, the systemic injustices that serve to hold minority communities within the chains of poverty, and the silent stigma that surrounds under-resourced communities. Let us use these railroad tracks to inspire true change and embolden us with the courage to fight for those without a voice. Let us commit to, as Mary Patillo remarks, reform that “includ[es] the real stuff of equality — wages that support a family, income maintenance in the absence of work, schools that compensate for inequalities in family resources, policing that does not always have its finger on the trigger, and parks and music and health care centers and clean air and good food…” Investing in under-resourced schools won’t eradicate the intersectional issue that is systemic inequality — but it is a step in the right direction.
Works Cited
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Elizabeth Spera is from Cincinnati, Ohio and studies in the College of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.