CHAPTER 8

The Age of Accountability

There was widespread agreement during the Civil Rights era in Rochester that Black children were not receiving fair access to education. The question was the form of the remedy. Should the school district integrate Black children with white children, abolishing the distinction between the two classes of schools, or should it direct additional resources into the majority-Black schools so they could improve without the need to move students? Most plans included elements of both approaches. Broadly speaking, and especially before the Rochester school board scotched Superintendent Herman Goldberg’s desegregation proposals in 1967, the idea of repairing Black students’ access to education without a significant desegregation component was a conservative, even reactionary position. “Being for school integration but against compulsory busing is like saying, ‘I’m for the abolition of slavery, but it must be voluntary,’” one integration proponent, Alfred Sette, said in 1969.1

The last half century has seen a massive swing in orthodoxy in this regard. The fundamental question of whether to integrate schools or to fix them in place has been settled decisively. Every new current in education reform—magnet schools, charter schools, standardized testing, governance changes—falls into the latter paradigm. In the city of Rochester and elsewhere this has led to a dizzying series of reconfigurations, reorganizations, and reforms that has continued uninterrupted to the present. Desegregation, when mentioned at all, is considered only if done on a piece-meal, voluntary basis. In March 2019 Mayor Lovely Warren stood with fellow elected officials and leaders from nearly all of Rochester’s educational nonprofits to call for “comprehensive, evidence-based and transformational responses to the needs of our children,” adding up to nothing less than a “complete overhaul of the entire school system.” The idea of tackling racial segregation as part of that effort, however, was dismissed out of hand. The mayor said that she was “not interested” in trying to get the suburbs on board, while County Executive Cheryl Dinolfo cautioned against “taking what’s broken and injecting it into other systems.” The logic of Brown is forgotten; a disavowal of desegregation is implicit in local, state, and federal education policy.2

This philosophical shift is based in part on demographic and geographical reality. When the movement for desegregation in Rochester failed in 1971, white students made up about 60 percent of the district enrollment and 45 percent of Monroe County’s white population still lived within city limits. The political will to desegregate may have been lacking, but the possibility was there from a numerical perspective. As white flight into the suburbs continued over the next several decades, that possibility disappeared. By 2010 the city school district’s white enrollment was about 10 percent, and just 16 percent of white county residents lived in the city. The challenge of reforming an existing system to create better racial balance was replaced with the exponentially more difficult job of dismantling district lines and state laws to engineer something that has never existed before, against the wishes of many. Faced with this task, educators and community leaders chose instead to focus their attention elsewhere.3

During the 1950s the city of Rochester began to swell with new Black residents, mostly transplants from the South—but these were not the only arrivals. The early 1950s also saw the beginning of Rochester’s Puerto Rican community, which grew from two dozen in 1950 to perhaps 4,000 people by 1955. They settled first on the northeast periphery of downtown and accepted low-end jobs in food and clothing production—though even those were available only sparingly. “Neither Kodak, General Dynamics, Stromberg Carlson nor Xerox were hiring Puerto Ricans,” said Ramon Padilla, an early community leader who arrived in 1947. “Many whites would say Puerto Ricans were lazy, could not speak English, and did not belong here. . . . If 25 [Puerto Ricans] would show up, maybe one person would be hired, as a test.”4 As the Puerto Rican community grew—9,400 people in the city in the 1960 census, then 13,000 in 1970—the Rochester City School District spearheaded early efforts to create English language classes for children and adults, including a federally funded bilingual education program called Adelante, or “forward.” Well into the 1980s, though, the district’s best method of classifying students as Latino was eyeballing their last names, and the fate of Puerto Rican children in the reorganization plan of 1971–72 was an afterthought.5

The city’s diversity began to gain yet another aspect in the mid-1970s. After the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, people from South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and other affected countries in Southeast Asia began to arrive in the United States as refugees. Rochester and other northeastern cities had welcomed refugees for centuries, of course, but this was the first time they came from outside Europe in significant numbers. The Southeast Asian refugees were gradually supplanted by those from other troubled parts of the world: Somalia, Sudan, and Congo; Iraq and Syria and Bhutan; again from Southeast Asia. Non-European refugees became a significant population driver as a generation of Kodak and Xerox employees moved to the suburbs, left the state, or died. As it had with the Puerto Ricans, RCSD undertook the initial task of teaching the refugees and their children English and providing some basic job skills. In 2011 the district created a newcomer program for refugee children, the Rochester International Academy.6

The influx of Black people in the Great Migration broke the pattern in Rochester and other northern cities as far as welcoming newcomers into the native population. After 150 years of a simple Black-and-white racial paradigm, Rochesterians were initially slow to understand where the new Latino and Asian arrivals fit into an increasingly stratified society, and the sophisticated system of physical segregation designed for the containment of Black people ended up ensnaring subsequent groups as well. Puerto Ricans and Southeast Asians, too, found it difficult to escape low-income neighborhoods that were adversely affected by urban renewal and served by increasingly segregated schools. Puerto Ricans in Rochester were often bewildered by the demand for neat racial classification. Nydia Padilla-Rodriguez had ten brothers and sisters with skin colors ranging from light to dark. She recalled that her next-door neighbor would let the lighter-skinned siblings play in her yard, but not the darker ones. “It just didn’t make sense, but you knew you had to deal with it because it’s part of what happens when you walk out of your home,” she said.7

By 2020, one in three RCSD students was Latino or Asian. The academic achievement of Latino students in RCSD now mirrors that of Black students. Asian students fare better, but a significant divide exists between refugee students from Southeast Asia and the children of highly skilled immigrants from China and South Korea who come to the area for college or jobs.8

The proportion of Latino and Asian students grew not only through in-migration to Rochester but also because African Americans began in the 1970s to disperse more broadly outside the city of Rochester. Between the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968 and the maturation of a professional class of Black employees at Kodak, Xerox, and other large employers, Black families with means increasingly chose the newly open path of homeownership in the suburbs. From 1970 to 2000 the number of Black adults who had attended college grew by a factor of twelve in the Monroe County suburbs, far outpacing the rate in the city. “I wasn’t moving [to the suburbs] because I was running from something,” said Musette Castle, an RCSD teacher who moved to Pittsford around 1980. “I was doing what most people who work do: looking for a phenomenal home, the best I could have, in the best neighborhood I could have.” “The best,” of course, included the school system. Middle-class Black families often regarded the city school district with the same alarm as their white peers. “In the city, kids could be out of school for weeks before their parents are called,” said Gloria Winston Al-Sarag, who moved to Henrietta with her children in 1990. “In Rush-Henrietta, if my kid missed homeroom, I got a call: ‘Is Michael home sick today?’”9

At the same time, housing discrimination in Rochester became less overt but remained pernicious. The Urban League of Rochester conducted a series of housing audits in the mid-1970s in which white and Black couples approached real estate agents with the same cover story. In case after case, the white couples were steered toward well-maintained houses at the top of their price range and assured that financing could be secured, whereas Black couples with the same purported income were shown lower quality houses in mostly Black neighborhoods. In one example, a Black couple who said that they were looking for a house in the suburbs were shown scores of houses in only one, relatively poor town. The same realtor later drove a similarly situated white couple through the same town to discourage them from buying there, saying disdainfully, “How would you like to live here?” White couples were cautioned against purchasing in the 19th Ward because “a lot of blacks have moved in.”10

FIGURE 8.1. Students by race and ethnicity, Rochester City School District, 1961 to 2020.

Source: RCSD and New York State Education Department data, available at data.nysed.gov.

These racial and ethnic changes made no difference in terms of attempts to desegregate the schools; that time had passed. But though government and community interest in desegregation had dwindled considerably, there were still some scattered attempts to draw attention to the question. New York Education Commissioner Ewald Nyquist warned in 1975 that the city’s schools were “extremely segregated” and that he intended to intervene (he never did). Two years later the Urban League of Rochester, under Executive Director Bill Johnson, issued a comprehensive report showing how racial isolation had continued to increase dramatically. From 1970 to 1975, the proportion of minority students attending majority-minority schools had increased from 56 to 77 percent. Achievement gaps, as measured by state test scores, were stark and persistent, both within the city and between the city and the suburbs. The Urban League proposed an overhaul of city school attendance zones to better balance students by race and warned that it might sue to rectify the situation. The school board, though, shrugged off the Urban League’s findings of academic disparity between majority white and majority nonwhite schools and summarily rejected the idea of revisiting reorganization. “The recommendations do nothing more than flirt with the chaotic situation we had in 1971,” Frank Ciaccia said. “The board should take this report, study it and reject it.”11

Although the school board never formally took up the Urban League recommendations, it did convene a committee on integration in the same month that the report was issued, charging it with developing ideas for improving racial balance among students and teachers in the city. The Citizens Committee on Race and Education was nearly derailed before it began its work after some school board members objected to the presence of the word “race” in its name. “The word ‘race’ is inflammatory and it won’t help the committee study what it’s going to study,” Louis D’Angelo said. The committee chairman, Rev. Richard Comegys of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, ignored the criticism, and it was dropped. But the committee’s initial seven-month term eventually stretched to nearly two years as it struggled to raise funds for research. “We got a lot less support than we expected from local businesses and local foundations,” Comegys said. “As a result, our report will have only about one-tenth of what we had hoped to have.” When it finally was released in January 1979, the Comegys report concluded that open enrollment and other voluntary programs within the district had done “essentially nothing” to stem worsening racial isolation. It instead identified the main problem as persistent “white anxiety . . . [having] more to do with perceived atmosphere than with direct threat, with tension rather than explosion.” It found that specialized programs like World of Inquiry had drawn the best students, white and Black, from other schools, leaving the latter worse off. The only viable solution, it determined, was a metropolitan approach. The school board did not formally respond to the Comegys report, either. It, like the Urban League report, was mostly forgotten. “A lot of people say they support the principle of integration, but there’s not a lot of people in this community who are going to work for it,” Comegys concluded.12

In 1979, federal investigators arrived in Rochester from the Departments of Justice and Health, Education, and Welfare, and announced that they were “looking for evidence that either the city school district, other school districts, or other governmental agencies, such as zoning boards or housing authorities, took action with the intent to create segregated schools or segregated housing patterns.” The investigation came in response to multiple parents’ complaints about their children’s lack of an equal opportunity. The investigators promised that their report would be “exhaustive,” possibly leading to a settlement or lawsuit. In particular, it seemed the 1972 repeal of Herman Goldberg’s reorganization plan might finally get the critical examination that the school board had then feared. If the investigators ever completed their work, though, it did not become public. The pending inquiry faded without a formal conclusion. The federal agencies involved responded to 2019 Freedom of Information Act requests by stating that no documents related to the investigation existed in their files.13

The city school board from 1962 to 1972 had argued ferociously over whether the district was doing enough to counteract racial segregation and its effects. In the subsequent years, board members took a much more fatalistic view. “Kids fail because they put no effort into their education,” Irene Frusci said in 1978. “I’ve been called defeatist for saying that, but I’m a nurse, and I know that some of my patients die.” Brenda Fraser, who had been a proponent of the Herman Goldberg reorganization plan before joining the school board, said that desegregation was no longer “politically feasible” and therefore not worth discussing. “If you try to make integration an issue in the campaign, not even the liberals will vote for you,” she said. “Without any legal action behind you, they’ll say, ‘Why are you stirring up that trouble again?’”14

Until 1972, the Rochester City School District’s grappling with the question of segregation overshadowed its mounting financial difficulties. After the reorganization plan was rescinded in 1972 by a new school board majority pledging fiscal responsibility, the question of funding rose to the forefront. Enrollment, and with it per-pupil state aid, peaked around 44,000 in 1968–69 before beginning a steady decline that has continued mostly unabated to the present—even as students’ level of need has risen. As more and more middle-class families (and businesses) moved into the suburbs, the city’s tax revenues began to decline. “The property tax within the corporate limits of the City of Rochester no longer will bear the crushing burden of both education and city service costs,” City Manager Kermit Hill wrote to Superintendent John Franco in 1971. “Both city services and education must suffer because, by law, we now must try to squeeze both feet into this tight shoe.”15

This situation, replicated in urban districts across New York, eventually served as the foundation for a major lawsuit, Board of Education, Levittown Union Free School District et al. v. Ewald B. Nyquist, challenging the prevailing, property tax–based school finance system. Levittown sought to establish in the state constitution the same concept that a US Supreme Court case, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, had sought unsuccessfully to establish in the US Constitution—the right to approximate equity in education funding across the state, regardless of a community’s real property value. After several years of litigation, the New York Court of Appeals rejected the Levittown plaintiffs’ argument. They noted that the state constitution makes only the barest mention of education as a public duty. Critically, the court also found that the plaintiffs had not made the claim that education in any given district fell below “the statewide minimum standard of educational quality and quantity fixed by the Board of Regents.” This final point would later be tested in a subsequent court case that generated decades of controversy.16

The city of Rochester and its school district ultimately would be rescued from their immediate revenue crisis by a sales tax–sharing arrangement with Monroe County. Before that, though, came nearly twenty years of whipsawing education budget seasons. Every year, RCSD cut hundreds of employees and then, in many cases, hired them back when funds later emerged through a variety of stop-gap budget mechanisms. During the same period, the school board decided that it needed to begin “restructuring and scaling down” the district’s programs and payroll in recognition of its declining enrollment. Superintendent John Franco left for Long Island in 1980, his nine-year tenure as superintendent having bridged a massive transition in the philosophy of urban education. When he took the job in 1971, his task was to implement Goldberg’s reorganization plan for racial desegregation. By the time he left, desegregation was an afterthought, and the era of school reform was underway.17

Franco was a Rochester native, affable and deeply connected to the community. By contrast, Laval Wilson, who stepped in as superintendent in 1980, was “an intellectual computer [with] no food, water or blood” in him, one community member complained. For the school board that hired him, this was a virtue. “We needed somebody who could come in and shake the system up internally [and] give the union a tough time,” Archie Curry, vice president of the board that hired Wilson, said. “He had the little man’s syndrome. . . . He came in and said, ‘I’m the boss.’” Wilson was RCSD’s first Black superintendent, but his appointment by no means indicated a renewed emphasis on racial equity. Instead he projected what one commentator called a “formal, bureaucratic, and essentially raceless persona.”18

This colorblind, technocratic philosophy made Wilson a superintendent suited for his time. The national conservative tilt in education policy that began with President Richard Nixon’s antipathy to busing had yielded, by the early 1980s, a widespread conviction that schooling in the classic liberal model was leading the nation far astray. This conviction was captured most influentially in “A Nation at Risk,” a 1983 report from the US Department of Education. US schools, the report’s authors contended, were to blame for “a rising tide of mediocrity”—in large part because they had instead been enlisted “to provide solutions to personal, social, and political problems that the home and other institutions either will not or cannot resolve.” The report’s call for a rededication to “the basic purposes of schooling,” scrubbed of social context, echoed the conservative pushback to the movement for racial equity and desegregation in the 1960s. Now, it was rebranded as “excellence in education.”19

The key proponents of this new movement were not fearful and economically insecure white families, but rather a nearly complete roster of the most influential business executives in the country. Industry leaders got involved “because profits depend on it,” as Xerox CEO David Kearns put it. “Without it, our society will founder, and our businesses will, as well.” The education reforms of the excellence in education movement, which continues in spirit to the present, were drawn largely from the pages of business school textbooks. Perhaps the most important of them was the emphasis on measuring success or failure with a new array of performance indicators. The schools that performed the best would profit by attracting more students, while those that did not would be—in the two words that best summarize the era—held accountable.20

For these early reformers, the universal applicability of business principles to the arena of public education was implicit. “I don’t know anything about education,” admitted Norman Deets, Xerox’s workforce training director, who worked closely with RCSD. “But I know about how to make decisions, how to restructure management, and how to put together a quality product.” Education was now seen as a product, with children as the consumers. “[Schools] must tailor their offerings to the needs of the customer, and they must believe that in a fundamental sense, the student is always the customer,” Kearns wrote. To complete the metaphor, schools were education factories—not terribly well designed ones, from the viewpoint of the nation’s top business minds, staffed largely by employees in dire need of retraining or replacement.21

In large part because of a nationally significant teachers’ contract in 1987, and as one of the last payments of tribute for its mid-century industrial prowess, Rochester became an important locus for school-reform thinking. Marc Tucker, an influential academic, launched his National Center on Education and the Economy in Rochester in 1988. David Kearns would leave Xerox to become the US deputy secretary of education under George H. W. Bush. “This is the educational flagship of the United States,” American Federation of Teachers president Albert Shanker said in 1988. “Everybody is looking at Rochester.”22

The concept of magnet schools—consumer-oriented, aligned with workforce needs, and competing with one another for enrollment—fit perfectly into the vision of public education as a Darwinist marketplace. The idea has a long provenance, beginning with vocational schools such as Edison Tech and other specialized programs that draw students by choice rather than geography. In the mid-1970s, specialized schools became magnets not only for students but also, as importantly, for federal desegregation dollars. The district had a few abortive experiments with new magnet programs in the 1970s before finally striking gold in 1979 with the restructuring of Joseph C. Wilson Junior High School.23 Wilson, the former West High School, had descended into chaos as a middle school. “That was the worst place in the world,” Peter McWalters, then a mid-level administrator and later the RCSD superintendent, said plainly. Federal magnet school funding would convert Wilson into a “trilogy” of magnet programs focusing on the performing arts, college-track academics, and science and technology. The district, now led by Laval Wilson, followed up in 1981 with another large-scale plan that closed Madison High School and planted the seeds of elementary and secondary programs in buildings throughout the city.24

Within a few years, Wilson Magnet High School had mostly met the lofty expectations the community had set for it. Attendance and achievement were way up; students skipped lunch to learn computer programming in the state-of-the-art laboratories or to finish their Latin homework. Just as notably, violence and suspensions were way down. “When I first came here, I expected to find one bully, go fight him, and then it would be over,” the captain of the school football team said in 1984. “But there’s no bully here. There’s no one to fight.” A small number of suburban students enrolled in the school as well, an unthinkable notion before the school’s conversion, and its racial demographics nearly mirrored those of the district as a whole. Wilson Magnet seemingly even kept middle-class families in the city. “The day may come when we move out of the city, if only for want of a little more space,” two parents wrote in 1984. “But we will never consider such a move until our son has completed his education in the Rochester public schools.”25

A string of accolades and achievements seemed to prove the school’s success. In 1985, the state education department named Wilson Magnet one of the top ten high schools in New York. A business partnership program called Brainpower brought in top executives and engineers from Kodak and Xerox, among others, to lend expertise in writing curriculum. Students snorkeled in the Bahamas to learn about marine biology. In 1989 came a visit from President George H. W. Bush. “What you’re doing is an example to the entire country,” Bush told the students. “I’m going to do my level best as president to get this concept of magnet schools all over the country.” In 1999 Wilson Magnet became the first school in Monroe County to offer the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, thanks to a $6 million federal grant. Unsurprisingly, Wilson Magnet, in particular its Academy of Excellence, developed a reputation as the finest academic program in the school district. “It wasn’t perfect, but you were going to get educated there,” said Malik Evans, a 1998 graduate who later served on both the board of education and city council. “You were pushed.”26

Preceding Evans at Wilson Magnet by a few years was Lovely Warren. When school leaders periodically rounded up students to represent the school’s grand reputation, Warren was not their choice. By the time she arrived in high school, her life had been turned upside down by the revelation that her father, a Xerox engineer, had become addicted to crack cocaine. “When life changed for him, life changed for me,” she said. “I became very angry and I acted out. I would fight all the time.” Family issues aside, though, Warren felt intuitively that her very presence at Wilson Magnet said something about her. “We were the smart kids, and that was known in the community,” she said. “I knew that I was smart, and if I could just stop acting out I could be whatever I wanted.”27

Wilson was the most celebrated magnet school in Rochester, but it was by no means the only one. The roster changed over the twenty years or so when magnet schools were most prominent in the city, but several proved long lasting. School of the Arts began as one of the three pathways at Wilson Magnet, then moved into space at Monroe High School and eventually to its own building on Prince Street. A law and government magnet was housed first at Jefferson High School before moving to John Marshall High School. Edison Tech and School Without Walls, the two long-standing alternative programs, were reclassified as magnets. There were also more than a dozen elementary schools labeled as magnets, including ones focused on early education, language development, and studying the Genesee River.28

Were Rochester’s magnet schools, as Bush believed, a model worth following for both academic success and desegregation? The evidence is mixed. The district’s first review, in 1984, showed that test scores at the magnet schools were no better on the whole than those in the regular comprehensive high schools. Absenteeism and student turnover were lower at magnet schools, but largely because the students who attended them were more stable to begin with. Certain magnet programs, like those at Wilson Magnet and School of the Arts, eventually drew great demand from RCSD families and became permanent institutions. At the same time, a revolving array of others—an environmental sciences magnet program at Charlotte High School, for example—proved short lived. This sink-or-swim dynamic in magnet schools would be seen again with charter schools in the twenty-first century.29

The results in terms of desegregation were even less encouraging. Although some Rochester magnet programs were racially balanced, they could not stop galloping white flight throughout the city. The district’s non-white enrollment rose from 58 percent in 1979, when the first official magnet opened, to 72 percent a decade later. Just a quarter of elementary students attended “racially balanced” schools that year, defined as those within 10 percentage points of the districtwide enrollment of nonwhite students. A 1989 district report showed that just one-third of Black and Latino ninth graders were enrolled in Regents-level social studies, and that just one-third of those students passed the final Regents exam. The numbers for white students were exactly the opposite: nearly two-thirds took the more challenging course, and two-thirds passed the exam. “Magnets, then, are good for education,” the Times-Union editorialized. “But they are not, by themselves, the answer to segregation. To say that they are is to tolerate ‘separate but equal’ for a long time to come.”30

The crux of the problem was that, while attention was showered on the top-performing magnet schools, many of the nonmagnet comprehensive schools floundered. Laval Wilson and later superintendents insisted that the district remained committed to the comprehensive high schools, and all schools were technically required to enroll an equitable number of students of across differences in race, wealth, and academic performance. The sky-high recruiting budget and glowing promotional materials for the magnet schools, however, spoke for themselves, and they were eligible for federal funding that other schools were not. As McWalters later conceded: “The gifted programs were all white females and the troubled programs were all Black boys.” The disparity existed even within school buildings, where magnet programs were sometimes hosted alongside regular classrooms. John Marshall High School, for example, was home to a well-regarded law and government magnet program for high-achieving students as well as an on-site childcare center for the ninety nonmagnet teenage girls—one fifth of its female enrollment—who already had children of their own.31

Lovely Warren captured the dynamic, half in jest, in describing how different high schools in the city had their own reputations when she was a student: “At that point in time all the schools had something,” she said. “We [Wilson] were the school of knowledge. . . . East was for sports. Edison was for tech and the trades. Franklin and Josh Lofton were the schools for bad kids.” Indeed, with Madison closed and Wilson reinvented, Franklin became a dumping ground for students not talented or resourceful enough to land elsewhere. It was deemed “in need of assistance” by the state in 1985, cycled through principals at an alarming rate, and ultimately landed on the state’s final sanction list in 1991, a label that marked it for possible state takeover if it did not improve rapidly.32

Hope for improvement was based on technical fixes and, in large part, school choice for students. “We’re not a pick-and-choose district,” a top administrator said in 1993. “We let kids pick and choose.” The result, only partially intended, was erosion of the traditional enrollment zones and dilution of the concept of a magnet school. McWalters in 1988 ended secondary-school feeder patterns, and the district enrollment office began placing more and more elementary school students outside their official “home” zones. With the strict geographic placement system stripped away, the magnet schools became less distinct. White enrollment, meanwhile, continued to plummet, putting the goal of integration even further out of reach. “It is no longer possible to redraw home school attendance area boundaries that simultaneously satisfy instructional capacity and provide for socio-economic and/or racial/ethnic diversity,” the school board admitted in 2002 in a policy eliminating single-school attendance areas in favor of three “zones” for elementary schools. Five years later, the last remnant of dedicated magnet school funding in the district was folded into a block grant.33

Of the profusion of magnet schools that emerged in the 1980s in Rochester, only one remains—and even then, only in name. Wilson Magnet lost its three distinct magnet tracks but still offers the IB program. RCSD acknowledged in 2014, though, that barely any of its students graduated with an IB diploma and most didn’t even enroll in the courses. The few suburban students once enrolled there and in other selective city schools have long since vanished. Benchmarks related to race and poverty have been abandoned. The city’s three enrollment zones, the last vestige of neighborhood schools, have proven porous, with more than half of elementary school students going to a school across town from where they live.34

Archie Curry served on the school board from 1978 until 2005, essentially the entire magnet school era. His own children attended magnet programs at School 3, Wilson Magnet, and Edison Tech. He attributed the magnet concept’s ultimate lack of success to disinterest, based partly on fear, from white families:

At Marshall, we thought if it had a law magnet, it would be great. They had a whole courtroom and everything. No white kids came there. We said to the suburban schools, ‘You can send your kids.’ They didn’t come. . . .

Magnet schools were a way to get more white kids to stay in city schools, and then by osmosis, Black kids would be better off. . . . We destroyed neighborhood schools, and by the time we [ended], we couldn’t integrate because there were no white kids left to integrate.35

The magnet schools movement may not have succeeded in stopping the trend of worsening racial segregation in Rochester (and Monroe County) schools, but the attempt at least acknowledged the problem. By contrast, nearly every other significant local attempt at education reform has been silent on the effects of segregation. These attempts have been frequent and unfailingly earnest. Several have been launched from the business community or else were developed with its support: the August Group, the Rump Group, the Call to Arms, the Call to Action, the Children’s Zone, and Beacon Schools. Mayor Bob Duffy fought valiantly but unsuccessfully for mayoral control of the district. All have sought to solve the problem of segregated education with a combination of coordinated supports—mentoring, social services, and health care—and structural change in the school system, with a particularly critical eye toward the elected school board.36

These reforms, none of them indigenous to Rochester, all are based on the same premise: that it is possible—preferable, in the opinion of some—to provide a separate but equal education for all children, no matter how massive the contrast in race and affluence from one school district to another. Indeed, the notion of equal outcomes between urban and suburban students has been either implicitly rejected or punted into the distant future. As the Rump Group, a coalition of the city’s industrial leaders, wrote in “A Community at Risk,” a much-discussed 2003 report: “It is unreasonable to demand that Rochester students suddenly match the performance of students in Brighton or Greece. . . . [But] it is reasonable to expect students in the Rochester City School District to perform as well as, or better than, students in any district with a predominantly low-income population.”37

The presupposition of racial and economic segregation also underlies federal (and New York) education policy dating back to George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind. That this premise directly contradicts the decision in Brown v. Board of Education, perhaps the most significant and revered Supreme Court decision of the twentieth century, is by and large ignored. Indeed, the universal acceptance of the essentially conservative principles underlying the reform and accountability movement is the clearest possible proof of the decisiveness with which the debate over segregation was resolved. Much has been written about the programs of the education reform movement, both locally and nationally. The two most prominent of them will be discussed below: the landmark 1987 Rochester teachers’ contract and the rise of charter schools.

A 1980 strike had left relations between RCSD and its teachers frosty throughout Laval Wilson’s tenure. When Wilson left for Boston in 1985, though, he was replaced by Peter McWalters, who saw himself first as a “teacher on leave,” not an administrator, and quickly made common cause with the Rochester Teachers Association. Union president Adam Urbanski, for his part, disavowed “unions as they used to be” and sold his members on the need to assume greater responsibilities.38 In the fall of 1987, the school board and teachers ratified a three-year contract that vaulted Rochester to the forefront of the national reform movement. The basic concept, as journalist Katherine Boo put it, was “to shower money and power on teachers.” It was the first part of that equation that captured headlines: a 40 percent increase in pay over three years, which resulted in the median teacher salary rising from $34,000 in 1986–87 to $46,000 in 1989–90. Rochester teachers became the highest paid in the country, a coup for Urbanski and the American Federation of Teachers. The added teacher duties, meanwhile, were mostly not spelled out in the contract but rather listed as “agreements to agree.” They included programs for teacher development and remediation and the establishment of school-based decision-making bodies dominated by teachers.39

“It does nothing less than put Rochester in the forefront of the national educational reform movement,” school board member Catherine Spoto said in voting to approve the new contract. Leading a movement, however, is not the same thing as running a school system, and implementation proved a harder lift than reform leaders had anticipated. For business-minded reform advocates and many parents, the prospect of weeding out so-called bad teachers was one of the contract’s top selling points. The confidential nature of that weeding, however, made it difficult to assess. Frustrated parents were quick to point to examples where bad teachers remained untouchable. “We have teachers who fraternize—I mean, have sex with—teenagers, and they’re still teachers,” Parent Council president Marvin Jackson said in 1992. “But mostly, we just have some plain old bad teachers, and nothing ever happens to them.”40 Signs of dissent in the community had become clear by the time the labor deal expired in 1990. Academic performance had only increased marginally, the country was entering a recession, and distaste for Rochester’s home-grown school reform was rising. Urbanski recalled meeting with a group of community leaders who were impatient with the pace of change in the schools. “I said, ‘I know, me too. But real change takes real time,’” he recalled. “And someone responded, ‘Yeah, but you took that money real quick.’”41

A generation after the 1987 teachers’ contract, lasting evidence of the reform it heralded is difficult to see. Teacher salaries in RCSD, once the highest in the country, are now in the middle of the pack in Monroe County. School-based planning is absent from many buildings and ineffectual in others. Complaints about ineffective teachers coasting to retirement have scarcely abated. Urbanski responded: “All our efforts to improve learning outcomes for students were outpaced by the declines in the students’ conditions.”42

Archie Curry voted against the contract and laid much of the blame on McWalters for being “duped” into granting an extravagant pay raise without getting the promised returns in writing. McWalters, who left Rochester in 1991, rejected the notion that Urbanski took advantage of him. And though he went on to positions of greater influence later in his career, he admitted a wistfulness for the Rochester reform that never was. “When I arrived in Rochester [in 1970], I felt like I was in one of the most progressive places I could imagine,” he said. “I distinctly remember having the sense: ‘This is the place that can make that happen.’ . . . But some of the stuff didn’t stay long enough, get supported enough, or they just couldn’t deliver it.”43

The waning of the late-1980s reform effort marked a turning point in the relationship between RCSD and the local business community. “Nine years after Rochester’s historic ‘reform movement’ started, there is little progress to report, despite a more than 40% increase in per-pupil expenditures,” the business-heavy August Group wrote in 1994. Disillusioned, local business leaders started looking outside the district for other solutions. They found one in charter schools, a movement that began as a way to encourage teachers to experiment with pedagogy and curriculum. By 2019–20 there were fourteen charter schools in Monroe County educating about 6,700 Rochester children. Advocates point to superior state test scores and graduation rates at most charter schools compared to district schools, and the data supports them. At the highest-performing charter schools, students often best even their peers in wealthy suburban schools. Like magnet schools before them, charter schools fit neatly into a competitive, capitalistic frame of reference. “The beauty of charter schools is that, in exchange for many freedoms . . . [they] must deliver or risk closure,” said Geoff Rosenberger, an investment banker and chairman of the Rochester Prep charter school board.44

In some cases, though, the freedom inherent in the charter school sector has led to abuses. In keeping with a national pattern, there have been numerous instances where Rochester-area charter school leaders have directed public funding into their own pockets, most often through real estate transactions. For example, the Education Success Network, an umbrella group comprising several schools along with a tutoring operation and real estate arm, created a thicket of contracts among its entities, including several where the signatories were affiliated with both parties.45

As with other accountability-era reforms, the charter school movement is not intended to reduce segregation, either within urban districts or across metropolitan areas. Instead, charter school advocates view poverty and racial segregation as rationalizations for failure and evidence of low expectations. It is not surprising, then, that the median Rochester-area charter school manages to surpass the median RCSD school in racial segregation, with 92 percent Black and Latino students compared to 89 percent in the district. Indeed, more than failing to address racial and socioeconomic segregation, charter schools actively deepen RCSD’s concentration of other sorts of vulnerable students. The median Monroe County charter school has half as many non-English speakers and students with disabilities as RCSD.46

One Rochester charter school does concern itself directly with segregation. That is Genesee Community Charter School (GCCS), a small K–6 school on the campus of the Rochester Museum and Science Center on East Avenue. Its twenty-year history illustrates the potential—and the problems—of charter schools in the context of school desegregation. It was launched as “diverse by design,” with demographic goals pegged to Monroe County rather than the city of Rochester. In practice, this means enrolling more middle-class and white children, and indeed GCCS has succeeded in that, perhaps too well. The school’s enviable campus setting and emphasis on child-based learning have made it an instant favorite of white families living nearby in the relatively affluent southeast quadrant. In 2014–15, when its five-year charter term came up for renewal, the school had 67 percent white children and just 26 percent economically disadvantaged children. In response the board of regents asked the school to give preference to economically disadvantaged children in its lottery. The school’s leaders parried the request but, after another five years of little progress in changing its demographics, agreed to create a weighted lottery.47

Should GCCS be celebrated as a model of school integration, where the demographics roughly mirror the metropolitan area and the curriculum is imbued with a social justice message? Or is it another parasite on RCSD, attracting away students with means and the state funding that comes along with them to the detriment of the city as a whole? The school in 2020 pledged to enroll more nonwhite and economically disadvantaged students, as well as English-language learners and students with disabilities, to more closely match the demographics of RCSD. Even while promising to pursue that goal, though, school leader Shannon Hillman questioned its wisdom. “I think it is achievable to do this major flip in our demographics and still be highly successful,” she said. “The lost piece is, you wouldn’t have the opportunity to grow up with kids different from you if you’re in a segregated school.”48

In a market-based conception of public education, the prospect of scalable success has become a holy grail. Schools that can point to a positive trend-line, no matter how preliminary, are soon inundated with visiting educators, officials, and journalists looking for evidence of something that works. Replication, though, is a constant challenge, in part because these model programs often succeed through unacknowledged but important advantages. The paradox of GCCS was true as well of magnet schools, whose successes stemmed from the makeup of the student body as much as from the teaching the schools provided. Other charter schools are a closer match to traditional public schools but nonetheless retain important privileges—fewer students with disabilities and the ability to turn out low-performing students, for instance—that RCSD lacks. In other cases—for instance, the costly, much touted partnership between the University of Rochester and East High School beginning in 2015—the advantages include an infusion of outside resources not available to other schools. Broader reforms like the 1987 teachers’ contract, meanwhile, have failed to generate systemic improvements. In no case has any meaningful desegregation occurred, racial or otherwise, in large part because school district lines have become too stiff a barrier. “We said we were going to achieve balance, but it was balancing 70 percent minority populations,” Ed Cavalier said of his time as an RCSD administrators in the 1980s. Like, ‘Let’s make sure there’s no one school that’s better than another.’ . . . There was no longer any way to integrate.”49

Only once since the school board election of 1971 has there been a serious challenge to the segregated nature of education in the Rochester area. That came in 1998 in a lawsuit filed on behalf of a group of students including fifteen-year-old Amber Paynter.

Paynter was born in New Jersey, and during her childhood she and her mother moved back and forth several times between a suburban school district there and Rochester. “I remember going to second grade in Rochester and doing work I did in kindergarten in New Jersey, and my mom made a huge deal about that,” Paynter said. “And that was the first time I was like: ‘Oh, OK, there’s something called inequality.’” By the time Paynter reached John Marshall High School she was inured to the dysfunction in the district and concentrated on keeping her head down while maintaining passing grades. Her mother, Mona Stone, helped recruit other families for the lawsuit. “She was very passionate about: ‘Let’s stand up for our kids and fight,’” Paynter said. “I remember her saying: ‘People are so used to having less, they’re not aware of what the possibility could be. . . . We can have better schools.’”50

The student plaintiffs were assembled by the Greater Rochester Area Coalition for Education, or GRACE.51 The group included much of Rochester’s social justice–oriented legal community as well as like-minded academics and politicians. One was county legislator Christopher Wilmot, who in 1996 unsuccessfully floated the idea of studying school district consolidation. Group members were moved to action by the vast disparity in academic outcomes in the city and suburban school districts. “Are our children being educated? The answer depends on, among other things, where you live and the economic circumstances of your family,” Wilmot wrote. “Some differential is inevitable, but the existing disparity is unconscionable.”52

The initial lawsuit, filed in September 1998 as Paynter v. State of New York, provided a laundry list of inequitable educational outcomes in RCSD compared to the surrounding suburbs: higher dropout rates, lower graduation rates, worse test scores. In sum, it alleged, these were evidence that Rochester children were being denied a sound, basic education. The complaint then went further, claiming that this deprivation was a direct cause of concentrated poverty in the city and that the “state laws and state policies [that] have caused and contributed” to it—in other words, de jure segregation. In particular the plaintiffs pointed to a 1973 state law that gave municipalities veto power over the siting of low-income housing developments. “Through no fault of its own, the RCSD has been saddled with tremendous educational hurdles,” they concluded. “By itself, the District simply cannot overcome the educational disadvantages imposed by extreme concentration of poverty.”53

The lawsuit sought no specific fix but rather asked the court to order the creation of a remedy and to take the parties under its supervision. In interviews, GRACE members said that they were not necessarily looking for a full metropolitan school district, even if they favored one conceptually. As Bryan Hetherington, one of the lead Paynter attorneys, said: “We were pretty convinced you could do a relatively non-disruptive remedy that would take advantage of the unique demographics of this community, with a combination of magnets and changing housing patterns by improving the city schools. We were always kind of vague in terms of our remedy because we wanted State Ed to listen to the local districts and see what they needed to be willing participants.”54

Longtime observers of the district’s segregation struggle may have recognized one of the names on the lawsuit. Lillian Colquhoun was the lead plaintiff in the 1970 case Colquhoun v. Board of Education, where she sued on behalf of her daughter Sereena Brown. By 1998 she was a grandmother and joined Paynter on behalf of her two grandchildren, Yancey and Yalawn Christian, of whom she had custody. Yalawn Christian recalled growing up under her grandmother’s roof with a large and changing assortment of aunts, uncles, and cousins—as many as ten living together at once under Colquhoun’s care. “It was really rough,” she said of her time in Schools 3 and 4, both almost entirely nonwhite. “There were a lot of children with trauma and PTSD and different things going on at home, and when they got to school there weren’t a lot of counselors to establish relationships.”55

The legal framework of Paynter was partly inspired by a pair of contemporary education lawsuits: Sheff v. O’Neill, in Connecticut, and Campaign for Fiscal Equity Inc. v. State. Sheff, first filed in 1989, alleged that educational disparities between Hartford and the state’s nonurban schools violated the equal protection clause of the state constitution, specifically as a result of racial and socioeconomic isolation. After seven years of litigation, the state’s highest court agreed with the plaintiffs. It ordered the creation of an inter-district remedy that ultimately involved building dozens of magnet schools and controlling enrollment to ensure racial and socioeconomic diversity.56

Sheff raised eyebrows but had relatively little national impact because it relied on language in the Connecticut state constitution that did not exist in New York or elsewhere. The Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) lawsuit, on the other hand, picked up where Levittown in New York had left off. The judges in Levittown had ruled that, though funding across New York school districts might be unequal, a claim of constitutional violation could not be proven unless the plaintiffs showed that the unequal funding resulted in unequal outcomes. A statewide coalition called the Campaign for Fiscal Equity filed a lawsuit in 1993 alleging that very thing: that funding disparities across districts had deprived poor students of their constitutionally guaranteed right to a “sound, basic education.” A trial began in 1999.57 CFE and Paynter, then, proceeded together through the state courts, aiming at the same broad goal through different means. Hetherington noted how the issues of funding and demographics were often cynically played against each other: “In a state where people were bringing a finance suit, the state defendants would say, ‘It’s concentration of poverty,’” he said. “And in states where there was a concentration of poverty suit, they’d say, ‘It’s financing.’” To get around this dilemma, Paynter proposed a novel formulation of the problem, arguing that “inputs” included not just money but also the students themselves.58

The initial lawsuit named only state representatives, including Education Commissioner Richard Mills. The state protested that the individual Rochester-area school districts, too, should be named, given that they inevitably would be implicated in a potential remedy. The courts agreed on appeal, meaning that the list of named defendants had ballooned by the time Judge John Ark issued the first substantive ruling in the case in November 2000. This was a strategic setback for the plaintiffs, who had counted on keeping the suburban districts sidelined and possibly engaged in a solution. “The court forced the suburban districts to come in; we didn’t want them to,” Feldman said. “[Once involved], they couldn’t make any nuanced arguments. They had to just oppose.”59

In his ruling, Ark agreed with the plaintiffs that “poverty concentration and racial isolation have affected the education provided to minority students in the RCSD, as in most American, and certainly New York State cities, to be inferior to that in surrounding suburban districts.” Beyond this general platitude, though, he turned skeptical. He dismissed several of the plaintiffs’ claims, in large part because the argument focused strictly on outcomes without tying them to a lack of “minimally acceptable educational services and facilities.” The only claims Ark left standing were for civil rights violations at the state and federal level, though here as well he was skeptical. “When compared to the other school districts in Monroe County, the RCSD is separate but apparently not equal,” Ark wrote. “But the courts realize they are not competent to resolve these most difficult education issues . . . [through a] court mandated solution.” The state appellate division upheld Ark’s ruling in December 2001 and dismissed the remaining claims as well. The last chance lay with the state court of appeals, which agreed to hear the case and scheduled a hearing for May 8, 2003.60

As it happened, the court of appeals heard Paynter the same day as CFE, the first in the morning session and the second in the afternoon. A single day’s deliberation would set the direction of New York education policy for a generation. If Paynter was allowed to continue, the injurious effect of segregation might finally get a hearing at the highest level. If the CFE plaintiffs prevailed, the legislature would need to develop an entirely new funding policy that better accounted for student need. If both were rejected, the quest for judicial reform in New York would be dealt a mortal blow.

The decisions in both cases were released on June 26, 2003. The dismissal of Paynter was upheld by a 4–1 ruling. Chief Judge Judith Kaye, in the majority opinion, rejected the idea that “an Education Article claim by students against the State may consist of an abundance of terrible educational outcomes . . . with no assertion that these results are caused by any deficiency in teaching, facilities or instrumentalities of learning, or any lack of funding.” This, she agreed with the lower courts, contradicted the key finding of Levittown, at the least.

She continued:

The only deficient input plaintiffs allege is the composition of the student body of RCSD schools. Plaintiffs say that no matter how well the State funds their schools, if plaintiffs and their classmates fail, it is the State’s responsibility to change the school population until the results improve. . . .

Holding the State responsible for the demographic composition of every school district, moreover, would mean either making it responsible for where people choose to live, or holding that it must periodically redraw school district lines, negating the preferences of the residents.61

The CFE lawsuit alleging an unfair state finance system, meanwhile, won on appeal, a momentous holding that led to several more years of litigation and negotiation over how a more equitable system could be designed—and how much money the state should pour into it. A final settlement was reached in 2007 but was abandoned almost immediately because of the financial crisis of 2008. Even after the state economy recovered, Governor Andrew Cuomo declined to return to the high-priced CFE formula, arguing that it was not binding on the state. This bickering over the proper funding level consumed a great deal of legislative energy throughout the 2010s. From a broader perspective, though, the reduction of the argument to figures in the budget and nothing more represented a final retreat from the idea that local school districts or the state of New York—or anyone at all—bore some responsibility to address racial and socioeconomic segregation in schools.62

The sole dissenting opinion in Paynter came from George Bundy Smith, the only Black judge on the court of appeals. While enrolled in law school at Yale, Smith had volunteered as a Freedom Rider in Alabama for the Congress on Racial Equality, studying for his exams while riding on the bus. After graduation he worked for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, helping draft the appellate briefs leading to James Meredith’s admission into the University of Mississippi. He also clerked for Jawn Sandifer, who in 1962 had supervised the Aikens desegregation lawsuit in Rochester.63

The bulk of Smith’s lengthy Paynter dissent was a history lesson on the development of the education article in the New York state constitution. The clause, drafted in 1894, consists of a single unadorned sentence: “The legislature shall provide for the maintenance and support of a system of free common schools, wherein all the children of this state may be educated.” Smith cited the report of the Constitutional Convention at length to show that, “while the Education Article was enacted to ensure that all the children in the State would have access to a sound education, its enactment was motivated by the plight of poor children.” He contrasted the framers’ emphasis on a “permanent, broad and firm” educational system with the Paynter plaintiffs’ allegations of “shockingly inadequate education.”

Smith argued that the plaintiffs should be allowed to proceed to trial to make their case that a “racially and socially separate education” violated the education article. “The Constitution does not place the responsibility of providing a sound education on local school districts, or towns, or cities,” he wrote. “It places that responsibility squarely on the State.” Smith dismissed the defendants’ paean to local control as a “red herring” meant to divert attention from the state’s overriding obligations. “Plaintiffs are not arguing for the elimination of local school boards,” he wrote. “They argue that the State should not draw district lines in a manner that encircles poor and minority students, and sets them up for failure.”64

Rhetoric aside, Smith’s dissent meant little. “This case is done,” Hetherington told reporters. For the families who signed up as plaintiffs, the fight was mostly forgotten. Amber Paynter said that her mother remained bitter about the lawsuit nearly twenty years after it concluded. “I think she was so upset nothing ever came of it, she won’t really talk about it,” Paynter said in 2020. “The lawyers basically courted poor Black moms . . . [and] I think a lot of the moms were under the assumption that this was a huge deal and it was going to affect their lives, like, right now. And I don’t think that was the reality.”65

It is noteworthy that the allegations in Paynter are based primarily on socioeconomic status rather than race. This was done strategically, Jonathan Feldman said, because “the Supreme Court had made race unviable in terms of federal claims.” He was referring to a trio of school desegregation cases in the early 1990s where the court showed skepticism of race-based claims. Those decisions would be followed in even more dramatic fashion by another ruling in 2007 that sealed the Supreme Court’s conservative turn since Milliken v. Bradley.66

Scores of cities across the United States were placed under court supervision for school desegregation during the 1960s and 1970s. Even when the political winds shifted after Milliken, these orders remained in effect, so that judges occasionally were required to determine whether segregation had yet been eliminated “root and branch,” according to the standard set by Green v. New Kent County in 1968. Disputes regarding such determinations in Oklahoma, Georgia, and Missouri school districts reached the Supreme Court from 1991 to 1995. In these three cases the court jettisoned the “root and branch” standard and dramatically lowered the bar for districts seeking release from judicial supervision. The desegregation orders, the court wrote in Oklahoma City v. Dowell, were “not intended to operate in perpetuity, federal supervision of local school systems always having been intended as a temporary measure to remedy past discrimination.”67

These rulings had an immediate impact in cities across the country that earlier had been subject to mandated desegregation orders, including Buffalo. Parents and activists there sued for desegregation in 1972, alleging both de facto and de jure segregation. Unlike in Rochester, the lawsuit, called Arthur v. Nyquist, succeeded. The state district court agreed that the current system had been “purposely segregated” and ordered the creation of a desegregation plan. That plan closed low-performing, mostly Black schools and replaced them with attractive federally funded magnet programs. Attendance patterns were redrawn and busing in many cases was made mandatory, eventually affecting about thirty thousand students. Black student achievement improved by some measures and Buffalo was hailed as a national model; one of the parent leaders of the group South Buffalo Anti-busers ended up sending her son to a magnet school across the city. Even in this best-case scenario, however, the victory was not complete. There were five times as many applicants to magnet schools as there were open slots, and teachers and families in the remaining traditional neighborhood schools complained of a short shrift.68

Buffalo’s success had two crucial supports. First, it had the most per-pupil federal magnet school support of any district in the country. Second, the court order provided political cover and a convenient excuse for actions like closing familiar neighborhood schools. “This way, they pointed to the judge and said, ‘He’s a tyrant; he’s making us do it,’” the supervising judge, John Curtin, said. Neither of these columns proved enduring. By 1991 Buffalo was receiving no federal magnet funding whatsoever. Then, following the trio of Supreme Court actions, the supervising judge declared in 1996 that Buffalo had achieved “unitary status,” even though a third of schools remained out of compliance with demographic targets. Many magnet schools closed or lost appealing features, and applications to magnet schools decreased by one-third over four years. White flight changed from a trickle to a gusher. “Today, the progress made during the 20 years of the Arthur v. Nyquist desegregation order has largely been undone,” a later analyst wrote.69

The Supreme Court decisions from 1991 to 1995 were, as one commentator put it, “a harbinger of an era of increased judicial indifference to ensuring desegregation.” The impression was confirmed in 2007, when the court heard complaints from parents in the public schools of Seattle and Louisville. In both cities, parents (white parents in Seattle, Black parents in Louisville) alleged that their children had faced racial discrimination after being denied their first choice under the existing race-conscious placement policies. The defendants responded by asserting a legitimate governmental interest in maintaining racial diversity in schools.70

The cases were joined and came to be known as Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. Writing for a split majority, Chief Justice John Roberts came down definitively on the side of the protesting parents. Allowing race-conscious policies like those in Seattle and Louisville, he wrote, would guarantee that “race will always be relevant in American life” and “would support indefinite use of racial classifications.” Except in specific remedial case, nearly any reference to race was verboten. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Roberts wrote in an oft-cited phrase. Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent, meanwhile, lamented that Brown had been reduced to mere “fine words on paper.” Echoing Thurgood Marshall’s famous dissent in Milliken, Breyer warned that Parents Involved in time would be “a decision that the Court and the Nation will come to regret.”71

The years after the publication of “A Nation at Risk” in 1983 are known as the “excellence in education” era. They just as easily could be called the age of acronyms. Propelled by the demand for measurement and efficiency and constantly roiled by reform, the education field has never been more difficult to decipher. NCLB begat RTTP begat ESSA. Schools are measured on AYP via the DTSDE; teachers must hit SLOs for their APPR. New York schools classified as CSI or TSI must submit SCEP and SIG plans, part of a broader DCIP.72

Much of this muddle is driven by US Department of Education guidelines that state education agencies and, in turn, school districts, must follow to ensure federal funding. The burden falls most heavily on poor urban school districts like Rochester, where compliance with various oversight measures, as well as grant requirements, requires the full-time attention of several administrators who otherwise could be working on teaching and learning. “All these state requirements for urban districts, the SIG plans, the SIF plans, the SCEP plans, the quarterly reports . . . I mean, we have a whole office that just works with that stuff,” interim RCSD superintendent Linda Cimusz said in 2016. “The burden of time that comes with all that, versus being able to work with principals and focus on schools—that really has a large impact.”73 An even greater escalation involves the appointment of an outside expert as a distinguished educator or monitor (Rochester has had both). These appointments are grounded in the unshakable logic of the school reform era: problems in educational achievement are a matter of pedagogy, organization, and systems management. The demographics of the student body may dictate how those technocratic knobs are tuned but are never considered remotely determinative.

For a time during the 1980s, Peter McWalters was as closely identified with this logic as any school superintendent in the country. He was one of many devotees of “A Nation at Risk,” which held, in McWalters’ words, that “basically the system is broken and we’re sliding into mediocrity.” Now, at the other end of his career, McWalters has reconsidered the premise. “After twenty-five years of test-based, standards-based accountability, tightening the screws, it hasn’t been proven to be very successful,” he said in 2020. Instead, he said, a “good school” is easily identified in the same way as always: mostly white, middle-class, English-speaking children, few of them with disabilities. “It absolutely is that simple,” McWalters said. “It took some of us a while to realize that that simple image [in “A Nation at Risk”] has become a false promise of fixing it. It assumed things ever worked before that, but they didn’t. The system was never set up to serve all kids.”74