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89 serving Metro tampa, the Hillsborough County Public schools (HCPs) district has relied heavily on choice policies for the past two decades, and school leaders still express a significant commitment to using choice to promote school diversity even though the desegregation plan that led to the creation of many of the choice options has ended. After implementing a comprehensive desegregation plan following the supreme Court’s 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg decision authorizing the use of busing, this large system had few segregated schools for decades, while continuing to grow rapidly. The district was known for its historically positive leadership in pairing schools in mostly white suburban areas with those in predominately black city areas. in addition, it designed magnet programs explicitly to produce desegregated schools. HCPs was credited with achieving one of the highest rates of pupil integration in the large metropolitan districts of the south, even surpassing Charlotte-Mecklenburg, north Carolina.1 in 1978, the Washington Post dubbed Hillsborough County as desegregation’s “quiet success.”2 years later, Drew Days, the chief civil rights official of the Jimmy Carter administration and a yale law professor, described the county’s effort to desegregate schools as “ahead of its time.”3 HCPs leaders embraced choice as the primary means to maintain a desegregated school system. Their district is a good place to think about the difference that generations of desegregation may make in the operation of choice programs. Despite HCPs’s desegregation legacy, in 2000 the county school board approved a controlled choice plan amid a contentious legal struggle over whether district officials had done all they could to create integrated schools. The local chapter of the national Association for the Advancement of Colored People 4 valuing Diversity and Hoping for the Best Choice in Metro Tampa Barbara shircliffe and Jennifer Morley 90 Shircliffe and Morley (nAACP) and the nAACP legal Defense and Educational Fund (lDF), groups that had always been at the center of southern desegregation efforts, believed that the district had failed to maintain good faith in operating schools on a desegregated basis and wanted judicial intervention. in 1998 the district judge overseeing the case agreed, prompting school officials to file an appeal.4 Throughout the litigation , HCPs officials insisted that school choice within demographically diverse regions and zones, well-placed themed programs, and transportation to certain choice options, including magnets, would promote voluntary desegregation, but they rejected racial limits, used in other controlled choice plans. The nAACP and the lDF argued that without provisions to guarantee racially balanced schools, parental choice would grossly accelerate resegregation. in much harsher language , the president of the local nAACP branch publically denounced choice as a bad idea that would “create all black schools and all white schools . . . taking us back to pre-1954.”5 in 2000 the school board voted, however, to approve the plan, with the only African American board member casting the dissenting vote. Four months later the Court of Appeals overruled the lower court, and court-ordered desegregation was dropped, leaving the key decisions about the future to the HCPs’s board.6 The controversy reflected the multiple meanings of choice and the equity implications of what type of program is pursued. This chapter examines the tampa story to consider whether school choice policies promote or undermine school desegregation. in tampa, school choice has not brought about a return to rigid segregation. yet findings indicate that choice without desegregation controls is extremely limited in reducing segregation and socioeconomic isolation. As the nAACP and the lDF predicted, since the implementation of the controlled choice plan in 2004, the number of highpoverty and predominately black and latino schools has increased—despite the concerted use of magnets and attractors (programs in such fields as computer science, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) to lure middle-class and white children to public schools in predominately low-income minority areas and despite district officials’ hopes that African American parents residing in the city would opt to send their children to suburban schools. As segregation has increased in the city, the number of racially diverse schools elsewhere has grown for reasons that seem to have little to do with choice policy. For instance, of the county’s twenty-three racially balanced elementary schools (as of 2009–10), all but one (a magnet) are located in suburban growth areas within and outside tampa, raising questions about the future of desegregation in the outer rings.7 school authorities and local communities must also face the issue of...

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