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Desegregation, Minimum Competency Testing, and the Origins of Accountability: North Carolina and the Nation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Scott Baker
Scott Baker*
Affiliation:
Wake Forest University where he directs the program in Schools, Education, and Society
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Extract

During the long history of the Civil Rights Movement, public education was a significant battleground in the struggle for racial equality. As the courts ordered officials to dismantle a system of educational apartheid, whites resisted, bringing blacks and whites together in ways that disillusioned many African Americans. Hoping to transcend what he called “the trauma of desegregation,” in 1977, North Carolina Governor James B. Hunt proposed that all students be required to pass a minimum competency test (MCT) to receive a high school diploma. Hunt was part of a generation of moderate New South politicians who crafted a new racially neutral educational discourse that emphasized accountability and achievement rather than equality and access. Capitalizing on the perception that the quality of education had declined, these New South moderates built biracial coalitions that established high school MCTs in every southern state by 1986, replacing a civil rights agenda of opportunity with an accountability agenda of individual student responsibility.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , February 2015 , pp. 33 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 History of Education Society 

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26 Anderson v. Banks, 520 F. Supp. 472 (1981), 486, 501,503; Debra P. v. Turlington, 474 F. Supp. 244 (1979), 249, 252, 257, 265, 269. While school funding was not an issue and was not contested in Green, Anderson, or Debra P., there was a considerable amount of school finance litigation during this period. After the Supreme Court held that education was not a fundamental right, litigation shifted to the state courts, San Antonio v. Rodriquez, 411 U.S. 1 (1973). Equity advocates won victories in California and New Jersey, but during the late 1970s and early 1980s most court decisions did not declare state finance systems unconstitutional. See Yudof, Mark G., Kirp, David L., Levin, Betsy, and Moran, Rachel F., Educational Policy and the Law (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Group, 2002), 800. Margaret Rose Westbrook has shown that between 1983 and 1989 “no state invalidated its funding scheme; school finance reform litigation was considered a dead issue.” See “School Finance Litigation,” North Carolina Law Review 73 (2004–5): 2129. After 1989, advocates began using a new adequacy theory to convince courts that states were constitutionally obligated to provide levels of funding required to achieve an educational result. For a discussion of adequacy arguments and court rulings during the 1990s, see Ryan, James E., Five Miles Away, A World Apart: One City, Two Schools, and The Story of Educational Opportunity in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).Google Scholar

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