In South Carolina, where I live, rural towns often remain largely divided by race, especially those with larger Black communities. You’ll often hear people describe railroad tracks that run through these towns and how white people live on one side of the tracks, Black people on the other. That’s true. But I’ve often seen a different dividing line, a more impenetrable one. This one runs between schools: private and public ones.
While reporting in many of these small towns, I saw that Black children typically attend the local public schools while white kids head to private schools. Many of these private schools are known as “segregation academies” because they opened for white children while the federal courts were forcing districts across the South to desegregate. Hundreds of these academies still operate, and they continue to divide their communities.
When children don’t go to school together, they don’t interact much with peers of another race. Their parents don’t meet at the bus stop or at PTA meetings or on the sidelines of football games. Communities can remain almost as divided as they were before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled state-mandated school segregation was unconstitutional — 70 years ago.
I spent much of 2024 digging into “segregation academies” with my colleague, ProPublica research reporter Mollie Simon. Early on, we set out to compile a master list of segregation academies that are still operating, which we planned to use as a foundation for our reporting.
It’s difficult, impossible even, to identify these academies or even to understand local school segregation more broadly without knowing the racial makeup of each private school’s enrollment over time. And private schools aren’t always willing to hand over that information. Nor do they have to. But while putting together our list of segregation academies, we came across something incredibly useful — a 30-year trove of data kept by the U.S. Department of Education that lays out the story of racial segregation, school by school, across the country. It shows the racial breakdown of most private schools’ enrollments every other year since the early 1990s.
Outside of a handful of education researchers, the average person doesn’t know this data exists. Nor is most of it kept in an accessible format. Parents would need a high level of data literacy to use it to better understand education trends or to make their own school decisions.
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