From the Atlanta Compromise to the School Cheating Scandal: Atlanta's Management of a Precarious Place Reputation through Public Education Policy

Ciel Quebedeaux, University of New Orleans
Jeffrey Parker, University of New Orleans

When Brown v. Board of Education mandated the desegregation of public schools in 1954, localities across the country struggled for decades to reach what the court considered to be “unitary status,” a legally defined measure of school integration in which 10 per cent or more of a school’s population consists of a minority race. For twenty years after the Supreme Court decision, city leadership in Atlanta, Georgia, struggled to resolve the issue in a way that satisfied leaders from both the white and Black communities. In 1973, a resolution was found when the NAACP and the Atlanta Board of Education agreed on the “Atlanta Compromise,” a plan that implemented a gradual – and arguably “token” – desegregation in exchange for Black leadership over the school system. Atlanta was then considered to have met unitary status in 1974, despite the plan allowing for most of the city’s white student population to remain in all-white schools. Still, while the intention was to mostly preserve the city’s status quo, white flight movements led to financial challenges and profound demographic changes for the school system in the decades to come. In 2010, after reports of widespread cheating on standardized tests, Gov. Sonny Perdue launched a state investigation into Atlanta Public Schools. The Atlanta school cheating scandal served as another inflection point in how the city’s leadership struggled to maintain its reputation for racial equanimity in the face of extreme challenges. Using archival research and interviews with Atlanta business and civic leaders, this paper analyzes the effects of moments like the Atlanta Compromise and the school cheating scandal on the city’s reputation as a bellwether for the Civil Rights Movement, revealing how education policy impacts cities' place reputations during a time of persistent threats to public schools.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 69. Education and its Discontents, From Pre-K to PhD