The television classic “King of the Hill” included a character known as Dale, who despite being a conspiracy theorist is entirely oblivious to the fact that that his wife is carrying on a long-term affair. Dale holds forth on multiple elaborate conspiracies, often of the “birds aren’t real” level of absurdity. Dale’s wife, however, claims to have suffered from “migraines” for years, and Dale’s “son” happens to strongly resemble his wife’s “therapeutic masseur,” John Redcorn. ProPublica may have taken inspiration from Dale for a series of reports about “segregation academies” in (so far) North Carolina and Mississippi.
In the case of North Carolina, the ProPublica team raised concerns over a number of private school segregation academies with 85% or more from the same racial or ethnic group. However, they failed to notice that the number of public schools with 85% or more students from the same racial/ethnic group was much higher. Moreover, the total number of students and money going to public school “segregation academies” dwarfed not only the number going to segregated private schools, but it easily dwarfed the number of students and money in the entirety of North Carolina’s voucher program.
Not satisfied with this level of Gribble, one of the Pro-Publica authors doubled down on Gribble and wrote a similar story about Mississippi:
In Mississippi, we identified 20 schools that likely opened as segregation academies and have received almost $10 million over the past six years from the state’s tax credit donation program.
Mississippi has two small scholarship programs for students with disabilities and a small ESA program for students with disabilities. In 2024, a combined 628 students participated across all three programs, all of whom were students with disabilities.
Meanwhile, in the Mississippi public school system, data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows 56 Mississippi public schools with a student body that is 85% or more white, and 245 Mississippi public schools with a student body 85% or more Black. A total of 114,203 Mississippi students attend these highly segregated public schools, which represents 26% of the total public-school enrollment for the state.
Using my advanced Texas public school math skills, this works out to a great deal more money than $10 million over six years. So, let’s see, approximately $5.4 billion public school budget in Mississippi in 2022, 26% of the kids, approximately $1.4 billion annually, carry the two…right. Let’s call this somewhere around $8,000,000,000 that Mississippi taxpayers have spent sending kids to public school segregation academies over the same six-year period. Give or take a few hundred million as a rounding error. So, let’s put Mississippi spending on public school segregation academies somewhere on the order of 800 to 1, if ProPublica has their facts straight about the 20 private schools.
Before you unsheathe your flaming sword of justice and point it at Mississippi, you might want to run these numbers for your own state. Mississippi is still using ZIP code assignments to put the vast majority of students in schools. Housing tends to be very segregated, and ZIP code assignment leads to very segregated schools both by income and by race. Your state probably does the same, especially if you work for ProPublica.
The Stanford Educational Opportunity Project created a data set on school segregation, and let’s just put it out there on the record that Mississippi does not have the most segregated public school system. In this graphic, darker green equates to higher levels of segregation in 2022:
The most segregated school system in America is not in the South at all; that status is held by New York — in fact this was a status New York held continuously from 1991 to 2022 — the entirety of data collected by the Stanford project.
I’ll give you one guess as to which state Dale Gribble…errr…I mean ProPublica is headquartered. What’s that? New York is correct! Mississippi should give families more choices and abolish ZIP code assignment in schools, but New York needs it even worse than Mississippi. If ProPublica wants to address segregation in schools, they should start at home and with the public schools.
