Twin Cities School District Segregation Solution: Five Districts

Abstract

Minnesota was at the forefront of progressive civil rights in the 1960s through the middle 1980s, even more so than San Francisco. In 1971, Minnesota State Legislature passed a law requiring Minneapolis, St. Paul, and its suburbs to contribute just under half of the growth in their commercial tax revenues to a regional pool which would be distributed to tax-poor areas. This regulation was revolutionary; a plan like this has never been tried at the Met- ropolitan level (Minnesota, 2015). However, racial segregation in the Twin Cities is at an all-time high in the twenty first century. This racialized gap is due to many reasons: charter schools, open enrollment, loss of funding for inner city schools, and how the geography of residential segregation correlates to school segregation. But in 2009, the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota published a study on a possible solution. They drafted a hypothetical map with five school districts for the Twin Cities metropolitan area. These five districts are integrated and distribute the wealth and race evenly throughout the districts which will lead to all districts having appropriate funding, adequate educational programs, and the value of integration.