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Using newspaper accounts, school board minutes, and interviews, the analysis explains how ideals and interests influenced conflict with the State Education Department. It highlights tactics, power imbalances, and court outcomes that solidified segregated outcomes despite claims of local control and educational excellence.",{"@graph":69,"@context":121},[70,84,104],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":40,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/the-politics-of-school-districting-a-case-study-in-upstate-new-york/603313/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":98,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":99,"interactionStatistic":100},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/the-politics-of-school-districting-a-case-study-in-upstate-new-york/603313.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"moss~","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-15",true,{"@type":101,"interactionType":102,"userInteractionCount":4},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":103},"ViewAction",{"@type":105,"mainEntity":106},"FAQPage",[107,113,117],{"name":108,"@type":109,"acceptedAnswer":110},"What is the central focus of the article?","Question",{"text":111,"@type":112},"The article examines the politics of school districting—how districts are created, for whose interests, and with what consequences for students.","Answer",{"name":114,"@type":109,"acceptedAnswer":115},"How does the Spackenkill case relate to desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education?",{"text":116,"@type":112},"It shows how stalled desegregation can produce opposite court outcomes: “no” for low-wealth Black parents and “yes” for higher-wealth White parents.",{"name":118,"@type":109,"acceptedAnswer":119},"What sources are used to reconstruct Spackenkill’s pursuit of independence?",{"text":120,"@type":112},"The reconstruction draws on newspaper articles from the time, school board minutes, and personal conversations with district leadership and a local resident.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":123,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":125,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":127,"site_id":62},603313,1792096059,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":130},{"doc_id":127,"user_id":131,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":132,"doc_module":4,"category_id":39,"category_name":40,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":133,"file_id":134,"file_url":135,"file_type":136,"file_size":137,"view_count":4,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":56,"language":138,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":139,"faqs":140,"seo_title":141,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":128,"read_time":142},962090895452,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_a8503ba1806abce46bf441b54a3ca4cd","Sue Books is a professor with the Department of Secondary Education at the State University of New York at New Paltz.  \nThe Politics of School Districting:  \nA Case Study in Upstate New York  \nBy Sue Books  \nSince the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Plessy doctrine of “separate but equal” in 1953 in Brown v. Board of Education, the nation has not moved steadily towards the envisioned ideal of equal educational opportunity—a requisite of which, the Brown court found, would be the abolition of racial segregation in schooling. Rather, our school system still is far too “separate and unequal.” After spending many hours over a period of many years in high-poverty and high-minority central city schools, Jean Anyon (1997) described practices of“ghetto schooling”andJonathanKozol(2006)condemned what he calls our system of“apartheid education.” Gary Orfield and his colleagues at The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, who have been publishing annual reports on the demographics of public schooling in the U.S., recently documented an“educational landscape that is increasingly multiracial yet, simultaneously, separate and unequal”(Orfield & Lee, 2006) .  \nTo the now-expansive literature on the causes and consequences of segregation in schooling and of inequality in educational opportunity in the United States, I would like to add a call for more attention to  \nthe politics of school districting—that is, to how and why districts are created, in the service of whose interests, and with what consequences for students.1 Towards that end, this article reconstructs the solidification of a school district in upstate New York, the Spackenkill Union Free Schools, a six-mile-wide district in the town of Poughkeepsie. In a battle with the New York State Education Department in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Spackenkill schools succeeded in avoiding consolidation with their poorer, larger, and far more diverse neighboring district, the Poughkeepsie City Schools. (The town of Poughkeepsie includes both the city of Poughkeepsie and the community known as Spackenkill.)  \nIn the discussion that follows, I recount the story of Spackenkill’s pursuit of“independence,”as reconstructed from newspaper articles written atthe time, school board minutes, and personal conversations with the president of the Spackenkill Board of Education and a Poughkeepsie resident who lived through the struggle.2 I then offer an analysis of the ideals and interests that shaped the district’s conflict with the State Education Department. Finally, I comment on the significance of this small chapter of social history for reformers still working towards desegregation and more equal educational opportunity.  \nHow the Spackenkill School District Was Created  \nA drive to consolidate school districts during the decades after World War II reduced the number from 100,000 in 1945 to just 16,000 by 1980 (Ravitch, 1983). In what arguably was “one of the most dramatic of all changes in America’s patterns of government,” districts were combined into larger units through a carrot-and-stick approach of legislative inducements and penalties (Garms, Guthrie, and Pierce, 1978, p. 32). The Spackenkill school district bucked this trend. The story of how and why it resisted consolidation provides a case study of sorts that illustrates some of the tactics, rhetoric, and imbalances of power that set the stage for the 21st-century version of“separate but equal.” It also provides a cautionary lesson for reformers still struggling to expand educational opportunity for the young people who have been shortchanged by the public schools for so long—largely, poor students and students of color.  \nAlthough theNewYork State Education Department tried to block theSpackenkill Board of Education’s efforts to attain “independence” from its neighbor, the state courts ultimately sided with the school board. Anew high school building solidified the Spackenkill-Poughkeepsie split and laid the groundwork for ","cbCaidYJOMFTmdC3","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaidYJOMFTmdC3","pdf",160628,"English","# Introduction\n# How the Spackenkill School District Was Created\n## Postwar consolidation pressure\n## Court conflict and new high school building\n## Local control rhetoric and segregation outcomes\n## Comparison with Milliken v. Bradley\n# Significance for desegregation reform","[{\"question\":\"What is the central focus of the article?\",\"answer\":\"The article examines the politics of school districting—how districts are created, for whose interests, and with what consequences for students.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the Spackenkill case relate to desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education?\",\"answer\":\"It shows how stalled desegregation can produce opposite court outcomes: “no” for low-wealth Black parents and “yes” for higher-wealth White parents.\"},{\"question\":\"What sources are used to reconstruct Spackenkill’s pursuit of independence?\",\"answer\":\"The reconstruction draws on newspaper articles from the time, school board minutes, and personal conversations with district leadership and a local resident.\"}]","The Politics of School Districting: A Case Study in Upstate New York | PDF",48]