ProPublica is a nonprofit news company that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter focused on fraud across the country, and get it delivered to your inbox every week.
In South Carolina, where I live, rural towns, particularly those with large black communities, often remain highly divided along racial lines. I often hear people describe the railroad tracks that run through these towns and how white people live on one side of the tracks and black people live on the other side. it’s true. But I have often seen a different line, a more impenetrable line. This is done between private and public schools.
While covering many of these small towns, I found that black children typically attended local public schools while white children attended private schools. Many of these private schools are known as “segregated academies” because they opened for white children while federal courts were forcing school districts across the South to desegregate. Hundreds of these academies are still in operation and continue to divide communities.
If children do not go to school together, they are less likely to interact with friends of other races. Their parents don’t meet at the bus stop, at a PTA meeting, or on the sideline of a football game. Communities could remain much as divided as they were before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled state-mandated school segregation unconstitutional 70 years ago.
I spent much of 2024 digging into the Racist Academy with my fellow ProPublica investigative reporter Molly Simon. Early on, we set out to create a master list of still-operating isolation academies, which we planned to use as the basis for our report.
Without knowing the racial composition of each private school’s enrollment over time, it is difficult or impossible to identify these academies or even to understand local school segregation more broadly. And private schools aren’t always willing to provide that information. And you don’t have to. But while compiling the list for Racism Academy, we found something incredibly helpful. It’s a 30-year trove of data kept by the U.S. Department of Education, compiling stories of racism in each school across the country. It shows the racial breakdown of enrollment at most private schools every other year since the early 1990s.
With the exception of a few educational researchers, the general public is unaware of the existence of this data. Also, most of it is not stored in an accessible format. A high level of data literacy is required for parents to use data to better understand education trends and make school-specific decisions.
Good journalism makes a difference.
Our nonprofit, independent newsroom has one job: to hold those in power accountable. Here’s how our research is driving real-world change.
We are trying something new. Was it helpful?
ProPublica decided to create a private school demographics database, which it launched this week. This database can be used by anyone, anywhere to search for schools and view years of data used in reporting.
The story behind this new tool began with the need to understand how many quarantine academies are still operating and where they are operating. We wanted to focus solely on students whose student bodies have come to reflect their local neighborhoods, but who continue to create discriminatory forces within their communities.
We turned to the National Center for Education Statistics. The center’s website includes demographic data on students at most private schools in the country. (Schools voluntarily reported the information to the center.) This was helpful, but the racial breakdown of each school’s children is only provided for the 2021-2022 school year, the most recent data available. .
We wanted to go back in time and see how the demographics of these schools have changed, or stayed the same, over the years.
It turns out that this NCES data is from something called the Private School Universe Survey, a dataset we have come to rely on. It was almost hidden in plain sight.
While the latest findings are readily available on the NCES website, the remaining findings are in a format that requires experts to clean and organize them into something usable. Fortunately, we have those experts on our staff. Our colleagues Sergio Hernandez and Nat Lash started looking at old datasets and converting them into a searchable format. We then compared the demographics of each private school to the demographics of the public school district in which the school was located.
Private school demographics
This showed us an enlightening story about the impact of the Segregation Academy on the community that was not seen by anyone, certainly not by me. In fact, this data could tell a story about the countless places across the country where private schools educate millions of children.
I used the database to show which segregated academies are having the greatest impact on local communities. That first brought me to the rural county of Selma, Alabama, one of the most important spots on the map of the civil rights movement.
The community is 45 minutes south of Wilcox County, where the population has been sharply divided along racial lines since the days when plantation owners brought slave labor to the area to grow cotton. I discovered that. Wilcox Academy was 98% white, while the local county public schools were 98% black. Local residents divided their limited resources to run two shrinking school systems, one private and one public, with the result that almost everyone there I suffered a disadvantage.
Wilcox Academy demographic breakdown from ProPublica’s private school demographic database
The Wilcox County story formed the basis of the first story in the Segregation Academy series.
Our database also led me to the final story in the series, a story based in Amit County, Mississippi. There we found the segregated academies that had the most profoundly divisive effect to date. One of them reported never enrolling more than one black student at a time. For another, the black registration rate in a county where nearly 40% of residents are black had just hit an all-time high of 3.5%.
Perhaps the most important details don’t come from data or a master list. Found this at a Friday night football game. One night I was in Amite, a public high school was playing a home game, and a nearby academy was playing as well. While a public high school game was in progress and the stands were filled with black families, I interviewed a black man who had graduated from the public high school and coached the football team.
As halftime approached, he and I decided to head to the private school, a segregated academy just above the treeline. In all the years he has lived and worked in this community, he has never set foot on campus. Almost everyone there, people in this very small community, were white. But he recognized only a few of them.
He said he felt millions of eyes on him as we walked to the stands. No one was unfriendly. But this threshold felt far more impenetrable than any railroad track I had ever encountered.
