Chapter Two: Outclassed
1. In 2015, I requested a copy of the employment contract Mr. Fuller described, but the school system said no records matched my request. School system spokesman Shawn Pachucki wrote in an e-mail that the system believed Mr. Fuller had signed such a contract, but the office that had handled those contracts no longer existed, so it couldn’t be verified. He said under such contracts, the principal’s job was not at stake. “However, if all benchmarks were met, a $4,000 cash incentive was promised,” Pachucki wrote in an e-mail. Since I never saw the contract itself, I’m uncertain what the exact terms were.
2. Daniel Kiel, “Exploded Dream: Desegregation in the Memphis City Schools,” Law and Inequality 26, no. 2 (Summer 2008). http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1317854. The section on Memphis school desegregation also draws on numerous archived newspaper articles, school profile reports and high school yearbooks, most of which were stored in the Memphis Room of the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library. Of particular note were future mayor Willie Herenton’s 1971 doctoral thesis “A Historical Study of School Desegregation in the Memphis City Schools, 1954–1970,” Southern Illinois University; Richard Lentz’s “Ordinance Mars CAB Bus Burial,” The Commercial Appeal, March 23, 1972; the unbylined story “Busing Plan in Protest Second Day,” Memphis Press-Scimitar, April 28, 1972; and an unsigned editorial, “Sad Story of White Flight,” in The Commercial Appeal, September 13, 1973.
3. Steve Suitts, “A New Majority Research Bulletin: Low Income Students Now a Majority in the Nation’s Public Schools,” Southern Education Foundation, January 2015. http://www.southerneducation.org/Our-Strategies/Research-and-Publications/New-Majority-Diverse-Majority-Report-Series/A-New-Majority-2015-Update-Low-Income-Students-Now