Subverting Swann: First- and Second-Generation Segregation in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools

beliefs. Concrete attitudes are grounded in people’s material realities and in the forces of race, ethnicity, and social class that shape their experiences. Adolescents’ concrete attitudes, then, are expressions of their lived cultures—cultures produced in ongoing interactions with other societal institutions on terrains wherein class, race, and gender meanings and conflicts are lived out. Concrete attitudes are influenced by family and community experiences with education and opportunity. Whereas abstract attitudes cannot predict achievement because they do not vary, concrete attitudes do predict academic outcomes. As such, they are useful windows into adolescents’ perceptions of their own location in the opportunity structure and how, in turn, that structure influences their educational outcomes (for a fuller explication of abstract and concrete attitudes, see Mickelson, 1990, 1989). Like abstract attitudes, concrete attitudes are measured by a series of Likert scaled belief statements scored from strongly agree (5) to strongly disagree (1). The higher the score, the more positive are the student’s concrete attitudes (see the Appendix for details of the belief statements). Proportion of elementary education in a segregated Black school. This variable measures students’ exposure to first-generation segregation. Using information on students’ educational history in CMS, I coded each school a student attended for its racial composition in the year when the student attended. I developed an indicator of exposure to first-generation segregation by counting the total years a student spent (K–6) in a racially isolated Black elementary school in CMS. Then I calculated that sum as a proportion of total years spent by that student in CMS elementary schools. In creating this construct, I defined a racially isolated Black elementary school as one in which Black enrollment exceeded by more than 15% the systemwide Black elementary school enrollment in that year. Magnet. This variable indicates whether the student’s high school is a magnet school (yes [1]; no [0]). CMS magnet schools receive more resources than nonmagnet schools and are widely thought to “cream” academically able students and their (active) parents from nonmagnet programs. Percent gifted in the high school. This measure represents the percentage of all students in the respondent’s high school who are designated as gifted or talented. CMS provides additional teacher resources to schools according to the size of their gifted populations. The percentage gifted in the student population also may reflect the academic climate of the high school itself.