Desegregating Boston Schools: Reports from the 1970s

Methodology

Research Goal: Police Presence and Student Behavior

The research goal of the Law & Order BPS project is to understand how desegregation and its backlash impacted student behavior and administrators’ disciplinary actions in Boston public high schools, particularly whether an increased police presence correlated with more incidents or harsher punishments. This project examines three recently-integrated high schools in Boston during the spring semester of 1976: L Street Annex (in South Boston), Hyde Park High School, and Charlestown High School. The student bodies of all three high schools were predominantly white before desegregation, with L Street Annex and Charlestown 2% or less Black and Hyde Park 15% Black.¹ All three high schools saw increased student violence and protests by adults opposed to desegregation in the year and a half since busing began, affirming school officials and political leaders’ belief that police presence in these schools, particularly when buses carrying Black students arrived or departed, was essential. This project uses visualizations to consider the relationship between student behavior, disciplinary actions, and police presence in these three high schools during a tense period.

Gathering Data from CCC Monitor Reports

The data in this project comes from monitor reports written by observers for the Citywide Coordinating Council (CCC) during the spring semester of 1976. The CCC was an independent body authorized by the court to oversee how the desegregation order was enacted. These monitor reports give an overview of the daily student incidents and disciplinary actions at each of these high schools. Many also provide data on police presence and whether student incidents were racial in nature, although the CCC monitors were often inconsistent in the level of detail recorded. Nevertheless, these CCC monitor reports provide the most thorough account available of the day-to-day events at these high schools. The monitor reports range from January to May 1976, during the second year of desegregation. Researchers collected data from the monitor reports on the number and types of incidents, race of students involved, number and types of disciplinary punishments, and police presence in a data sheet.

Visualizing CCC Monitor Data

The next stage of the Law & Order BPS project entailed developing visualizations to better understand the possible correlation between police presence and student behavior. Creating these visualizations in Tableau offered great versatility in making a variety of types of visualizations and working with a complex data set. This project includes line graphs, both continuous and dual lines, to examine the number of police officers and students inciting incidents at the three high schools, both in total and broken down by race of student. A bar chart visualization illustrates the most common types of disciplinary actions during this time period at these high schools.