Black flight

Interesting story from the Birmingham News:

In the past five years, Birmingham schools have lost 20 percent of their students. Nine of every 10 of those 7,300 children who left the city were black.

A Birmingham News analysis of five years of school enrollment data shows that this exodus of black families has led them to nearly every corner of Jefferson County, into the city of Hoover and throughout the suburbs of central Shelby County as far south as Calera. ...

This movement of black children into metro-area school systems that have more white children also may reverse the resegregation in the region created by white flight from the central cities of Jefferson County over the past generation. In 1999, public schools in the metro Birmingham area were the eighth-most segregated among America's 50 largest metro regions, according to researchers at the Mumford Center, State University of New York-Albany. Blacks now make up about 99 percent of the students in Birmingham city schools. ...

[Parents interviewed by the News] say one predominant purpose drove the decision to migrate - a desire for better education for their children.