In Missouri, Race Complicates a Transfer to Better Schools Dan Gill for The New York Times A parent at a Normandy School District meeting signals his approval for a plan to allow students there to transfer to an accredited district. Normandy has one of Missouri's worst disciplinary rates. CHARLES, Mo. - When the Missouri Supreme Court upheld a law in June allowing students from failing school districts to transfer to good ones, Harriett Gladney saw a path to a better education for her 9-year-old daughter. But then she watched television news clips from a town hall meeting for the Francis Howell School District, the predominantly white district here that her daughter's mostly black district, Normandy, had chosen as a transfer site. Normandy, in neighboring St. Louis County, has one of the worst disciplinary rates in the state, and Francis Howell parents angrily protested the transfer of Normandy students across the county line, some yelling that their children could be stabbed and that the district's academic standards would slip. "When I saw them screaming and hollering like they were crazy, I thought to myself, "Oh my God, this is back in Martin Luther King days," " said Ms. Gladney, 45. " "They're going to get the hoses out. They're going to be beating our kids and making sure they don't get off the school bus." " Public schools here in the St. Louis region, as in many other metropolitan areas across the country, have struggled for decades to bridge a wide achievement gap between school districts - a divide that often runs along racial and socioeconomic lines. By affirming the right to transfer students out of failing school districts, the State Supreme Court opened the doors for hundreds of families to cross the lines and move their children into better schools. But the ensuing contention has shown that the process remains a tricky one, complicated by class, race, geography and social perceptions. "Most folks are for having equal opportunity, having good schools for everyone," said Patrick J. Flavin, an assistant professor of political science at Baylor University who recently wrote a report on the black-white achievement gap in schools. We're all about that in the abstract. You start to see support levels drop when it turns into a real-life thing. In 2010, nearly three out of four black students and four out of five Latino students in the United States attended schools made up mostly of minority students, according to a report published last year by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. More than half of the 28 public school districts - excluding charter and specialty districts - in the city of St. Louis, St. Louis County and St. Charles County combined are at least 75 percent black or white. Of the nine districts that are at least three-quarters white, all but one scored a perfect 14 on the state's performance rating scale. The six mostly black districts scored an average of 7. Racial segregation has lingered in this region, the result of generations of discriminatory zoning and real estate practices. Efforts to reverse it have included a court-ordered program that has been busing thousands of black St. Louis students to mostly white suburban schools since the early 1980s. The separate transfer law, which the Legislature passed two decades ago, did not directly target segregation, but it addresses the issue in practice. Unaccredited districts, so classified based on a state performance formula, must designate a district to which they will send students wishing to transfer. Parents may choose to send their children to a different accredited district, but then they will be responsible for their own transportation. The transfer law was invoked several years back when Normandy, which is 97 percent black, took in students from another predominantly black district that eventually dissolved. Supporters of the law noted that there was no outcry when students from that mostly black district were transferring to Normandy, which at that time had been accredited. Normandy, Riverview Gardens and the Kansas City Public Schools are currently the state's only unaccredited districts. Those districts will remain responsible for paying for students who have transferred. "I think they're already killing schools like ours indirectly because they're taking the resources," Ty McNichols, the Normandy superintendent, said of the law. It's going to negatively impact us because of the financial side. Educators and parents also argue that the law could leave students facing instability because they would have to return to their home district if schools regained their accreditation.