On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court set a new precedent: separate but equal has no place in American schools.
The message of Brown v. Board of Education was clear. But seventy years later, the decision’s impact is still up for debate. Have Americans actually ended segregation, and not just legally?
The answer is complicated. According to an Associated Press analysis, American schools have become much more diverse and, by some measures, more segregated in recent decades.
On the one hand, the number of black and white students who attend school almost exclusively with students of the same race is at an all-time low.
On the other hand, large numbers of students of color still attend schools where there are almost no white students. Spanish segregation is worse now than it was in the 1960s. Segregation has increased sharply since the 1990s, especially in the nation’s largest school districts, according to research from Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project.
The history of school desegregation efforts, from Brown v. Board to today, shows how far the U.S. has come—and how far it still has to go.
The Brown v. Board decision declared that white and black students could not be forced to attend separate schools, even if those schools were equal in quality.
A few states, such as Kansas and Delaware, have made some effort to comply with the order. But leaders in the Deep South immediately declared what U.S. Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia called “whole-scale resistance” to integration.
Overall, segregation levels changed little over the next decade, despite the courage of black students like the Little Rock Nine in 1957 and six-year-old Ruby Bridges in New Orleans in 1960, who faced violent, racist gangs as they tried to end segregation to desegregate. their local schools.
By the mid-1960s, the federal courts were losing patience with the South. They began handing out desegregation orders in spades, requiring bus transportation if necessary. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. declared that segregation must be eradicated “root and branch.”
At the same time, the civil rights legislation of the 1960s reformed schools in far-reaching ways. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination in education; the Voting Rights Act gave black voters more power to elect school boards; and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act offered schools federal money if they desegregated. Meanwhile, the Immigration and Nationality Act has opened the country to more immigrants from Asia, Africa and Latin America, leading to much more diverse schools.
From then on, segregation decreased rapidly. Nearly every black student in the South went to school only with people of color in 1963; only a quarter of black students did so in 1968.
But desegregation came at a price: thousands of qualified black teachers were fired, even though they were often better qualified and qualified than white teachers.
“Integration has never been fair,” says Ivory Toldson, a professor at Howard University.
Courts also began to push for desegregation in other parts of the country. Denver was one of the first cities outside the South to call for segregation in a 1973 Supreme Court case. Places like San Francisco and Cleveland were subject to desegregation orders, and in 1974 riots broke out over bus orders in Boston.
The momentum was short-lived. In 1974, in Milliken v. Bradley, the Supreme Court rejected a desegregation plan involving several school districts in and around Detroit. That meant that, with rare exceptions, metropolitan areas could not be forced to transport students across school districts.
At the time, there was a mass white flight from urban school districts, in places where busing was mandatory and where it wasn’t. Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City collectively lost more than half a million white public school students between 1968 and 1980. In just twelve years, the number of white students fell by 71% in New Orleans, 78% in Detroit and 86% in Atlanta.
Yet federal court orders succeeded in reducing black segregation to its lowest level ever by 1986.
After that, progress began to stagnate.
The courts gradually began to focus less on achieving racially balanced schools and more on other means of promoting desegregation, such as magnet schools. It became easier for school districts to argue that they had made enough progress to be released from desegregation orders, and most of them were lifted in the early 2000s. A few hundred are still active, but mostly unenforced; School district leaders are often unaware that they are still under desegregation orders.
The segregation of black students changed little after the 1980s. As Latino immigration soared, so did the segregation of Latino students.
The effects of isolation are especially damaging for students from immigrant backgrounds, said Patricia Gándara, co-director of UCLA’s Civil Rights Project. These families are less likely to speak English or know the unspoken rules of the American education system, such as how to apply to college.
A growing number of lawsuits have undermined policy tools to address desegregation and target the conservative idea that setting goals based on race is itself a form of racial discrimination.
Nevertheless, classrooms became more diverse, reflecting the country’s changing demographics. A historic milestone came in 2014, when for the first time the majority of American students were children of color.
Students of color may be more exposed to each other, but they are still often in different schools than white students. About 4 in 10 black and Hispanic students attend schools made up almost entirely of other students of color.
According to researchers at the Stanford Educational Opportunity Project, the racial imbalance is particularly acute in the nation’s 100 largest districts. Using segregation scores from 0 to 100, they found that black-white segregation grew more than 40% from 1991 to 2019, from 21 to 30 points, while Hispanic-white segregation grew from 15 to 24.
That’s both because the government moved away from desegregation orders in the 1990s and because parents took advantage of the school choice movement in the 2000s.
Even before school choice, racial isolation was extreme in many large urban school districts. This is one reason that many states with large cities outside the South, such as Illinois, Michigan, New York and California, have been among the most segregated states in America since the 1980s.
This segregation matters because concentration in racially segregated, high-poverty schools is strongly correlated with poorer student outcomes.
“Segregation is at the heart of a lot of the problems we have,” Gándara said. “It doesn’t matter how much money you spend, if you bring poor kids and kids without family resources together to support them in school, you’re going to continue to have these inequitable outcomes.”
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