70 years ago, school integration was a dream many believed could actually happen. It hasn’t

WASHINGTON — Seventy years ago this week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregating children in schools based on race is unconstitutional. On paper, that decision—the legendary Brown v. Board of Education, taught in virtually every American classroom—still stands.

But for decades, American schools have been resegregating. The country is more diverse than ever before, with students being more exposed to classmates from different backgrounds. Yet about four in 10 black and Hispanic students attend schools where virtually all of their classmates are also students of color.

The intense segregation by race is related to socioeconomic conditions: schools where students of color make up more than 90% of the student body are five times more likely to live in low-income areas. This, in turn, has resonant academic consequences: Students who attend high-poverty schools, regardless of their family’s finances, have worse educational outcomes.

Efforts to slow or reverse the increasing segregation of American schools have stalled. Lawsuits have slowly undermined the dream outlined in Brown v. Board, leaving fewer and fewer tools in the hands of districts to integrate schools in the early 2000s.

The arc of the moral universe does not seem to bend toward justice in this case.

“School integration in America right now is little more than an idea, little more than a memory,” said Derek Black, a law professor at the University of Southern California. “It’s actually an idea that a pretty large majority of Americans like. But that’s all.”

Brown’s dream was never as simple as diversity. It was about equality and the opportunities that came with it.

From the beginning, financing and integration have been inseparable.

“White schools and districts have more resources, and that is wrong,” said Ary Amerikaner, a former Obama administration official and founder of Brown’s Promise. “But it is a reality. And that undermines opportunities for students of color, and it undermines our future democracy.”

We remember Brown v. Board as the end of segregated schools in the United States. But expressing values ​​does not in itself change reality. Although the case was decided in 1954, it was followed by more than a decade of delay and avoidance before school districts began meaningfully admitting black students to white schools.

It took even more court rulings, oversight, and enforcement to bring about a short-lived era of integration in hundreds of school districts. For the students who participated in these desegregation programs, their life trajectories changed: the more years they spent in integrated schools, the better black children fared on measures such as educational attainment, graduation rates, health, and earning potential, without adversely affecting white children. children.

For a brief period, it seemed that the country was recognizing the profound solutions that were needed. “All things being equal and there is no history of discrimination, it may well be desirable to assign students to schools closest to their homes,” Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote in Swann v. Mecklenburg, a 1971 decision that confirmed the use of buses to integrate schools. in North Carolina. “But not all is equal in a system purposefully constructed and maintained to enforce racial segregation.”

But not long after, a new series of court decisions would reverse these outcomes. Fifty years ago, in Milliken v. Bradley, the court rejected a plan to integrate Detroit’s public schools across school districts. The ruling undermined desegregation efforts in the North and Midwest, where small districts allowed white families to escape integration.

Other decisions followed. In Freeman v. Pitts, the court held that the resegregation of private choices could not be followed by the court. More than 200 counties were released from court-supervised desegregation plans. In 2007, when the court ruled in the case of Parents Involved vs. Seattle Public Schools, could no longer even consider voluntary integration plans to assign students based on race.

“If you’re stripped of your tools by the Supreme Court, you really don’t have many tools,” said Stephan Blanford, a former Seattle Public Schools board member.

The arc of history is clearly visible in the town where the historic Swann bus business emerged.

At its height, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools was considered such a success at integrating classrooms and closing the gap between black and white students that teachers from across the country came to tour the district. Today, more than two decades after a court ruling struck down busing students based on race, CMS is the most segregated district in North Carolina.

While there are no laws that keep children in boxes based on race and income, that is the reality in so many schools.

Charlotte’s sprawling, complex busing plan brought black and white students to the same schools — and by extension, made the resources of white children available to black students for the first time. The district’s integration program ended when white families sued after their children were not given the best school choice in a lottery that took race into account.

Instead, the district created a school assignment process stating that diversity “will be based on the family’s decisions.” It left the families of Mecklenburg County, some of whom always had better choices than others, to fend for themselves. In the first year of the district’s choice program, black families were more likely to attempt to use the choice plan to choose an alternative school. They were also more likely to not get into any of the magnet schools they wanted.

In the decades that followed, the district segregated again. Years of busing had undone the segregated composition of the schools, but the underlying differences and residential segregation had remained untouched.

Charlotte is a place where the divide between wealth and poverty, and the clear racial boundaries that reflect it, are so stark that people who live there refer to the city in two parts: the affluent “wedge” and the poorer “crescent.” ” How could anything other than an explicit consideration of these conditions ever hope to improve them?

In this context, segregated school solutions exist, often relying on individual families to make choices limited by their circumstances. Magnet schools and interdistrict transfers – two common policies that can create great individual opportunity – are limited and will always leave some students behind.

Wherever you look, families are divided in how they view integration. For white and affluent families, it can be a noble idea, one full of self-reflection. But for families of color or poor families—those who have less of a safety net—the point of integration is often about getting their children into a better place.

Efforts to integrate schools can take two paths, says Stefan Lallinger, executive director of Next100, a public policy think tank. They either fight along the margins, creating slightly less segregated spaces, or they tackle the problem head-on, which in many parts of the country would mean tackling the lines that have been deliberately drawn to separate the rich from the poor.

Amerikaner and Saba Bireda founded Brown’s Promise with the idea of ​​bridging the gap between funding and inclusion, using state courts to obtain the tools the Supreme Court has taken away from districts.

Their strategy has some priority. In Connecticut, a 1989 lawsuit in state court resulted in the creation of an interdistrict transfer program, allowing students in Hartford to transfer to suburban schools and magnet programs, breaking up concentrations of poverty and racially isolated schools.

“This country needed to be moved towards integration,” Bireda said. “And unfortunately, seventy years later, we feel like we still need a lawsuit. We need the pressure from the courts.”

More recent lawsuits have occurred in New Jersey and Minnesota. In 2015, Alex Cruz-Guzman became a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging public school segregation in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Cruz-Guzman immigrated to the United States from Mexico as a teenager. As a parent, he noticed that his children’s schools consisted almost exclusively of other Latino students. When he tried to place them in more integrated schools, the family faced long waiting lists.

The case dragged through the courts for nearly a decade and nearly reached a settlement in the Legislature before the bill failed to pass.

Cruz-Guzman remembers people asking why he would join a case that was unlikely to be resolved in time to benefit his own children, who for a time struggled to learn English in predominantly Latino schools. For him, the case is about the children whose lives could change in the future.

“It’s not just my children. My grandchildren will benefit from it,” he says. “People will benefit from it for generations.”

How far these lawsuits can reach remains to be seen. Actual solutions are imperfect. But integration is something this country has tried before, and while it lasted, it worked by many measures.

Anniversaries are moments to pause and reflect. Seventy years after Brown, the work to realize his vision is still not complete. If there are no perfect, easy answers, what other choice is there besides trying imperfect paths that lead to an increasingly diverse country that is somewhere closer to Brown’s promise?

“What is the alternative?” Bireda said. “We are on our way to a country where the majority consists of people of color. … We can be a strong multiracial democracy, but we cannot be that if we continue to allow most children in the United States to not go to school with children from diverse backgrounds.”

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