Friday will be the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the landmark Supreme Court decision that ruled that separating children in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional. But as The 74 online reported last week, our public schools are more segregated today than 30 years ago. Why is this happening?
The 74 reports that,
“Racial segregation in classrooms edged upward over the past three decades, according to the work of two prominent sociologists. Across America’s largest school districts, the expansion of school choice and the winding down of court-mandated desegregation decrees have resulted in white students being more racially isolated from their non-white peers, the authors find.”
“Timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education to end legal segregation in public schools, the research offers further evidence that integration hit its peak in the 1980s, only to recede somewhat in the time since. But it also poses questions about the true scale of that backsliding nationally, as well as the solutions that could be reasonably embraced to counter it.”
“Notably, the trend toward isolation has been underway even as Americans of different races and national origins are living in increasingly close proximity to one another. Ann Owens, a professor at the University of Southern California and one of the co-authors of the analysis, said that public policy was ‘undoing the decline in residential segregation.’”
“’While it’s true that school segregation is higher in places where residential segregation is higher, it can’t explain the increase over the last 30 years because residential segregation has not been increasing over that time.’ Owens said.”
“Owens and her co-author, Stanford professor Sean Reardon, have spent years chronicling demographic changes in school through the lenses of both race and class. Their latest study has not yet been made public though its findings were presented at a conference at Stanford in early May. The duo has also unveiled a new interactive data tool, the Segregation Explorer, which allows users to investigate patterns of segregation across schools, districts, cities and counties.”
…
“As previous historical studies have shown, after falling dramatically in the wake of federally led integration efforts in the 1960s and ‘70s, school segregation began creeping back up in the late 1980s. Between 1991 and 2019, Owens and Reardon calculated, the segregation level rose by over one-third in the 541 U.S. school districts that enroll at least 2,500 African American students.”
“But Owens cautioned that, even accounting for that shift, schools are vastly more racially mixed than in the days before Brown. When examined over the last half-century, the growth in segregation is much harder to perceive. The total increase in segregation levels amounts to less than five percentage points since the presidential administration of George H.W. Bush.”
“Brian Kisida, an economist at the University of Missouri, said that it was critical to monitor changes in cross-racial exposure over time. In his view, however, existing evidence did not constitute ‘anything that sets off alarm bells compared with the history of the issue.’”
“’I think segregation is an incredibly important problem, and one we’ve had terrible trouble with in this country,’ Kisida said. ‘But I don’t know if I would look at the trend form 1990 to 2020 and characterize that as ‘resegregation.’”
“Kisida added that the paper’s evidence of charter schools’ role in driving racial isolation made for a ‘very solid finding’ that dovetailed with his own prior work.”
“In 2019, he co-authored an article examining the same phenomenon, incorporating an even wider swath of date than Owens and Reardon. That study showed that charters exerted a meaningful, if modest, impact on the racial composition of the surrounding districts; eliminating the charter sector entirely would lead to a 5 percent decrease in the segregation of Hispanic and African American students, they found. (Kisida added that the effect was substantially counteracted by charters’ propensity to draw students into more integrated environments than their residentially zoned school, lessening segregation between districts.)”
“The newer research estimates that total growth in segregation would have fallen between two and three percentage points – from around 19 percent on their exposure index to a little under 17 percent – had charter schools not rapidly expanded after the year 2000.”
…
“’When you say, ‘Black students attend school with fewer white kids than they did 50 or 60 years ago,’ that’s true,’ Owens concluded. ‘But it’s also true that white kids attend school with fewer white kids – because there are fewer white kids around.’”
My African American friends remind me that the charter school movement didn’t add as much segregation to where our kids go to school than the primarily white movement to private and suburban schools during the late 20th century.
With the rise of out of school options, beyond charters, like learning pods and microschools, it will be interesting to see what happens to our country’s segregation line graph. I’m guessing we are looking at greater segregation as school, and out of school, choice becomes more prevalent.
A public school board member once told me that families are going to send their kids to schools or other types of learning places based on what they feel comfortable with, and that race isn’t necessarily the criteria that is most important on their list. That might sound racist, but it seems like it exemplifies the times we live in.
I’ll be away until Monday. Til then. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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