The unfinished work of school integration in America
We overlook the harmto white students who miss the chance to learn from and among black and Latino children
Linda Brown wasn’t allowed to attend the Sumner School in Topeka, Kansas, just seven blocks fromher home. That school was for white children. Instead, she had to attend theMonroe School, 21 blocks away, crossing a dangerous rail yard and catching a school bus to get there. In defiance of segregation, her father tried to enrol her in the white school when she was seven, but they were turned away. Fed up, he became the lead plaintiff in Brown vs Board of Education.
Last Sunday, Linda Brown died at 75. She and thousands of children risked enormous harmas the foot soldiers in the battle to integrate schools. More people should celebrate their achievements. But no one is really talking about school segregation anymore. That’s a shame because an abundance of research shows that integration is still one of themost effective tools that we have for achieving racial equity.
At the height of school desegregation, from 1964 through the 1980s, high school graduation rates for black students improved significantly. So did standardised test scores. Desegregation led to higher income, more years of education and better health outcomes for blacks, and integration also reduced racial prejudice amongwhites, according to studies by the economist Rucker Johnson.
Why does school integration command such little attention? Most of the blame lies with the United States Supreme Court, which has eliminated some of the most effective tools we have for carrying it out. In 1974, the Supreme Court dealt a blowto integration in the North inMilliken vs Bradleywhen it struck down a lower court’s decision to require two- way busing between Detroit’s black schools and the white schools in the suburbs. As a result, segregation in Northern states ismore entrenched than in the South, where school systems tend to be countrywide and cover a larger geographic area.
That’s right — school segregation in Michigan, New York, Illinois, Maryland and New Jersey is worse than in the former Confederacy. Housing segregation in the North exacerbates the problem becausemany state laws require students to go to schoolwhere they live.
Even in the South, integration has declined. Beginning in the early 1990s, the Supreme Court made it easier for many Southern school districts to slide out from under court orders that had required them to integrate. Although the NAACP Legal Defence Fund is still litigating about 100 school desegregation cases from the Brown era across the South, the Supreme Court has, in practice, halted any new federal lawsuits that would challenge school segregation.
The Supreme Court not only has limited integration through the courts, but has also hamstrung school districts thatwant to integrate on their own. In 2007, the court struck down school districts’ voluntary use of race in Parents Involved in Community Schools vs Seattle School District No 1 on the grounds that it discriminated against whites.
Discriminatory policies
In addition, poorly designed school- desegregation policies have scarred black students by focusing too narrowly on removing legal barriers to integration rather than creating inclusive school environments that value the abilities and dignity of all children. As a result, new discriminatory policies that cater towhite parents, like tracking, aswell as other policies that target black children for punishment, have emerged in schools that are supposedly integrated.
And so, school segregation endures. We can see its impact in poor academic and life outcomes and in the overlooked harms to white students who miss the chance to learn from and among black and Latino children. It’s also a major driver of inequity in metropolitan areas dominated by racial divides. Segregation often undermines property wealth in black and Latino communities because of the close relationship between the demand for housing and the perceived quality of local schools. This has the effect of limiting the pool of available tax revenue for funding local school districts.
But integration is possible. Lawmakers should redraw school district boundaries to include more diverse populations. They must end laws that require students to attend school where they live and instead work to create schools that bring together students from different neighbourhoods and class backgrounds. They should also promote housing and land- use policies that eliminate residential segregation.
Integration would strengthen state schools. And it would move this countrymuch closer to the democratic ideals that Linda Brown and somany others like her sought to achieve. ■ Elise Boddie, a lawprofessor at Rutgers, directed litigation at the NAACP [ National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] Legal Defence and Educational Fund Inc., where Dennis D. Parker, the director of the Racial Justice programme at the American Civil Liberties Union, oversaw hundreds of desegregation lawsuits.
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