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Blacks and Hispanics make up 15.5% and 25.4% of the U.S. public school population, respectively. Yet large shares in each group attend schools where their own race or ethnicity accounts for at least half of students, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Department of Education data.

Meanwhile, whites, who continue to make up by far the largest share of the U.S. public school population, tend to go to schools where half or more of students are white.

In 2014, the most recent year for which data are available, 44.1% of black public elementary and secondary school students attended schools where at least half of their peers were also black. Among Hispanics, 56.7% went to schools where at least half of students were also Hispanic.

Since 1995, black public school students have become somewhat less isolated from students of other racial or ethnic backgrounds, while Hispanics have become more isolated. In 1995, 51.4% of blacks were attending schools where at least half of students were black. Meanwhile, 52.6% of Hispanics were going to schools where half or more students were Hispanic.

These long-term shifts in enrollment are partly the result of the changing racial and ethnic composition of the United States - and, as a result, of its public schools.

The share of Hispanics enrolled in public schools has almost doubled since 1995, when they made up 13.5% of all students. As the share of students who are Hispanic has grown, the share who are black has decreased slightly.

Whites still account for the largest share of any racial or ethnic group within U.S. public schools, though their number and share have declined. In 2014, 24.9 million public school students were white - about twice the number of Hispanic students. These students accounted for 49.5% of students overall, down from 64.8% in 1995.

In 2014, about eight-in-ten whites (81.6%) attended schools where at least half of students were also white, a decrease from 90.5% in 1995.

The share of white public school students attending schools where the vast majority of students are white has also shrunk over the past 20 years. In 1995, nearly half (48.6%) of white public school students attended schools where at least 90% of students were also white. In 2014, this was the case for just 21.9% of white students. The share of blacks attending schools where at least 90% of students are black has also decreased, from 22.1% in 1995 to 15.4% in 2014. But the share of Hispanics attending schools where at least 90% of students are Hispanic has grown slightly since 1995, from 15.4% to 16.9%.

Asians, who have also driven part of the growth in America's classrooms and in the country overall in recent years, are less likely than whites, blacks and Hispanics to attend schools where at least half of students are their own race or ethnicity. In 2014, just 12.9% of Asians attended schools where this was the case, which is likely due to their relatively small share of the overall public school population. American Indians, Alaska Natives and Pacific Islanders - who make up even smaller shares of the public student population - were also much less likely than those in other racial or ethnic groups to attend schools where at least half of students are of the same race or ethnicity.

Topics: Educational Attainment, Education, Race and Ethnicity

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Many minority kids go to schools where at least half of students are their race, ethnicity

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Blacks and Hispanics make up 15.5% and 25.4% of the U.S. public school population, respectively. Yet large shares in each group attend schools where their own race or ethnicity accounts for at least half of students, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Department of Education data.

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Race and School quality since Brown v. Board

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Race and School quality since Brown v. Board

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Boozer, Michael A., Alan B. Krueger, and Shari Wolkon. Race and School Quality Since Brown v. Board of Education. The Brookings Institution. Brookings. 1992. Accessed September 24, 2018. brookings.edu.

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school choice; school demography; student diversity; educational policy

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Choice without Equity: Charter School Segregation | Frankenberg | education policy analysis archives

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Choice without Equity: Charter School Segregation

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Fifty years ago last January, George C. Wallace took the oath of office as governor of Alabama, pledging to defy the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision prohibiting separate public schools for black students. "I draw the line in the dust," Wallace shouted, "and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever" (Wallace 1963).

Eight months later, at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Martin Luther King Jr. set forth a different vision for American education. "I have a dream," King proclaimed, that "one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers."

Wallace later recanted, saying, "I was wrong. Those days are over, and they ought to be over" (Windham 2012).

They ought to be over, but Wallace's 1963 call for a line in the dust seems to have been more prescient than King's vision. Racial isolation of African American children in separate schools located in separate neighborhoods has become a permanent feature of our landscape. Today, African American students are more isolated than they were 40 years ago, while most education policymakers and reformers have abandoned integration as a cause.

This is part of a series of reports from the Economic Policy Institute outlining the steps we need to take as a nation to fully achieve each of the goals of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Visit www.unfinishedmarch.com for updates and to join the Unfinished March.

In place of integration, politicians, commentators, and public education critics, content with situating black students in racially homogenous schools, 1 declare instead that the test score gap between black and white students is the "civil rights issue of our time." 2

Although this gap is real, it has been declining for decades, while a host of factors besides schools influence student performance. The marchers did not need to be told what a half century of subsequent social science research has confirmed-schools cannot fulfill their potential so long as African Americans are segregated, as King put it, into "a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity."

Today, many black children still attend schools in racially and economically isolated neighborhoods, while their families still reside in lonely islands of poverty: 39 percent of black children are from families with incomes below the poverty line, compared with 12 percent of white children (U.S. Census Bureau(a)); 28 percent of black children live in high-poverty neighborhoods, compared with 4 percent of white children (Casey 2013). 3

Other socioeconomic hardships that powerfully affect student achievement also remain unacceptable for black students: Housing for many remains inadequate (Sherman 2006); the black unemployment rate remains today, as then, more than twice that for whites (Austin 2013). While the minimum wage has been extended to some occupations in which black workers predominate, its level today is below that established in 1967, inflation-adjusted and in relation to national average wages (Mishel 2013). A discriminatory criminal justice system today incarcerates many more black young adults than it did 50 years ago (Alexander 2010). 4

Freeing African Americans from these lonely and segregated islands was the aspiration of the 1963 March on Washington. Yet with the march's demands for school integration and economic justice still unfulfilled, how did test scores become the civil rights issue of our time?

The diversion from integration toward compensatory education

The march's leaders hoped that their mobilization would pressure Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act, which had been drafted by President Kennedy's Justice Department and was languishing in Congress. 5 Regarding education, the bill called only for more aggressive efforts to prosecute Southern refusals to dismantle formally segregated school systems.

One provision required the Office of Education 6 to investigate school districts that failed to integrate. As the bill neared passage in 1964, Johnson administration negotiators agreed to dilute this requirement to lessen Southern opposition to the bill as a whole. Instead of investigations, the act called for a "survey...concerning the lack of availability of equal educational opportunities for individuals by reason of race," with results to be reported within two years. 7

Initially, the Office of Education planned simply to ask its regional attorneys to report instances of continuing resistance to desegregation. But Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel decided to expand the project and commissioned one of the nation's leading sociologists, James S. Coleman, to use the best statistical tools then available to survey a representative national sample of 600,000 elementary and secondary school students. The survey covered student attitudes and family social and economic circumstances; it also included math and reading test items.

Until Coleman's study, the only nationally representative student achievement data had come from Project Talent, a 1960 Office of Education survey of high school students' abilities and interests, intended to help guidance counselors advise students in choosing careers. It included cognitive test items and showed that the average black student's score was lower than scores of about 95 percent of all white students, a staggering gap that attracted almost no specific attention. 8 Coleman found the gap to be somewhat smaller-the average black student's literacy and mathematics proficiency was worse than that of about 85 percent of whites. 9

Measuring the gap, however, was not an important concern. Rather, Keppel and Coleman expected the addition of a statistically sophisticated methodology to reinforce their regional offices' attorney reports: that foot-dragging on desegregation had left black children with poorer facilities, larger classes, and less adequate teachers, and that this resource discrimination was associated with poorer academic performance. As Coleman himself predicted before completing the survey:

...the study will show the difference in the equality of schools that the average Negro child and the average white child are exposed to....[T]he difference is going to be striking. And even though everybody knows there is a lot of difference between suburban and inner-city schools, once the statistics are there in black and white, they will have a lot more impact.

Although the data did confirm this difference, it was not "striking"; the association between resource differences and a racial achievement gap was surprisingly small. Rather, to Coleman's surprise, this association was statistically overwhelmed by another, that between family characteristics-such as parent educational level-and student achievement. Lowered class sizes or other resource improvements in schools serving large numbers of black children made little difference.

What did make a difference was integration, but only where black children were integrated into majority middle-class schools. In other words, priorities of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom had been correct: To improve black student achievement, the nation must improve socioeconomic conditions for black families, as well as implement integration not only by race but by social class.

Yet rather than connect the Coleman Report to the civil rights movement's demands for integration, federal officials and their liberal allies undertook a shameful effort in 1966 to hide Coleman's findings and even to misrepresent them, setting a tone for denunciations of public education, and rhetoric about school reform, that continues to our time.

Worried that a report minimizing the importance of school resources would reinforce conservative opposition to the new federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (intended to provide supplementary funds for schools serving disadvantaged students), Johnson administration officials initially suppressed Coleman's report. Instead, the Office of Education (Harold Howe had succeeded Francis Keppel as commissioner) released only a summary downplaying the main finding about the importance of family characteristics and social class integration and exaggerating the minor finding that school resource differences were associated-barely-with an achievement gap. The report itself was released weeks later, after headlines distorting its message had sunk in and political support had coalesced around federal funds for schools serving black students. This "compensatory education," not integration, became the chief weapon in the nation's arsenal to combat inequality. School reformers' claim today that improving teacher quality will equalize achievement, in the absence of addressing the poverty of many black children or their isolation from middle-class society, is a direct descendant of the Johnson administration's short-sighted efforts to build support for compensatory education by exaggerating the importance of school resources alone.

The fear of education reformers today, that discussion of social and economic impediments to learning will only lead to "making excuses" for poor teaching (Rothstein 2008), mirrors fears in 1966 that similar discussion would undermine support for federal aid to education.

A year earlier, Daniel Patrick Moynihan had written a controversial report suggesting that low-income African Americans' isolation in urban ghettos, without access to jobs and the mainstream economy, had undermined the family characteristics needed to take advantage of opportunities for integration, were such opportunities ever to arise. Moynihan's 1965 brief remains controversial because it is too easily and mistakenly interpreted as blaming black families themselves for their continued poverty. But by stressing the importance of families' ability to support children's success, Moynihan had anticipated Coleman's findings, and was dismayed at how the administration ignored its implications. He denounced as "gilding the ghetto" the administration's strategy of pouring resources into black central city neighborhoods with housing ("Model Cities"), antipoverty, and compensatory education funds, rather than fighting as well to promote black families' movement into white middle-class suburbs where job opportunities existed. He (temporarily) abandoned the Democratic Party for the Nixon administration, which seemed committed to pursuing the Coleman Report's implied recommendations.

At first, the Nixon administration adopted Moynihan's strategy, and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development George Romney began to withhold federal funds from white suburbs that refused subsidized lower-middle-income housing and low-income public housing for black families moving from central cities. 10 His strategy divided Nixon's advisors. Some (Vice President Spiro Agnew was one) supported suburban desegregation as necessary to avoid further rioting in black ghettos. Some supported desegregation, hoping that African American dispersion in suburbs would weaken urban Democratic political machines while posing no threat to Republican suburban control. But other advisors, such as Kevin Phillips, architect of Nixon's suburban political strategy, feared that opposition of white voters to integration would threaten Republican support in those suburbs. This viewpoint prevailed, and Nixon announced, "[I]t is not the policy of this government to use the power of the federal government or federal funds in...ways not required by the law for forced integration of the suburbs. I believe that forced integration of the suburbs is not in the national interest" (Nixon 1970). The nation's brief experiment with suburban desegregation ended.

Once the ghetto became politically acceptable, busing was the only remaining tool to desegregate schools. The Nixon administration quietly promoted busing while publicly blaming "activist" judges for the ensuing turmoil. Soon, Nixon's judicial appointees ended busing as well. Compensatory education became the only approach for raising black achievement. Accepting defeat, Moynihan returned to the Democratic Party, serving as New York senator from 1977 to 2001, but still skeptical of ghetto amelioration as a substitute for desegregation. Attempts to raise achievement solely by improving ghetto schools continue to date, with disappointing results. It remains the strategy of contemporary reformers, and its continued failure leads, inevitably, to conclusions that public education itself has failed and must be dismantled.

Achievement gains by blacks as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

As commissioner of education, Francis Keppel made another contribution of lasting importance. When the Office of Education was created in 1867, Congress had instructed the commissioner to collect "such statistics and facts as shall show the condition and progress of education in the several States and Territories." The requirement was ignored until, in late 1963, shortly after the March on Washington but before knowing that the 1964 Civil Rights Act would require the Coleman survey, Keppel asked John Gardner, then president of the Carnegie Foundation, to form a committee to design a measuring system for student outcomes.

The committee labored for a decade to produce the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a survey including test items in math, reading, science, social studies, foreign language, and writing, but also covering "less tangible areas" such as art, music, citizenship, career and occupational development, and health and physical fitness (including such aspects of emotional health as self-image and self-confidence). Survey items assessed personal economic skills such as budgeting and ability to reject misleading advertising. 11

NAEP was designed for a nationally representative student sample. To cover many curricular areas in a limited time for each participant, different test booklets were administered to different students, with results aggregated into national results. For the less tangible items that could not be assessed with a paper-and-pencil test, NAEP planned to have surveyors interview students about attitudes and make judgments about their abilities.

Gardner's committee also wanted to avoid judging school performance only on what students remembered shortly after being drilled. More important was what young adults retained, so the early NAEP included a sample of young adults, visited at home and assessed in the same subjects as students.

NAEP began in the early 1970s as the committee had designed. Samples generated statistically reliable results by community type (large city, suburb, small city, or rural town), gender, parental education, and poverty status. Race was added shortly afterwards. But NAEP was very expensive; as Congress cut funds, observations and interviews were eliminated, less tangible items were dropped, and NAEP became primarily an in-school paper-and-pencil test of basic math and reading skills. 12

The sampling design mostly survived, so NAEP still today can assess a broader swath of the curriculum, even in basic subjects, than tests in which all students get identical items. Because only a sample of students participate, no school- or student-level results are generated, and teachers have no incentive to prepare students for specific questions or themes. NAEP remains today the most reliable student achievement indicator, often called testing's "gold standard" by participants on all sides of education debates.

NAEP introduced a second assessment in 1990 that incorporates more questions requiring reasoning and "constructed" (i.e., not multiple choice) responses. The Department of Education calls the original design the "Long Term Trend," or "LTT," and the newer design the "Main NAEP." 13

We now have trend data in basic skills since 1971 and in somewhat more advanced skills since 1990, by race. Eight available trends include LTT's more basic skills and Main NAEP's somewhat more advanced skills, for math and reading, and for fourth- and eighth-graders. LTT trends by race begin in 1973 for math and in 1971 for reading, with the most recent data for 2012. Main NAEP trends by race begin in 1990 for math and in 1992 for reading, with the most recent data for 2011. 14

Early on, NAEP confirmed what we knew from Project Talent and from the Coleman Report: Average black achievement was below that of about four-fifths of white students. In 1992, the earliest year for which we have math and reading data from the Main NAEP that included constructed response items, black student achievement was similarly below that of whites. 15

From NAEP's inception, black students have made very large gains-about a full standard deviation on the LTT from the early 1970s to 2012 and about two-thirds as much on the Main NAEP from the early 1990s to 2011. 16

On some components, gains have been greater and in others, less. African Americans have generally made greater gains in math than in reading and in fourth than in eighth grade. In fourth-grade math, average black students now score better than average white students scored in 1973 on the LTT, and better than average white students scored in 1990 on the Main NAEP. This full standard deviation gain in a single generation represents an improvement rate rarely encountered in any area of human performance.

In eighth-grade math, black students' gains have been nearly as large. Average black eighth-graders now score better than about 40 percent of whites in 1973 on the LTT and in 1990 on the Main NAEP.

In reading, black fourth-graders gained a full standard deviation and black eighth-graders gained slightly less than that since 1971 on the LTT. This is also a very large gain. On the Main NAEP, black fourth- and eighth-graders gained about a third of a standard deviation since 1992, an impressive but not spectacular rate of progress.

Table 1 displays average annual rates of black NAEP improvement, in math and reading, fourth and eighth grades, combined, in six periods, as well as for the full time span for which NAEP data are available:

1970s, beginning when math and reading LTT data became available in 1973

1980s and early 1990s, before math and reading Main NAEP data became available in 1992

the balance of the 1990s

early 2000s, before implementation of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law in 2003

subsequent years for which LTT data are available, ending with 2012, and for which Main NAEP data are available, ending with 2011

Table 1 shows uneven progress. LTT gains for African American students were considerable in the 1970s, slowed in the 1980s and more so in the 1990s, then resumed rapid growth in the early 2000s, only to slow in the later 2000s. Main NAEP scores for African American students rose slowly in the 1990s, very rapidly from 2000 to 2003, then slowly after 2003. Both tests show similarly slow growth in the 1990s with pickup in the early 2000s and then slowing in the later 2000s, giving confidence in the data's reliability.

The most rapid growth period was the early 2000s on the Main NAEP. That black student progress slowed after 2003 on both the LTT and Main NAEP, but slowed relatively more on the more cognitively challenging Main NAEP than on the basic-skills-focused LTT, is consistent with but does not prove a story that excessive basic-skills focus at the expense of reasoning began with the 2003 implementation of No Child Left Behind. Further, the slowing on growth of both tests is consistent with, but does not prove a story that NCLB created incentives for instructional practices (perhaps excessive test preparation and drill) that were less effective than practices employed prior to the law's implementation.

Although black student improvement has been impressive, policymakers are shockingly incurious about its causes. Some public education critics, although claiming to base policy on research, simply deny the improvement itself. 17 Instead, they stress relatively slow improvement in the gap between white and black scores. 18

Indeed, the average black student still performs more poorly than about three-quarters of all whites. While black achievement has been improving, so has white achievement. The gap has narrowed slightly because white gains have been smaller.

Table 2 compares rates at which the gap narrowed during the periods displayed in Table 1. The table shows the gap narrowing most rapidly in the 1970s and early 2000s. During these periods, black achievement improved more rapidly than white achievement, although both improved. In the 1980s, 1990s, and late 2000s, the gap narrowed more slowly, because black and white improvement occurred at more similar rates.

What are we to make of African American achievement gains?

It is hard to see how improvement for both whites and blacks can be deemed evidence of school failure, but by focusing on the gap rather than on real improvement, most policymakers draw such a conclusion. Examining the causes of the improvement might inspire policymakers to wonder what policies, if any, were responsible for the gains and then try to intensify them. Instead, by focusing almost exclusively on persisting gaps, reformers develop a narrative of public education failure, unsupported by evidence.

Because of inattention to causes of black student improvement, we have little evidence regarding whether this improvement is at all attributable to school policy. Gains can result either from improvement in schools or from improvement in socioeconomic conditions that prepare children to take advantage of good instruction. The Coleman Report suggested that student background is more powerful in differentiating black and white achievement than school effects. It is possible, but only possible, that educational approaches not yet employed in 1965 could have a greater effect.

It is incontrovertible, however, that steady improvement in black students' performance is inconsistent with the conventional claims of reformers that teachers of disadvantaged students are poorly trained, have low expectations, and fail to exert their best efforts. Data cannot disprove this story, but they do not support it.

It is plausible that further curricular improvements would benefit both blacks and whites, the net result being a continued achievement gap attributable to differences in socioeconomic backgrounds. It would be difficult, perhaps unjustifiable, to develop new successful pedagogies and make them available to black but not white students. If schools improved, achievement of both black and white students could go up while achievement gaps persisted.

Commenting on the Coleman Report, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and a collaborator, Frederick Mosteller, suggested as much. Many had reacted to the Coleman Report simplistically, interpreting it to mean that "schools don't make a difference." On the contrary, Mosteller and Moynihan quipped, children don't invent algebra on their own. Whether children learn algebra depends on school quality. Which groups of children, on average, learn algebra better than others reflects their background characteristics. 19 This framework may be helpful for understanding how black achievement could have improved so substantially, though with less impact on the black-white gap.

David Grissmer et al. (1994) disentangled some causes of narrowing achievement gaps in the 1970s and 1980s, when black gains were more rapid than those for whites. Grissmer concluded that about half the gap-narrowing in that period was associated with changes in black family characteristics, with two such changes particularly influential: Black schoolchildren had mothers with greater educational attainment in 1990 than they had a decade earlier, and these mothers had fewer children, perhaps enabling them to devote greater attention to each child, a known predictor of higher achievement.

But Grissmer could not identify conditions associated with the other half of the gap-narrowing. Perhaps class-size reduction or other school improvements played a role. 20 Perhaps integration was partly responsible: Black children in 1990 benefited from court-ordered integration but when the policy was subsequently reversed, black achievement growth slowed.

Recent research may have identified another factor. Chay, Guryan, and Mazumder (2009) attribute narrowing of the black-white gap in the 1980s to superior health of black children in the South, born in years following 1963 when hospitals in that region were desegregated and African American children had access to better health care. The researchers take the declining mortality rate of African American infants in the South in this period as representative of overall improvement in health, and they find that this declining mortality was highly correlated with higher test scores when this cohort became teens. Cognitive improvements for these Southern children were sufficient to improve overall average black achievement nationwide.

Other research has demonstrated large benefits from court-ordered school integration, including, for blacks, reduced dropout rates (Guryan 2004; Johnson 2011); less incarceration (Johnson 2011); fewer homicide arrests and less homicide victimization (Weiner, Lutz, and Ludwig 2010); and higher adult earnings and less poverty for adults who had attended integrated schools (Johnson 2011).

In 2006, the Russell Sage Foundation convened a conference of scholars to examine causes of LTT achievement gap trends through 2004 (Magnuson and Waldfogel 2008). Participants were concerned about stagnation of black students' scores in the 1990s and were not yet fully aware of renewed progress in the early 2000s. The conferees identified several influences that could explain increases (or stagnation) in black scores and narrowing (or stagnation) of the achievement gap. Among these were parents' educational attainment, family literacy, 21 and single parenthood (Magnuson, Rosenbaum, and Waldfogel 2008); the quality of early childhood experiences that develop noncognitive skills (Grissmer and Eiseman 2008); popular culture (Ferguson 2008); school factors such as class size and teacher quality (Ladd 2008); and isolation of black students in segregated schools (Berends and Penaloza 2008; Vigdor and Ludwig 2008).

In other work, Grissmer et al. (2010) identified an additional predictor-the background knowledge that young children already possess when entering kindergarten. Children are better readers if they have out-of-school experiences that provide meaningful contexts for written words. Grissmer has not, however, identified whether black children's growth in such experiences can explain changes in their average achievement.

New challenges for research on sociodemographic factors

We have nearly a decade of data since the Russell Sage scholars examined the 2004 LTT. Breaking out predictors of these scores is beyond the scope of this discussion, but the following tables illustrate social and economic trends that may hold clues to black student achievement trends and suggest policies for further improvement. The periods are those of previous tables.

Family poverty influencing student achievement is not poverty in the test year but poverty experienced throughout childhood, from birth to test year. Throughout childhood, changes in family income may result in changing access to health care, housing instability, stress from parental unemployment, or other conditions. Table 3 shows average poverty rates for white and black children's families for nine years prior to fourth-grade NAEP test administrations and for 13 years prior to eighth-grade administrations.

Family poverty of black students taking fourth- and eighth-grade NAEP tests declined steadily from 1973 to 2003, but then rose again (for fourth-graders) in 2011. This pattern supports but does not prove a theory that black achievement gains during this period may have been influenced by declines in childhood poverty. Earlier, we speculated that slowing improvement in black students' achievement after 2003, especially on the Main NAEP, may have been influenced by excessive basic skills emphasis required by NCLB. Table 3 provides another possible explanation: increasing black family poverty after 2003. 22 These hypotheses are not mutually exclusive.

Table 3 also shows a steadily declining ratio of black to white poverty for NAEP test-takers from 1973 to 2011. This could help explain the period's steadily narrowing achievement gap.

Mothers' education may influence children's performance. Educated mothers use more complex language and vocabulary in speaking to and around children, may read to their children more and encourage children to read themselves, may use more supportive disciplinary approaches, and may feel more comfortable participating and collaborating with their children's teachers. Table 4 shows shares of white and black women, 25 to 29, who were high school graduates in the birth year of NAEP test-takers from 1973 to 2011.

Because mothers' education probably trended similarly to that of all females in their cohort, the table shows that the share of black NAEP test takers with high school graduate mothers probably rose rapidly after 1973 and was nearly identical to the share for whites by 2011. This is consistent with, but does not prove, a theory that black achievement gains during this period may have been influenced by improvements in the home intellectual environment for these students. The table also shows a narrowing black-white gap in female high school graduation rates. This is consistent with the period's narrowing black-white achievement gap.

Table 5 shows the share of white and black women (also probably representative of white and black mothers), 25 to 29, who were college graduates in the birth year of NAEP test-takers in the illustrative years. The increase reinforces the notion that black NAEP test-takers from 1973 to 2011 experienced steadily improving home intellectual environments. But unlike for high school graduates, black women are still far from equal with whites in college graduation. These trends could but don't necessarily help explain black achievement gains and the narrowing but persistent achievement gap.

How much attention, guidance, and instruction parents can devote to their children depends partly on how many children must share in it. Although parents with fewer children may spend the additional time working rather than attending to their remaining children, it is nonetheless a conventional social science finding that children with fewer siblings have better cognitive performance. Table 6 displays, for black and white NAEP test-takers, family size trends from birth to fourth and eighth grades.

For example, the table shows that for whites and blacks taking fourth-grade tests in 2011, average annual ratios in the nine years from 2002 to 2011 were, respectively, 0.98 and 0.75. These suggest that black children had the potential opportunity, prior to test taking, for three-quarters (0.77) the parental attention as whites.

Note, however, the large and rapid improvement in potential attention black parents could devote to individual children from 1973 to 1992, especially from 1973 to 1980. Although whites also had potential for greater attention during these periods, the increase for blacks was relatively greater. These data are also consistent with rapid improvement of black achievement in the 1970s and 1980s, in absolute terms and relative to white achievement, and the subsequent slowing of these gains.

We cannot say what the relative contributions were to changes in student achievement of changes in poverty rates, parental education, or family size, displayed in Tables 3-6, nor can we say what role school quality improvement played, because school quality indicators like class size and teacher quality are unavailable or difficult to quantify. For class size, data series are available for pupil-teacher ratio, and some analysts proxy this for class size but should not. Pupil-teacher ratios are affected by low ratios in special education, and spending on special education (mostly for teachers) has grown rapidly since 1973 (Alonso and Rothstein 2010). Declines in overall pupil-teacher ratios might not reflect class sizes experienced by regular white or black students. Although there are indicators purporting to measure teacher quality (years of education, experience, advanced degrees), there is little agreement regarding whether these measures reflect quality.

Persistent segregation and the 'truly disadvantaged'

Out-of-school indicators described in the previous section are positive and, if trends continue, suggest likely continued improvement in black student achievement and perhaps a continued narrowing of the achievement gap. But there is one important negative trend: Isolation of black students, particularly of low-income black students, in predominantly black and low-income schools, is increasing. Indeed, the educational goal of the March on Washington-school desegregation-is a condition affecting black students in which we are sliding backwards.

Reflecting how little concern we now have about ongoing school segregation, data tracking it are rare. Table 7 shows one indicator: the percentage of white students in a school that typical black students attend.

In 1970, black students typically attended schools where enrollment was 32 percent white. Integration increased in the 1970s; as suggested above, this may have supported rapid improvements in blacks' test scores during that decade. But integration declined in the 1990s and settled at a lower level in the 2000s. As of 2010 black students typically attend schools that are only 29 percent white.

These averages understate critical reality. As more lower-middle-class and middle-class African Americans move to suburbs that are less segregated and/or less impoverished than central cities, low-income African Americans are more likely to attend heavily black and heavily low-income schools than before.

Improved black student achievement and narrowed black-white test score gaps are less impressive in our most segregated central cities than in the nation generally. Recently, NAEP began to report average scores for large urban districts; the findings show that low-income black students continue to achieve very poorly.

In 2011, the average nationwide black-white gap (Main NAEP) was 26 scale points (the average gap on four tests: math and reading, fourth and eighth grades). This means that average black students performed better than only about 20 percent of whites. But scale score differences between black students nationwide and those in the most segregated cities were nearly as great as the black-white gap nationwide. Table 8 displays average scale score differences between black students nationwide and those in five cities where differences are greatest.

Estimates from the performance differences shown in Table 8 indicate that average African American students in these cities perform below nearly two-thirds of African American students nationwide and below nearly all white students nationwide.

Table 9, for the same cities, displays for elementary students in 2000 (the most recent year for which data have been calculated) the exposure rate of white to black students and the share of students in typical black students' schools who come from economically disadvantaged families (defined as eligible for free or reduced-price lunch because family income is at or below 185 percent of the federal poverty line).

In some large districts, average scores for black students exceed those for black students nationwide, although they are still below those of white students within their districts. Of districts with available data, Charlotte-Mecklenberg, N.C., has the largest relative advantage; however, here only 54 percent of students in a typical black student's school are economically disadvantaged, less than in large central cities elsewhere, and 38 percent are white, more than in most large central cities elsewhere. 24

With such concentrated disadvantage of African American students in cities displayed in Tables 8 and 9, it is difficult to imagine that achievement can improve substantially, or that differences between black students' performance in these districts and nationwide can be closed. It is also difficult to imagine how gaps between black students in these cities and white students nationwide can be eliminated if we assume continued segregation of urban African American children.

From 2003 to 2011, average African American students nationwide gained an average of 7 scale points on the four Main NAEP tests. In the 10 large cities for which NAEP has data, black students gained an average of 9 points. Because many cities include relatively advantaged black populations as well as ghettos, this superior performance is hardly an endorsement of No Child Left Behind, intended to generate large improvements in the most disadvantaged children's performance. In one such city (New York) where reformers' policies-charter school expansion, closure of schools with low test scores, intensive test preparation-are applied with especial fanfare, black gains were the same (7 points) as gains nationwide.

The low achievement of children in racially isolated urban ghettos is, indeed, the civil rights issue of our time, but it is unlikely to be meaningfully addressed by school reformers' policies.

Should we focus on the achievement gap?

School reformers typically justify subordinating demands for economic and social equality to school policies aimed at narrowing the achievement gap by claiming that if black scores were higher, graduates would get better jobs, earn higher incomes, and could then afford to live in middle-class neighborhoods relatively free of crime, anti-social temptations for their children, and intrusive and aggressive policing. As New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg once cavalierly put it, if schools improved, "a lot of what Dr. King wanted to accomplish in our society will take care of itself" (Wyatt 2002).

His claim was flawed for three reasons.

First, public education critics exaggerate the economic benefits of better achievement because they ignore how firms employ credentials for workforce sorting. Many good reasons exist for helping all children get better educations, but one is not that education itself can solve problems of poverty and inequality. Better-educated workers can be more productive, but they can also comprise a surplus of qualified job seekers, depressing wages. Already, many college graduates are employed part time, are forced to work as poorly paid interns rather than career-path professionals, or are working at jobs not requiring their skills (Rampall 2012). 25 This surplus can grow if reformers progress toward their objective of having all students "college-ready." If more educated workers grow in number faster than the economy and faster than the proportion of jobs requiring higher education, wages of these workers will fall. Education alone can be a ticket to the middle class only if proportional to the number of middle-class jobs available. School reformers fantasize that as more workers get more education, technology will eliminate poorly paid jobs on which many workers now depend-driverless trucks will deliver goods to retail malls, fast food restaurants will be self-stocking, and new medical technology will permit the elderly and disabled to live independently. It is only a fantasy.

Improving blacks' education relative to whites would reduce blacks' disadvantage in competing for better jobs, but would not itself do much to increase the number of such jobs. The combination of more education and tepid economic growth could produce a new underclass of well-educated truck drivers, coffee baristas, and home health care aides. Equality requires not only enhancing African Americans' competitive position when competing with whites for limited opportunity, but also expanded opportunity with truly full employment for all workers-black and white-and improved labor standards. African Americans, no matter how well qualified, have never made rapid gains in periods of economic stagnation.

African Americans who complete high school still have 18 percent unemployment, twice the white rate. Even before the 2008 recession, unemployment for black college graduates was 50 percent higher than for whites; by 2011, over 8 percent of black college graduates remained unemployed, compared with 4.5 percent for whites (Mishel et al. 2012, Table 5.3).

Continued racial discrimination may partly explain this ongoing disparity. 26 It may also result from spatial mismatch-blacks are disadvantaged in competing for jobs located where historic housing discrimination has prevented them from residing. No doubt, the disparity may partly result from blacks having poorer achievement than whites with similar attainment.

Whatever the combination of reasons, school reformers hold out false hopes to many when they tell black students that if only they get more education, they will enjoy middle-class incomes with middle-class security. They will certainly benefit from more education, but the "if only" misleads.

A second flaw in school reformers' approach is their mostly backwards theory of cognitive development. True, children with better achievement are more likely to escape poverty, but even more so, better socioeconomic family conditions enable children to improve achievement. Children coming to school in poor health or with unstable housing are absent more frequently and cannot benefit from good instruction. Children who walk (or ride) to school through violent neighborhoods, or who return to these neighborhoods after school, are stressed and less able to focus on studies. Children with more frequently unemployed parents suffer from insecurity that affects learning.

These children cannot reasonably be expected to achieve, on average, like children without these disadvantages, no matter how high quality their instruction. Equality requires that the cycle of low achievement leading to poverty and poverty leading to low achievement be interrupted, but contrary to reformers' assumptions, the latter direction is more susceptible to policy influence and a more powerful lever than the former.

And third, obsession with test score improvement undermines disadvantaged children's opportunity for well-rounded education that public schools more typically deliver to middle-class children. The obsession is counterproductive because developing literary and quantitative proficiency requires balance between mechanical skill and background knowledge; holding educators accountable for the test scores in schools serving large numbers of disadvantaged children creates incentives to narrow curricula by directing time, effort, and resources away from non-tested curricular areas and toward more test preparation and drill in math and reading. This strategy ignores that literacy depends not only on decoding print but also on informed curiosity about history, literature, science, and the arts. Mathematics proficiency also relies upon children's having quantitative problems they are motivated to solve.

Graduates of both races need cultural literacy to compete in middle-class society and the workforce. Contemporary school reformers ignore this balance between basic skill and background knowledge, and exacerbate disadvantages of impoverished black youth.

The march forward

For low-income African American children, continued improvement will most likely be accomplished by addressing the socioeconomic barriers the Coleman Report identified a half century ago; by providing high-quality early childhood care, staffed by well-educated professionals who can expose children to sophisticated intellectual environments like the ones typical middle-class children enjoy; and by providing high-quality after-school and summer programs in which children can acquire background knowledge and noncognitive skills that predict high achievement. Other social and economic improvements could also help-stabilizing and improving low-income families' housing opportunities, and ensuring that children can come to school in good physical and emotional health, able to be in regular attendance and to concentrate on lessons.

Whatever the shortcomings of public schools, damage to black children from the recent recession and its disparate impact on their families exceeds damage attributable to inadequacy of the schools that black children attend. Social and economic improvements necessary for African American educational success are conceivable only in reasonably stable communities and in reasonably secure families. While white adult unemployment has come down slowly from last year, the rate for blacks-still last hired and first fired-has remained virtually unchanged (BLS 2013). The toll on children's achievement from racially disparate foreclosure rates, rental evictions, loss of food security, loss of access to continuous health care, and other effects of poverty is palpable.

When low-performing students are concentrated in the same schools, it is more difficult to raise their achievement than when these children are integrated into the middle-class population. Where disadvantaged students are concentrated, frequent student mobility from inadequate housing and parental unemployment undermines instructional continuity, as classes are reconstituted and teachers repeat lessons for newcomers. When low-performing students are concentrated, teachers must slow the overall instructional pace rather than devote individual attention to students who struggle; schools must devote more time to discipline of students who are not engaged, taking time away from instruction while funds for academic support staff are diverted to disciplinary programs. Children learn less from each other if few come from homes where large vocabularies and more complex language are used and where they were often read to when young.

An investigation of Chicago school reform attempted to distinguish characteristics of schools where disadvantaged students improved and those where students stagnated. Schools with well-developed and aligned curricula, good teacher-principal collaboration, and concerted efforts to involve parents made greater progress. But such programs made little or no difference in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, where nearly all students were black, residentially mobile, and had low-income parents with little formal education and little likelihood of employment. The investigators concluded, "Our findings about schooling in truly disadvantaged communities offer a sobering antidote to a heady political rhetoric arguing that all schools can be improved" (Bryk et al. 2010, 210).

Efforts to integrate such students into middle-class schools are impractical in many metropolitan areas. Busing distances are too great, and busing itself undermines the attachment to neighborhood schools that supports our democratic public education system and offers parents the opportunity and incentive to become involved in their children's education. 27

Schools in many urban ghettos are hypersegregated because their neighborhoods are racially isolated. 28 School administrators who aim to create more diversity typically establish magnet schools, make attendance zone boundary adjustments, or implement controlled-choice or socioeconomic school balancing. But such admirable efforts can succeed only at the margins. Too many "truly disadvantaged" students live too geographically distant from middle-class schools for such schemes to be practical, and too many of their parents are too stressed to make the proactive choices necessary (Rothstein and Santow 2012b).

In segregation from the mainstream, low-income black children differ from low-income non-blacks. Black children living in the poorest neighborhoods are most likely from families who lived in such neighborhoods in the prior generation. In contrast, living in the poorest neighborhoods for whites is most likely a single-generation phenomenon. The experience of living in one of the poorest neighborhoods for children whose parents were also raised in such neighborhoods is associated with a loss of about eight IQ points, compared with living in one of the poorest neighborhoods for only the present generation (Sharkey 2013).

Poor white and poor black families may improve their circumstances and leave high-poverty neighborhoods. But when poor white families move to better neighborhoods, their children benefit from better environments. When poor black families move to better neighborhoods, middle-class flight from these neighborhoods frequently ensues; the segregation (and poverty concentration) of the new neighborhoods increases, defeating these families' mobility.

Education analysts frequently wonder why a black-white achievement gap remains, even when individual poverty and family characteristics are similar. Partly it's because of greater (and multigenerational) segregation of black children into neighborhoods of high poverty, few employment opportunities, and frequent violence.

Neighborhood desegregation has disappeared from mainstream policy agendas partly because of beliefs that little can be done about it and that residential isolation has no constitutionally compelled remedy. In 2007, the Supreme Court prohibited districts from taking explicit steps to increase racial diversity because, according to the plurality opinion, racial isolation in schools resulted only from "de facto" neighborhood segregation-accidents of economic differences, demographic trends, and personal choices.

This widely shared view is historically inaccurate. Neighborhoods in major metropolitan areas are segregated because of a century-long pattern of racially motivated and racially explicit federal, state, and local policies of banking regulation, mortgage guarantees, public housing, law enforcement, planning and zoning, highway and school construction, and urban renewal (Rothstein 2012, 2013; Rothstein and Santow 2012a). Effects of these public policies endure; segregation of major urban areas today offends the Constitution and calls for a remedy.

It is inconceivable to think that education as a civil rights issue can be addressed without addressing residential segregation-a housing goal of the March on Washington. Housing policy is school policy; equality of education relies upon eliminating the exclusionary zoning ordinances of white suburbs and subsidizing dispersed housing in those suburbs for low-income African Americans now trapped in central cities. 29

By stressing integration as the most important goal of education improvement, the March on Washington had it right. It is appropriate not only to commemorate this resolve, but to renew it.

About the author

Richard Rothstein ( http://www.epi.org/people/richard-rothstein/) is a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and senior fellow of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California (Berkeley) School of Law. He is the author of Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right (Teachers College Press and EPI, 2008) and Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap (Teachers College Press 2004). He is also the author of The Way We Were? Myths and Realities of America's Student Achievement (1998). Other recent books include The Charter School Dust-Up: Examining the Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement (co-authored in 2005); and All Else Equal: Are Public and Private Schools Different? (co-authored in 2003).

Endnotes

1. The charter school sector that school reformers promote is more segregated than the regular public sector with which it competes (Frankenberg, Siegel-Hawley, and Wang 2010).

2. Former Secretary of Education Rod Paige, who presided over the adoption and implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act, titled his memoir, The Black-White Achievement Gap: Why Closing It Is the Greatest Civil Rights Issue of Our Time. The phrase has been used by many others, including both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in their 2012 presidential campaigns. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan frequently refers to the achievement gap as the "civil rights issue of our generation" (Duncan 2010).

3. The Annie E. Casey Foundation defines a high-poverty neighborhood as one where 30 percent or more of families have incomes below the poverty line.

4. "If our nation were to return to the rates of incarceration we had in the 1970s, we would have to release 4 out of 5 people behind bars" (Alexander 2011).

5. After President Kennedy's assassination later that year, President Johnson promoted the act to passage.

6. The Office of Education was then part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Education programs would not be split off into a separate cabinet department for another 17 years.

7. The account here and in the following paragraphs of the origin of and early controversy surrounding the education survey (referred to as the "Coleman Report") in the Civil Rights Act draws primarily on Grant (1973).

8. The difference in combined reading and math scores was about 1.5 standard deviations (Reardon 2011, Figure 5.3). Assuming a normal distribution, a student whose achievement was 1.5 standard deviations above that of the average student would rank at about the 95th percentile in achievement. Possibly, the black-white gap was even greater because at that time, many fewer black than white students completed high school. In 1970, 58 percent of black young adults (ages 25-29) had completed high school, compared with 78 percent of white young adults (NCES 2012, Table 8.5). If we assume that completers had better reading and math skills than dropouts, the gap would have exceeded 1.5 standard deviations, meaning the average black youth achieved at a lower level than virtually any white youth. This gap is not inconsistent with the reality that some above-average-achieving black students had higher test scores than nearly half of white students. But virtually no black students (only about 5 percent) had higher test scores than the average white student.

9. The Coleman Report found a combined difference in reading and math scores of one full standard deviation, compared with Project Talent's 1.5. It is not conceivable that the real gap could shrink by half a standard deviation in only five years. The decline could reflect only that different grades were assessed in Project Talent and in the Coleman study (i.e., the gap for high school students surveyed in Project Talent was larger than the gap for the range of elementary and secondary grades surveyed by Coleman), that the two surveys had different questions, or that results in both surveys were less precise than hoped for.

10. For an account of George Romney's efforts to promote residential integration, see Rothstein and Santow (2012a).

11. For a full account of the development of the National Assessment, see Chapter 6 of Rothstein, Jacobsen, and Wilder (2008).

12. NAEP has continued to assess a few other academic subjects on a very sporadic basis.

13. The Department of Education describes the difference between the two designs as the difference between one (the LTT) whose items remain stable over time so that trends can be reported, and one (the Main NAEP) whose items change as the underlying public school curriculum changes. In practice, however, the Department of Education itself regularly reports trend data on the Main NAEP, and both assessments change over time. Indeed, the impracticality of having an assessment whose items are intended to remain stable as students' curricula and environments change is one reason why the LTT was revised substantially in 2004. Although the Main NAEP includes items requiring more reasoning than items on the LTT, the Main NAEP is still not a test of very advanced reasoning skills. Constructing a test of reasoning skills is a particular challenge in mathematics, because the greater a test's reliance on solving problems than on applying algorithms, the more it becomes a reading and not a math test.

14. The National Center for Education Statistics of the Department of Education oversees NAEP and describes results for the LTT as being for "9 year olds" and "13 year olds," not for fourth- and eighth-graders. However, in practice, contractors administering NAEP no longer seek out, as part of their samples, 9- and 13-year-olds who are not in the fourth and eighth grades, respectively, so this report refers to the LTT as a test of fourth- and eighth-graders. Both the LTT and Main NAEP are also administered to 12th-graders (for the LTT, the department refers to them as 17-year-olds). However, a test given to 12th-graders should not be employed to investigate black-white achievement comparisons, because blacks and whites have different dropout rates and trends, and black students who drop out may not have the same achievement distribution as whites who drop out. For these reasons, this report does not address 12th-grade NAEP results.

15. This and the summary discussion of NAEP trends that follows rely on data in Appendix Table 1 that has been posted at the end of this publication's Web page, http://www.epi.org/publication/unfinished-march-public-school-segregation. Tables with NAEP data in the text of this report use data from Appendix Table 1 but create comparability between NAEP tests in math and reading by interpolating scores from preceding and successive years for years in which a test (LTT or Main NAEP, math or reading) was not administered. Standard deviations in NAEP tests are usually about 32 scale points, and this approximate figure is the basis of discussion in the text. NAEP data for the Main NAEP and for the LTT since 1978 can be downloaded from the NAEP Data Explorer, http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/naepdata/. LTT data for years prior to 1978 are reported by Campbell et al. (1996).

16. This summary is an average of math and reading gains for both fourth and eighth grades.

17. See, for example, a Washington Post op-ed by Bill Gates (2011), whose charitable foundation has supported many "school reform" programs. Gates flatly asserts, offering no evidence, that "over the past four decades, the per-student cost of running our K-12 schools has more than doubled, while our student achievement has remained virtually flat."

18. For example, in a speech at the National Press Club announcing grants to states under his "Race to the Top" competition, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, without acknowledging in any way the gains made in achievement in recent years: "The achievement gap is unacceptable. Education is the civil rights issue of our generation" (Duncan 2010).

19. Mosteller and Moynihan's observation is worth reporting verbatim: "To the simple of mind or heart, such [Coleman Report] findings might be interpreted to mean that 'schools don't make any difference.' This is absurd. Schools make a very great difference to children. Children don't think up algebra on their own. It took a whole sequence of civilizations even to invent it. But given that schools have reached their present levels of quality, the observed variation in schools was reported by [the Coleman Report] to have little effect upon school achievement. This actually means a large joint effect owing to both schools and home background...little that is unique to schools or homes. They vary together" (Mosteller and Moynihan 1972, 21).

20. Subsequent research has demonstrated that smaller class sizes in the early grades have particular benefit for disadvantaged children. Although some policymakers have drawn exaggerated conclusions from this research, claiming that smaller class sizes are always beneficial, few dispute that smaller class sizes benefit disadvantaged students in the early grades. For a summary of the debate, see Mishel and Rothstein (2002).

21. NAEP collected background information on whether the household received a newspaper. Today, as newspaper circulation has fallen while newspaper reading on-line has increased, newspapers in homes is probably no longer as valid a measure of family literacy.

22. Not shown in Table 3 is that black family poverty experienced by NAEP test takers continued to decline from 2003 to 2008, but then rose rapidly after 2008.

23. The phrase was coined by William Julius Wilson, in his 1987 book by that name.

24. Charlotte-Mecklenberg is a county-wide school district that includes both suburban areas and the city of Charlotte. Expanded versions of Tables 8 and 9, showing all large urban districts that participated in NAEP in 2011 and that had sufficient sample sizes of African American students, have been posted as Appendix Tables 2a, 2b, and 3 at the end of this publication's Web page, http://www.epi.org/publication/unfinished-march-public-school-segregation.

25. The share of college graduates working at jobs that do not require a college degree was increasing before the 2008 recession, and has accelerated since. For 20- to 24-year-olds, the share increased from 30 percent to 34 percent to 39 percent from 2000 to 2007 to 2011. For 25- to 29-year-olds the increase was from 24 percent to 26 percent to 30 percent (Mishel et al. 2012, Figure 4AK). Unpaid internships for college students have increased (Perlin 2012, 28). Evidence regarding college graduates having to accept poorly paid internships is anecdotal but sufficiently commonplace to be persuasive. A plausible explanation for the growth of unpaid or poorly paid student internships is that internship experience has become a helpful qualification for college graduates hoping to find their first jobs following graduation, a condition related to increased competition for a limited number of job opportunities.

26. Otherwise equivalent job applicants with white-sounding names get called for interviews more frequently than otherwise equivalent applicants with black-sounding names (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2003). White job applicants with criminal records get called for interviews more frequently than otherwise equivalent black applicants without criminal records (Pager 2003).

27. For an illustration of how impractical it would be to integrate schools in the Detroit metropolitan area with its current segregated residential patterns, see Rothstein and Santow (2012b).

28. The term "hypersegregation" was employed by Massey and Denton (1993) to describe the extreme forms of geographic isolation, frequently government imposed, experienced by African Americans in urban areas.

29. "Housing Policy Is School Policy" is the title of a report showing that black student achievement rises with integration, and that the gains diminish as the share of low-income black students in middle-class schools increases (Schwartz 2010). The report also compares the benefits of integration with those of increased compensatory education funding for disadvantaged students in schools with less integration, and finds the former to be a more powerful intervention.

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Sherman, Arloc. 2006. African American and Latino Families Face High Rates of Hardship. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. http://www.cbpp.org/files/11-21-06pov.pdf

U.S. Census Bureau(a). "Historical Poverty Tables - People; Table 3. Poverty Status, by Age, Race and Hispanic Origin." http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/historical/people.html

U.S. Census Bureau(b). "CPS Historical Time Series Tables, Table A-2. Percent of People 25 Years and Over Who Have Completed High School or College, by Race, Hispanic Origin, and Sex: Selected Years 1940 to 2012." http://www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/education/data/cps/historical/index.html

USSchools. Desegregation Court Cases and School Demographic Data. (Data obtained from website August 16, 2013.) http://www.s4.brown.edu/usschools2/index.html

Vigdor, Jacob L., and Jens Ludwig. 2008. "Segregation and the Test Score Gap." In Katherine Magnuson and Jane Waldfogel, eds., Steady Gains and Stalled Progress: Inequality and the Black-White Test Score Gap. New York, N.Y.: Russell Sage Foundation.

Wallace, George C. 1963. "Inaugural Address of Governor George Wallace, which was delivered at the Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama." Alabama Department of Archives and History. http://digital.archives.alabama.gov/cdm/singleitem/collection/voices/id/2952/rec/5

Weiner, David A., Byron F. Lutz, and Jens Ludwig. 2010. "The Effects of School Desegregation on Crime." National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper #15380, August 16 revision of September 2009.

Wething, Hilary. 2013. Estimates of parent-child ratios from U.S. Census, Current Population Survey, America's Families and Living Arrangements: 2012, Tables Ch-1, Ch-2, Ch-3, and Fm-2 (http://www.census.gov/hhes/families/data/cps2012.html), and the 1960 Census, General Social and Economic Characteristics (Table 80). Economic Policy Institute.

Windham, Ben. 2012. "Southern Lights: Malcolm X, George Wallace, Shared Similar Qualities." The Tuscaloosa News, March 11. http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20120311/NEWS/120319988?p=all&tc=pgall&tc=ar

Wyatt, Edward. 2002. "On King's Day, Warm Response by Blacks to Bloomberg Embrace." New York Times, January 22. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/22/nyregion/on-king-s-day-warm-response-by-blacks-to-bloomberg-embrace.html

Appendix tables

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For Public Schools, Segregation Then, Segregation Since: Education and the Unfinished March

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Fifty years ago last January, George C. Wallace took the oath of office as governor of Alabama, pledging to defy the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision prohibiting separate public schools for black students.

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creating a new school district in order to avoid integration
He doesn't state what the truth is... What else could it be about?
unsurprising, dissappointing
they broke the law and got no consequences... sounds about white
176 school districts still use segregation
not enforced

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Sign in with your credentials to access the EBSCOhost premium information resources provided by your subscribing institution.

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Commentary

School reform alone cannot substantially raise performance of the poorest African-American students unless we also improve the conditions that leave too many children unprepared to take advantage of what schools have to offer.

Social and economic disadvantage depresses student performance; concentrating disadvantaged students in racially and economically homogeneous schools depresses it further.

Schools that most disadvantaged black children attend today are located in segregated neighborhoods far distant from middle-class suburbs. Our ability to desegregate is hobbled by historical ignorance. We've persuaded ourselves that residential isolation of low-income black children is only de facto-the accident of economic circumstance, personal preference, and private discrimination. Unless we relearn how residential segregation is de jure-racially motivated public policy-we can't remedy school segregation that flows from neighborhood isolation.

When a school's proportion of students at risk of failure grows, the consequences of disadvantage are exacerbated. In schools with high proportions of disadvantaged children, remediation becomes the norm; with high student mobility, teachers spend more time repeating lessons for newcomers. When classrooms fill with students less ready to learn, teachers discipline more and instruct less. Children surrounded by neighborhood violence suffer greater stress that depresses learning. When few parents have strong educations themselves, schools cannot benefit from parental pressure for stronger curriculum; children have few college-educated role models to emulate, and few classroom peers whose own families raise academic expectations.

Nationwide, low-income black children's isolation has increased. It's a problem not only of poverty but of race. Roughly 40 percent of black students attend schools that are more than 90 percent minority, up from 34 percent 20 years ago. Then, black students typically attended schools where 40 percent were low-income; it's now 60 percent.

Even sophisticated policymakers now generally assert that black students' residential isolation is de facto, but the proposition is dubious.

The federal government led in establishing metropolitan residential segregation. From its New Deal inception, federally funded public housing was explicitly segregated by government. Nationwide (not only in the South), projects were officially designated either for whites or blacks. Once white families left the projects for the suburbs, most public housing was purposely placed only in black neighborhoods.

In the mid-20th century, the federal government subsidized relocation of whites to suburbs and prohibited similar relocation of blacks. The Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration recruited builders to construct giant developments in the East like the Levittowns, most famously in New York's Long Island, but also in Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania; in the West like Lakeview, Panorama City, and Westlake (Daly City) in California; and in numerous metropolises in between. These builders received federal loan guarantees on explicit condition that no sales or resales be made to blacks.

Federal and state bank regulators approved and encouraged "redlining" policies, banning loans to black families in white suburbs and even, in most cases, to black families in black neighborhoods, leading to those neighborhoods' deterioration and ghettoization.

The Internal Revenue Service unconstitutionally extended tax favoritism to universities, churches, and other nonprofits that enforced racial segregation. For example, Robert Maynard Hutchins, known for promoting the liberal arts, headed the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1951. His office organized homeowners' associations to establish racial restrictions in surrounding neighborhoods, and employed university lawyers to evict black families who moved nearby, all while the university enjoyed tax-deductible and tax-exempt status.

Urban renewal programs of the mid-20th century often had undisguised purposes of forcing low-income black residents away from universities, hospital complexes, or business districts and into new ghettos. Real estate is highly regulated, but state authorities never punished brokers for racial discrimination, and rarely do so even today when discriminatory practices remain. Public police and prosecutorial power enforced racial boundaries: North, South, East, and West, in thousands of incidents police stood by as mobs firebombed and stoned homes purchased by blacks in white neighborhoods, while prosecutors refused to charge easily identifiable arsonists. These and other forms of racially explicit state action to segregate the urban landscape violated the Fifth, 13th, and 14th Amendments. Yet the term "de facto segregation," describing a never-existent reality, persists among otherwise well-informed advocates and scholars.

Private prejudice certainly played a large role, but the federal government helped create and sustain private prejudice. White homeowners' resistance to black neighbors was fed by fears that African-Americans who moved into their neighborhoods would bring slum conditions with them. Yet slum conditions were created by overcrowding caused almost entirely by government refusal to permit African-Americans to expand their housing supply and by municipalities' discriminatory denial of public services. In the ghetto, garbage was collected less frequently, and neighborhoods were often rezoned for industrial or even toxic use. White homeowners came to see these conditions as characteristics of black residents themselves, not the result of racially motivated government policy.

Even those today who understand this dramatic history may think that because these policies are mostly those of the past, segregation persists mostly because few blacks can afford to live in middle-class neighborhoods.

Yet the federal government also contributed to this unaffordability with discriminatory labor-market policy. At the behest of Southern congressmen, New Deal labor standards, like minimum wages and the right to unionize, excluded from coverage, for undisguised racial purposes, occupations in which black workers predominated.

The federal government granted exclusive collective bargaining rights to segregated private-sector unions, including some that entirely excluded African-Americans from their trades, into the 1970s. Government thus depressed income levels of African-American workers below levels of comparable white workers, contributing to black families' inability to accumulate the wealth needed to move to equity-appreciating white suburbs.

Reacquaintance with this history should lead us to conclude that racially segregated metropolitan areas have a constitutional obligation to integrate, with inclusionary zoning laws, scattered public and private housing for low- and moderate-income families (including in the wealthiest suburbs), and even the removal of tax subsidies for property in communities that fail to take aggressive steps to integrate.

Yet we fail to tell young people this story so, as adults, they will be unlikely to understand our constitutional obligation to integrate. School curricula typically ignore, or worse, misstate historical truth. For example, in over 1,200 pages of McDougal Littell's widely used high school textbook The Americans, a single paragraph is devoted to 20th-century "Discrimination in the North." It devotes one passive-voice sentence to residential segregation, stating that "African-Americans found themselves forced into segregated neighborhoods," with no explanation of how government did the forcing.

Another widely used textbook, Prentice Hall's United States History, attributes segregation to mysterious forces: "In the North, too, African-Americans faced segregation and discrimination. Even where there were no explicit laws, de facto segregation, or segregation by unwritten custom or tradition, was a fact of life. African-Americans in the North were denied housing in many neighborhoods."

History Alive!, a popular textbook published by the Teachers Curriculum Institute, teaches that segregation was mostly a Southern problem: "Even New Deal agencies practiced racial segregation, especially in the South," making no reference to liberal Democrats' embrace of Northern residential segregation in return for Southern support for progressive economic policies.

We have a national concern with the racial achievement gap, but school reform cannot succeed without housing reform. We're unlikely to accomplish either if we suppress knowledge of how they came to be connected.

Published in Print: March 26, 2014, as Segregated Housing Policies Still Haunt Schools

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Commentary School reform alone cannot substantially raise performance of the poorest African-American students unless we also improve the conditions that leave too many children unprepared to take advantage of what schools have to offer. Social and economic disadvantage depresses student performance; concentrating disadvantaged students in racially and economically homogeneous schools depresses it further.

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How Redlining’s Racist Effects Lasted for Decades (Published 2017)

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By declaring some neighborhoods bad risks for mortgages, 1930s-era appraisers altered the course of development, new research confirms.

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Effect of a Public Housing Project on a Neighborhood: Case Study of Oakland, California on JSTOR

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Glenn Robert Lym, Effect of a Public Housing Project on a Neighborhood: Case Study of Oakland, California, Land Economics, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Nov., 1967), pp. 461-466

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Congress writing off poor children: Notes

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Congress writing off poor children: Notes

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Senate bill ESEA reinstates education redlining
ESEA punishes schools for not doing well; it closes the school, reinstates it as a charter school, and fires at least 1/2 the staff
In 1975, black & latino college graduation rates were equal to those of white students and since then it's gone downhill
More than 70% of students of color attend a school with at least 90% other students of color
Today's system is slightly worse than the late 60s, but considerably worse than in the 70s.

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Redlining our schools: why is Congress writing off poor children?

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Redlining our schools: why is Congress writing off poor children?

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De jure segregation in bills passed by Congress (2012)

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Most Popular

There is no major investment in preschool or in wraparound services that will address the many needs of children for extended learning time, healthcare and social services so they can learn. While a recent Race to the Top initiative offers some preschool funding, it is minuscule in relation to the need and will not make up for the huge cuts in these services occurring in communities across the country. (After widespread cuts, preschool spending at the end of 2010 stood at almost $700 per pupil less than in 2001. Meanwhile, state cuts to education spending reached more than $7.5 billion this year on top of $3 billion in cuts last year.)

It's not as though we don't know what works. We could implement the policies that have reduced the achievement gap and transformed learning outcomes for students in high-achieving nations where government policies largely prevent childhood poverty by guaranteeing housing, healthcare and basic income security. These same strategies were substantially successful in our own nation through the programs and policies of the war on poverty and the Great Society, which dramatically reduced poverty, increased employment, rebuilt depressed communities, invested in preschool and K-12 education in cities and poor rural areas, desegregated schools, funded financial aid for college and invested in teacher training programs that ended teacher shortages. In the 1970s teaching in urban communities was made desirable by the higher-than-average salaries, large scholarships and forgivable loans that subsidized teacher preparation, and by the exciting curriculum and program innovations that federal funding supported in many city school districts.

These efforts led to big improvements in achievement and attainment from the '60s through the '80s. The black-white reading gap shrank by two-thirds for 17-year-olds, black high school and college graduation rates more than doubled, and, in 1975, rates of college attendance among whites, blacks and Latinos reached parity for the first and only time before or since.

Almost all the programs described above were ended or shrunk in the '80s, targets of the Reagan revolution, which systematically sought to dismantle federal supports for urban and rural development, housing, social services and education. Poverty and homelessness increased sharply. As the federal education budget was cut in half, funding for urban and poor rural schools declined precipitously, desegregation aid was discontinued and teaching supports were reduced, leading to growing shortages when teacher demand increased in the late 1980s. Despite some modest pushback during the Clinton years, the momentum toward increasing inequality was not reversed.

How Educational Redlining Works

The racial and economic segregation that sets the stage for redlining is now firmly in place. One in four American children lives in poverty, nearly 60 percent more than in 1974, and the number of people living in severe poverty has reached a record high. A national study released in 2009 found that one in fifty children in America is homeless and living in a shelter, motel, car, shared housing, abandoned building, park or orphanage. The proportions in some school districts exceed one in ten, and the number is growing rapidly.

Furthermore, this poverty is concentrated in increasingly resegregated communities and schools. More than 70 percent of black and Latino students attend predominantly minority schools, and nearly 40 percent attend intensely segregated schools, where more than 90 percent of students are minority and most are poor.

Poverty rates make a huge difference in student achievement. Few people are aware, for example, that in 2009 US schools with fewer than 10 percent of students in poverty ranked first among all nations on the Programme for International Student Achievement tests in reading, while those serving more than 75 percent of students in poverty scored alongside nations like Serbia, ranking about fiftieth.

The schools identified as low-performing not only serve a growing underclass of impoverished families; they also typically do so with fewer state and local dollars per pupil than wealthier districts around them. Unlike high-achieving nations that fund their schools centrally and equally, most American states spend three times more on their wealthiest schools than they do on their poorest.

In California, for example, urban school districts often spend less than the state average although their children have the greatest needs. With inadequate budgets, crumbling buildings, class sizes of more than thirty (in some cases nearing fifty) and not enough desks or books, many schools serving the neediest students have long ago canceled art, music and physical education, shut down libraries and fired librarians, nurses and counselors. They have lost reading specialists, science teachers and school psychologists. As they suffer cut after cut while they seek to meet the needs of children who are often hungry and homeless as well as shortchanged in terms of educational opportunities, these schools must decide how they will underserve their students, not whether they will.

These disparities in school funding also lead to disparities in salaries and working conditions, which create shortages of qualified personnel in high-need districts. A recent study found that in California and New York, for example, the highest-spending districts offer salaries more than twice as high as those in the lowest-spending districts. Even within a single region, the average teacher in high-poverty Oakland earned $54,000 in 2009 while her counterpart in wealthy Portola Valley (home to Silicon Valley industrialists) earned $89,000. Nationally, teachers in low-poverty districts earn one-third more at the top of the salary range than those in high-poverty districts. And the teachers who work in the neediest communities also manage larger classes with fewer books, materials and supports of all kinds.

These disparities are greatest across districts, but they are exacerbated further within most large districts, where resources are unequally distributed. It is no surprise then that the Education Department recently reported that schools serving mostly African-American students are twice as likely to have teachers with only one or two years of experience than schools in the same district serving mostly white students. Because they are less experienced and educated, teachers at schools with more Latino and African-American students are paid $2,500 less on average than teachers in the district as a whole.

Now comes the federal government to announce that such schools-where students score lower on tests than in more advantaged communities-should be labeled as failing and threatened with closure or staff firings. This makes educational redlining official. The federal share of less than 10 percent of school budgets is a tiny drop in the bucket, and far from enough to tip the scales that are so dramatically out of balance. Not only is there no plan in federal law to tackle poverty, segregation or the massive state and local underfunding of these schools; the plans embodied in Senate ESEA proposals are likely to undermine these communities even further.

How Federal Policy Can Make Things Worse

Today, NCLB-and plans to replace it-deliver primarily on the promise of more tests and sanctions. New proposals would focus the law's punishments even more pointedly on schools in high-need communities and on educators who are willing to serve in these schools, where they earn lower salaries, teach larger classes, deal with more stress and spend longer hours than those who work in more affluent schools. This passes for accountability in America. It is also a recipe for educational redlining.

The test-and-punish approach to school reform has already made it more difficult for schools labeled as failing to attract and retain well-qualified educators-thus, ironically, reducing the quality of education for students still further. Rather than increasing the incentives and supports for teaching in high-need schools, recent federal policy has encouraged states to lower standards for prospective teachers, despite evidence that doing so increases teacher attrition and reduces student achievement. Blaming teachers for the ills of high-need schools lets policy-makers off the hook and keeps the more fundamental problems of severe poverty, a tattered safety net and inequitable funding under the rug.

Instead of making long-term investments in these communities, the strategies promoted in Race to the Top and the current proposals for ESEA will cordon off "failing" public schools and seek to close, replace or reconstitute them, or use them to experiment with high-risk reforms like for-profit educational management firms.

These approaches have a dubious track record. Many reconstitutions-where staff are fired and replaced-have resulted in a less qualified teaching staff and lower achievement after the reform. The largest national studies of charters have found that while some are highly successful, most are more likely to underperform than to outperform district-run schools serving similar students. Moreover, the fact that charters enroll fewer English learners and special education students makes it difficult to compare their performance with that of other public schools.

The school replacement strategy is far from a panacea. An independent evaluation of Chicago's Renaissance initiative-which aimed to replace 100 schools with redesigned schools, charters and "contract schools" run by entrepreneurs-found that the achievement of students in the new schools had not improved relative to comparison students and that both groups continued to be very low-performing. Meanwhile, the disruptions to communities were severe. Many students were shipped out to distant schools, creating long, dangerous travel conditions; others were not accepted by the new schools; and still others dropped out when their schools were closed. An effort to launch another round of closings and turnarounds led to vehement public protests that closed down a school board meeting in December. "We see through the sound bites. You have betrayed the public trust!" one protester yelled. "You have failed Chicago's children."

More troubling, pressure to raise test scores has led many schools to exclude students who are hardest to teach, either by structuring admissions so that low-achieving students and those with special needs are unlikely to be admitted, or by creating conditions under which they are speedily encouraged to leave. In Houston a study documented a slew of strategies by which schools rid themselves of struggling students. In the brave new world of New Orleans, composed almost entirely of charter schools, the Southern Poverty Law Center had to sue because disabled students could not get access to public education.

Excluding low-scoring students from public schools gets scores up, but it expands the school-to-prison pipeline, which has quadrupled over the past thirty years, along with corrections costs, which now threaten to devour funds that should be spent on education. Most inmates are functionally illiterate and high school dropouts. In a devil's bargain, the public spends as much as $50,000 a year to incarcerate young men on whom it would not spend $10,000 a year for a decent education.

The truth is that the competitive market approach leaves the most vulnerable children behind. It is impossible to punish schools that are struggling without punishing the children they serve. When schools are closed, it is the students and families who suffer the chaos and confusion. And if teaching and leadership positions in high-need communities become even more unappealing as a result of such policies, educators with options will be even less willing to come to or stay in these schools, leaving students and their schools with an even more inexperienced and transient teaching force. This is not a strategy that promises great wins for these students or for the nation.

What We Should Do Instead

We need a new approach to federal policy that makes it possible for all students to succeed and creates the momentum we need to regain our status as an educational leader among nations. The new ESEA must be better than what we've had for the past ten years-especially for the low-income communities it was intended to serve. To make this happen, Congress and the administration must think differently about the ends and the means of reform.

First, we need to recognize that the growing income gap, unemployment and poverty must be addressed if we are to close the education gap and maintain a stable democratic society. The Occupy movement is beginning to reawaken awareness of how much social inequities have grown in the past thirty years, but few are aware of how intolerable the situation has become in the most marginalized communities. As socioeconomic segregation has increased, policy-makers and pundits are ever more buffered from direct knowledge of how the other half lives.

Although it is not fashionable to say so, we desperately need a jobs bill that will allow all those who want and need to work to take on the many jobs that need doing in America, and we need a major anti-poverty program that will eliminate childhood poverty in the richest nation on earth. The goods bought and the taxes paid by Americans with jobs will be the most important corrective for our lagging economy, and the stability and dignity this provides for families is the most important foundation for children and their learning.

Second, we must finally address the outrageous disparities in school funding that set us apart from other industrialized nations. To help students reach the new, rigorous Common Core standards that states have developed, we must create common resource standards-and incentives to meet them. This should include benchmarks for early childhood education, well-qualified teachers, high-quality curriculums and equitable instructional resources. Consider the nearly 500,000 high school students who want to go to college but, according to the Education Department, do not have access to algebra 2 classes, and the more than 2 million who have no access to calculus classes.

It's not fair to expect students to meet equally high standards if we do not provide them with equal opportunity to succeed. The ESEA should tie standards for equal educational opportunity to standards for learning: indicators of learning opportunities-the availability of qualified teachers, appropriate courses, materials and equipment, and necessary services-should be published alongside test results, and states should be expected to show evidence of progress toward resource equalization along with evidence of learning.

Third, we should equalize learning opportunities outside school, including high-quality preschool education and enriched summer learning opportunities for all students. A major study at Johns Hopkins University found that one-third of the achievement gap between affluent and poor high school students is present at the start of first grade, and two-thirds occurs because of summer learning loss for low-income students. Evidence shows that preschool investments create large returns as students experience less school failure, fewer special education placements and higher graduation and employment rates. High-quality summer programs also help close the achievement gap and prevent students from dropping out. Yet most low-income students do not have access to these opportunities.

Fourth, we must invest in the quality of our educators. Since federal supports for teacher training were dramatically reduced in the '80s, teacher shortages in schools serving low-income students have increased to the point that there is a revolving door for teachers in these schools. Congress has colluded in lowering preparation standards and creating fast-track alternative certification routes for teachers to fill jobs in high-minority, low-income schools, despite research that shows that these teachers leave faster and reduce student achievement.

Frustrated by this counterproductive approach, a number of organizations representing parents, communities, educators, and civil rights and disability activists have banded together to insist on a higher standard and to advocate for more sensible federal supports for high-quality teaching. Many successful models have been created and documented, but the funding for these programs has been steadily eliminated. The new education law should maintain the NCLB expectation that teachers be fully prepared and qualified for their challenging jobs and then support those goals with service scholarships to underwrite training and high-quality preparation programs in high-need urban and rural communities.

It may sometimes be necessary to close schools, but only as a last resort, after communities have been engaged in diagnosis and decision-making and necessary investments have been made, wraparound services provided and all student needs taken into account. Increased emphasis on parent and community participation in the direction of their public schools should be a key piece of new education law. We must think and act more systemically. We need federal education policy-backed up with state policy-that builds an escalator out of poverty. The 2020 Vision Roadmap produced by the Opportunity to Learn campaign provides one image of how this can be done.

Preventing educational redlining is a moral and a practical issue. The estimated 7,000 students who drop out of school each day represent a human tragedy as well as lost potential for our society. The more than $300 billion a year forgone because of the lost wages and social service costs of dropouts could be spent building strong schools for these students in their neighborhoods.

We must be honest about our challenges and adopt solutions that give all children an opportunity to learn if our nation is going to reclaim its role as a world education leader. We cannot afford to settle for an education law that is looking backward when it is so critically important to bring our future into view.

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There is no major investment in preschool or in wraparound services that will address the many needs of children for extended learning time, healthcare and social services so they can learn. While a recent Race to the Top initiative offers some preschool funding, it is minuscule in relation to the need and will not make up for the huge cuts in these services occurring in communities across the country.

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Government policies, laws, and precedents enacted in the 60's that promoted racially exclusive zoning continue to interfere with the right of black and latino students to an equal education.

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Middle class white & asian neighborhoods in NYC have the best schools
In Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, the children have worse "opportunity to learn"
The study says that this is de facto segregation, but it is a result of de jure redlining

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"A Rotting Apple: Education Redlining in New York City"

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"A Rotting Apple: Education Redlining in New York City"

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NYC schools unequal by poverty

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A Rotting Apple: Education Redlining in New York City | Schott Foundation for Public Education

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Schott Foundation for Public Education 1250 Hancock Street, Suite 803N Quincy, MA 02169 Phone 617-876-7700 Fax 617-876-7702