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Improvement in racial division still present

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Improvement in racial division still present

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Exactly 62 years ago, on May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that segregated schools were unconstitutional.

The Brown v. Board of Education decision was historic - but it's not history yet.

Just this week, a federal judge ordered a Mississippi school district to desegregate its schools.

The case on which the judge was ruling was originally brought during the summer of 1965. The first named plaintiff, "Diane Cowan, minor," was a fourth-grader at the time. Now she's Diane Cowan White, a 57-year-old clerk with the U.S. Postal Service.

The legal saga that bears her name continues because, for 50 years, the Cleveland, Miss., school district has failed to integrate.

The town of 12,000 people - like many, many towns and cities in America - is racially segregated. A railroad track runs through town. Black people live on the east side of the tracks; white people live on the west side.

(Last year, The Washington Post published a stunning set of visualizations showing how American cities are separated along railroad tracks and highways. Suffice it to say Cleveland is not unique.)

In the early 1960s, the town's schools were explicitly segregated by race. There were white schools and black schools, and no matter where children lived, their school attendance was determined by their race.

So began the case against Cleveland School District - and a five-decade saga of resistance and inadequate action.

There was some backlash to a judge's first order, instructing the district to desegregate. The Wall Street Journal wrote that according to a historian, some Cleveland residents proposed segregating schools by sex if they couldn't segregate them by race, to keep black boys and white girls from interacting at school.

But Cleveland agreed to allow black students into white schools, and vice versa. However, the federal government later alleged that the district established "dual residency" policies to cheat and send students to schools based on their race instead of their neighborhood. The district also built new schools in locations designed to keep black students in all-black schools, the U.S. said in a motion in the '80s, and assigned faculty based on race.

Fifteen years passed. Schools remained segregated.

So Cleveland agreed to make an effort - to stop distributing faculty based on race, to encourage students to transfer to classes where they'd be in the minority, to set up exclusive and attractive classes to give them an incentive to make such a transfer, to establish appealing magnet schools in majority-black communities.

Fifteen years passed.

And ... schools remained segregated.

In 2011, the U.S. revived the case with a motion stating that Cleveland lacked the will to "meaningfully integrate."

"In a school district where approximately 67 percent of the students are black and 30 percent of the students are white, half of Cleveland's schools - the schools on the east side of the railroad tracks - are all black or virtually all black," the federal government wrote. The other schools were disproportionately white.

A judge noted that "despite the District's attempts to attract Caucasian students to the majority-African-American Eastside High, today, the school is attended by 99.7% African-American students."

And in the eyes of residents, it is both separate and unequal, The New York Times reports: "Testimony given in court by both white and black residents described a stigma associated with the black schools and a perception among families that white students received a better education."

The district said, basically, it would try harder - with better course offerings to tempt white kids to cross the railroad tracks, or with an intense high school magnet program.

But the U.S. argued that none of that had worked before. This time around, it didn't accuse the school district of active resistance or any ill will - just of failure.

Time for the nuclear option: merging both high schools into a single school with around 1,000 students, and similarly combining middle schools.

Some residents thought that would be too big and that the town couldn't afford new buildings.

They also argued that forcing integration by merging would cause white families to turn to private schools, causing a drop in enrollment.

No dice, said the judge: The fear of white flight doesn't override students' constitutional right to an integrated education.

"The delay in segregation has deprived generations of students of the constitutionally-guaranteed right of an integrated education," Judge Debra Brown wrote. "Although no court order can right these wrongs, it is the duty of the District to ensure that not one more student suffers under this burden."

The Associated Press writes that the case may be eye-catching, but it's not unique:

"Merging black and white schools was a common desegregation method in the 1960s and 1970s, and the opinion is a reminder that desegregation lawsuits never ended in some places. As recently as 2014, the U.S. Justice Department was still a party to 43 such suits in Mississippi alone."

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After 50-Year Legal Struggle, Mississippi School District Ordered To Desegregate

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Exactly 62 years ago, on May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that segregated schools were unconstitutional. The Brown v. Board of Education decision was historic - but it's not history yet. Just this week, a federal judge ordered a Mississippi school district to desegregate its schools.

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Racial division is still very prominent in the United States almost two decades into the 21st century.

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Still Separate, Still Unequal: Teaching about School Segregation and Educational Inequality (Published 2019)

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Although many students learn about the struggles to desegregate schools in the civil rights era, segregation as a current reality is largely absent from the curriculum. This teaching resource uses Times articles and Op-Eds to investigate the issue.

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Life as a White Student in a 99% Black School in Segregated America

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American public schools are increasingly segregated along the lines of race and income, a study found.

A report from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and the Center for Education and Civil Rights at the Pennsylvania State University, which was published in May, found racial and economic segregation is intensifying and spreading among American public schools due to demographic changes and a stall in desegregation regulations.

The report examined segregation in American schools in observance of the 65th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, which deemed racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional.

California has the most segregated Latino student population nationwide, with 58% of Latino students attending intensely segregated schools, according to the report. The study defines intensely segregated schools as those in which 90-100% of the student population is nonwhite.

The report found the share of intensely segregated schools more than tripled from 1988 to 2016, to the point where one out of five schools counts as intensely segregated, said Jenn Ayscue, an assistant education professor at North Carolina State University and co-author of the report.

Nationally, 40% of black students and 40% of Latino students attend intensely segregated schools, she added.

Gary Orfield, a professor of education, law, political science and urban planning at UCLA and co-author of the report, said he thinks progress made toward desegregation since the civil rights movement has largely been erased.

"We are back to the periods of the late 1960s in terms of levels of segregation," Orfield said. "We've lost all the progress we made since the time of (Martin Luther King Jr.'s) death and we are going backward steadily."

Orfield said the Latino population in the United States has quintupled since the 1970s, from 5% to 26%, due to factors including increased immigration and decreased domestic white birth rates.

These changes have led to residential segregation among communities, particularly among black and Latino students, he said. Residential segregation increases segregation within individual school districts because students are assigned to districts based on their residential locations, Orfield added.

Ayscue said the study found desegregation efforts in state and federal levels have stalled because schools are no longer legally required to desegregate.

"When (school) districts are released from court-ordered desegregation, they also lose their focus on desegregation efforts, and without actively trying to maintain desegregation, schools often resegregate," Ayscue said.

Another factor contributing to increasing segregation is school district secessions, said Erica Frankenberg, an education professor at Penn State and co-author of the report. Communities sometimes secede from larger countywide school districts, creating school district boundary lines that expand segregation in schools, she added.

Frankenberg said to reverse segregation, she thinks school districts and governments need to work together. She said state and local governments can aid in these efforts by incentivizing cross-district enrollment and collaborations.

She added she thinks all branches of the government need to work together to create permanent housing integration efforts to avoid segregated communities. However, she said these efforts require sustained bipartisan political effort, which she believes is currently absent.

Ayscue said she thinks it is also important for school administrators and superintendents to understand whether their school assignment plans facilitate desegregation or exacerbate segregation.

Decades of social research have shown segregated educational systems have negative social impacts, Ayscue said. Segregation is linked to systematically unequal education opportunities and outcomes, she said.

Ayscue said racial minority segregated schools have less experienced and qualified teachers, higher teacher turnover rates, higher student mobility and fewer opportunities to take advanced programs such as Advanced Placement courses. These factors lead to higher dropout rates and lower graduation rates.

Black and Latino students often experience double segregation, or segregation on the basis of both race and income, Orfield said. Schools that are doubly segregated have fewer resources and opportunities for students, he added.

These schools also maintain weaker connections with colleges compared to high schools that enroll predominantly middle-class white and Asian students, Orfield said.

About half of Asian students and about a third of white students are in the nation's best high schools, compared to about 5% of black and Latino students, he said. This may have a drastic effect on the college admissions process, Orfield added.

Conversely, desegregation is associated with a number of benefits, Ayscue said. A desegregated setting is associated with higher academic achievements, stronger critical thinking skills, reduction in prejudices and increased friendship across racial groups, she said.

Studying in an integrated setting also shows long-term benefits, Ayscue added. Students who attend desegregated schools are more likely to work and live in desegregated environments and have greater civic engagement, better economic outcomes, less likelihood of incarceration and better health outcomes, she said.

Orfield said he thinks the rhetoric and actions of President Donald Trump's administration have made people more aware of segregation.

"I think people are realizing that we are in a dangerous time as race relations in this country with the polarization and racism of the Trump era, and they are beginning to recognize that schools are one of the only places that we have to prepare people for different outcomes," Orfield said.

Frankenberg said the different branches of government must cooperate in order to make policies that address school segregation, as they did to initially desegregated schools following the Brown decision.

"For me, that was a really important example about how widespread change can happen in a very little time period," she said. "But that was a time in which we had all branches of the federal government working together and I think an important lesson is that we can't do this piecemeal, it has to be a comprehensive effort."

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UCLA study finds schools across the country are becoming increasingly segregated

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American public schools are increasingly segregated along the lines of race and income, a study found. A report from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and the Center for Education and Civil Rights at the Pennsylvania State University, which was published in May, found racial and economic segregation is intensifying and spreading among American public schools due to demographic changes and a stall in desegregation regulations.

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The Effects of Segregation on African American High School Seniors' Academic Achievement

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This study examines the relationship between segregated education and school outcomes for African American adolescents in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carol...

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In the past decade, resegregation through so-called "white flight" and relaxed integration enforcement is leading to greater inequality from an earlier age. Modern inner-city schools are often underfunded, while dropout rates are high and violence is common. Police officers routinely intervene to discipline students for minor infractions, exposing minority kids early to the criminal justice system. Greater allocation of resources may not be enough to halt the cycle of racially-skewed poverty and crime as long as racial and class segregation continues, according to an analysis by Columbia Business School professor Ray Fisman.

Over 50 years since the Supreme Court desegregated schools in Brown v. Board of Education, integration has helped keep black students from dropping out, while improving their earnings, health and decreasing incarceration rates. But resegregation of schools since 2001, when poor black students stopped getting bused to integrated schools, is fast undoing the progress made since the civil rights era.

Fisman highlights a recent study of Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina, a civil rights battleground used in a 1971 Supreme Court decision to allow busing of minority students into white schools. Before 2001, school populations were racially mixed through the inclusion of some minority neighborhoods not immediately around the school. After busing was halted, the district redrew its school boundaries to re-sort students into mostly black and mostly white schools. The study found that even with increased funding to minority schools, young black students placed in resegregated schools were suddenly tangling with law enforcement more frequently:

Despite cushioning minority students from academic decline, the resegregation of Charlotte schools nonetheless led to a jump in arrests and incarcerations of minority students - particularly among poor black males, who are most at risk for crime. According to the authors' calculations, a poor black male was 15 percent more likely to get arrested if assigned to a school that had 60 percent minority students rather than 40 percent minority.

The study's findings suggest that clustering those already most vulnerable to turning to crime - poor black males - in certain schools may lead to their acting as negative influences on one another. These findings also underscore the fact that desegregation isn't the zero-sum game that it's often portrayed to be, with benefits to black students coming at the expense of whites. White students didn't commit fewer crimes with the end of busing, while black students committed significantly more.

Court-ordered integration led to more equitable resources and spending per student regardless of race, allowing poor minority students to access, to an extent, the same kinds of opportunities as white children. In the Charlotte study, increased resources for resegregated minority schools kept the dropout rate level. But active integration policies are necessary to help students change their socioeconomic fates. The study links the racial crime gap directly to segregation, concluding, "Policies that allocate additional resources to segregated schools can improve classroom instruction and course offerings, but only deliberately integrative student assignment policies can change the racial or socioeconomic backgrounds of students who walk in the doors of the school."

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School Segregation Leads To More Violent Crime, Study Finds

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In the past decade, resegregation through so-called "white flight" and relaxed integration enforcement is leading to greater inequality from an earlier age. Modern inner-city schools are often underfunded, while dropout rates are high and violence is common. Police officers routinely intervene to discipline students for minor infractions, exposing minority kids early to the criminal justice system.