This article was written a year ago, but there is no doubt that the trend lines towards resegregation are only getting worse.
Just this week, we learned that the Republican legislature in Kentucky is about to eliminate one of the nation’s most successful programs of school desegregation.
Last May, on the anniversary of the Brown decision, Emma Brown of the Washington Post wrote that public schools are resegregating.
This should not be surprising, because federal courts have gradually but decisively withdrawn from their role as enforcers of desegregation. District after district has been relieved of court orders, and new ones are not forthcoming. Similarly, the U.S. Department of Education has become passive in the face of resegregation. I have often said that Arne Uncan wasted a historic opportunity to encourage integration. Imagine if Race to the Top had offered state’s and districts financial incentives for increasing desegregation instead of test scores. We now know that “Race to the Top” was a flop. It advanced the school choice movement but didn’t help students or communities. DeVos picked up where Arne left off, promoting privatization of public schools.
Brown writes:
Poor, black and Hispanic children are becoming increasingly isolated from their white, affluent peers in the nation’s public schools, according to new federal data showing that the number of high-poverty schools serving primarily black and brown students more than doubled between 2001 and 2014.
The data was released by the Government Accountability Office on Tuesday, 62 years to the day after the Supreme Court decided that segregated schools are “inherently unequal” and therefore unconstitutional.
That landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education began the dismantling of the dual school systems — one for white kids, one for black students — that characterized so many of the nation’s communities. It also became a touchstone for the ideal of public education as a great equalizer, an American birthright meant to give every child a fair shot at success.
But that ideal appears to be unraveling, according to Tuesday’s GAO report.
The proportion of schools segregated by race and class — where more than 75 percent of children receive free or reduced-price lunch and more than 75 percent are black or Hispanic — climbed from 9 percent to 16 percent of schools between 2001 and 2014. The number of the most intensively segregated schools — with more than 90 percent of low-income students and students of color — more than doubled over that period.
It seems we are hurtling backwards into the past. On matters of economics, social security, race, and schooling.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sad. Sad. Abandonment of Judeo-Christian code “love your neighbor”.
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Just SICK.
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“@Ninacharters: Unfinished business in charters is to meet demand & open rural charters.”
Rural charters will really harm kids in public schools. We have an economically diverse school and it is absolutely essential that the better-off parents be on board for paying for the public schools. If they skim off 10% of our school the public system will collapse.
It’s fragile. We don’t have the kind of numbers urban districts have. The one and only reason it holds together is everyone has a piece of it. If they rupture that social compact and they won’t be able to put it back together.
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Botel: “We need to build a more robust portfolio of school options.”
Us Department of Education. A charter school leader. Of course.
Does the federal government actively bar public school people from employment now, or what? Why do NONE of these people come out of the schools 90% of the public attend?
They throw those resumes in the trash or something.
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Diane: It seems to me that we can see at least two things going on in that link about re-segregation of schools.
First, like the voting rights legislation, we can see how important maintaining strong policy can be at both the state and national level, and what happens when that policy is “disappeared.” (Again, like with gutting the voting rights legislation–there was a veritable rush to re-institute voter-suppression tactics.)
Second, we can see just how recalcitrant and long term biases can be (class/race/gender), especially when it just gets driven under to re-emerge as some neo-Jim Crow manifestation. We should name them: Jim Crow Vouchers, Charter Schools, and privateers.
But as far as turning the trend goes (and of course this won’t happen in our present “starve the beast” situation with public schools and moneyed interests), it seems to me that REAL reform aimed at public schools and districts who are suffering such a trend needs to include comprehensive and targeted “lifting.” Such lifting would ensure that the original intent of public education as “the great equalizer” is fostered. This means each school has the full, systematic, and long-term support to make concrete the school’s mission which includes making this school a “plum” that anyone, rich or poor, would be glad to attend or have their children attend. For instance, if we need to reduce class sizes for awhile to 8 per class, then so be it.
I know democrats can be less than angelic; but in the main, I blame the Republican Party and it’s long-term effort to dismantle and tear-down, rather than build up, not only the “society,” but the inclusive culture of commonwealth and well-being that began in earnest with the Roosevelts. Now Republicans are gaming the timing of the elections so that what’s bad about their treatment of the AFA won’t actually occur until the voting is over. They think the American people are stupid–some actually are, but I think its also just distracted and even involved in a kind of pervasive cultural nihilism that is rooted mainly in the long-term degeneration of Washington politics, and the R-Party, and a now-open embrace of their own degeneration.
They are not even ashamed of their across-the-board loss of integrity. As our founders said and the Federalist Papers reflect, the “elites” among us are supposed to be elected, and to know and do what is really good for the people. In our dreams.
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It is depressing we are regressing into resegregation. I have witnessed the positive results in students that attend a racially and socio-economically diverse school system. There is a strong peer effect that occurs that is beneficial to all. Poor students get to attend a clean, safe, well resourced school, and middle class students learn acceptance, empathy and appreciation of individual differences. All students are better off from the experience. We should be focusing on creative ways to promote integration instead of using choice systems to segregate and rank and sort students. Separate is never equal.
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Reblogged this on BLOGGYWOCKY and commented:
Resegregation. Great, just great. Not. 😩
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Meant “resegregation,” of course. Stupid spell-check.
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I call it “neo-segregation”. With the return of neighborhood schools, and with people of similar ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds living in these neighborhoods, schools will no longer be introducing children to children different than the kids in their own neighborhoods and schools.
With this new reality, how can schools achieve the goal of having children of different ethnic and economic backgrounds be educated together?
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Charles,
Not every neighborhood is racially segregated. The best hope for interracial contact and equity is good public schools. Choice creates more segregation.
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I was born in Louisville KY, and my sister still lives there. The different neighborhoods there, tend to be “de facto” segregated by race and economic class. The schools in St. Matthews (an upscale white neighborhood) are mostly white. The schools in the west end (past 40th street) are run-down and mostly black.
With the abandonment of cross-town bussing, the schools in the west end are going to deteriorate, and the black kids, are going to be “locked in” to crumbling, failing schools. There is no incentive for the more affluent citizens of Louisville to spend more money to improve the schools in the west end.
Go ahead and hope for interracial contact, and good public schools. Hope is all you will ever get.
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Charles: “crumbling failing schools” is a choice–that does not have to be made.
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Why do you think that school choice creates more segregation? The data shows otherwise:
http://rare.us/rare-news/education/no-school-choice-doesnt-promote-segregation/
http://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/in/2016/09/20/democrats-argue-school-choice-is-driving-segregation-but-what-does-the-data-say/
I see that school choice, will enable parents in economically depressed areas, and minority parents, will be empowered to pull their children out of predominately minority schools, and enable them to send their children to public and non-public schools, which are not located in their minority neighborhoods.
With the end of cross-town bussing, and the return of neighborhood schools, how would you enable parents in all-minority schools, to send their children to schools with a different ethnic/economic makeup?
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Because all international data and the Project on Civil Rights at UCLA conclude that choice promotes segregation. Catholics go with Catholics, Jews with Jews, whites with whites.
That is why the very idea of school choice emerged from Southern racist officials in the 1950s as a response to the Brown decision. The term was stigmatized for that reason for decades. Do you stand with the Supreme Court or George Wallace?
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I am not a racist. Not all people who support school choice are racists. Be fair. I abhor the segregationist policies of the late George Wallace. I stand with the Supreme Court, most of the time. I am reading a book “The Dirty Dozen”, about the 12 worst supreme court decisions of all time.
Do you stand with the Court on Korematsu v. US? That is where the court ruled it constitutional to incarcerate American citizens of Japanese ancestry. Or Kelo v. New London, where a private citizen’s property was condemned and transferred to a private corporation?
The Court is not always right. See Dred Scott v. Sandford.
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Charles,
The Supreme Court was wrong in the Dred Scott case too. Are you suggesting that the Brown decision was wrong? I disagree. Those who give up on desegregation give up on America.
Some reading for you.
Mercedes Schneider, School Choice (Teachers College Press)
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/01/16/509325266/how-the-systemic-segregation-of-schools-is-maintained-by-individual-choices
https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/choice-without-equity-2009-report
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Although I do not agree with the Supremes 100% of the time, I support Brown v. Board of Education. (Keep in mind, that a married a non-white person. See Loving v. Virginia 1967).
“De Jure” segregation is long gone. I am a telecommunications engineer, not a sociologist.
I am not happy with the neo-segregation that is coming. All children, who are stuck in neighborhood schools, will lose out.
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Charles “Stuck in neighborhood schools” is again, privatization propaganda. It’s only the case if proper support is withheld from schools and neighborhoods in systematic fashion. And it IS and HAS BEEN systematically withheld in systematic fashion, with lots of other diversions (covered here again and again, like obsession with testing), or at the very least squandered on wrong-headed reforms.
Also, there are other kinds of segregation: like school supports or financial/economic, aka improper use of funding driven by different and draconian political winds.
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Charles That’s the right question, but it’s also the challenge that good minds with an understanding of the problem can solve with methods employed at the situation level in each district and school–without destroying neighborhood schools and what cohesiveness and other values they bring to the entire community.. If you ask a bunch of experienced teachers to work on the problem, and with good sociological and educational research that’s probably already available, it’s doable.
The bigger problem is not that there is a problem that needs to be fixed and good minds to fix it. The problem is rather political–which is what has been given scads of treatment here on this site–one huge aspect is that many who are in control and who have the resources don’t want to fix it–don’t want the problem to be given adequate treatment. If you want segregation, you don’t see segregation as a problem. If you know that makes you a racist (or that your other biases will be exposed), then you lie, detract, starve the beast, make education a living hell for good teachers, and do every other kind of diversion to keep desegregation from happening–like giving your segregating activities a good name: choice.
Or you scream that “the neighborhoods are becoming more segregated!” So let’s do vouchers and charters and privatize the whole thing! (regardless of the mounting evidence for NOT doing so.) But regardless of that evidence, which they ignore, there’s OTHER evidence that money can be made and that neo-segregation (which is what many want) can still occur–with privatization.
So that there’s plenty of evidence to be had, and privateers pay great attention to it–it serves their ends. It’s just not the same evidence or ends that will keep public schools in their place. So when we say: “don’t they see the evidence that vouchers and charters don’t work?” We are talking about a different evidence-to-ends reality.
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There is indeed a problem. The Supreme Court ruled in Swann v. Mecklenburg (1971) see https://www.oyez.org/cases/1970/281
that cross-town bussing was part of the solution to integrating public schools.
With the dismantling of cross-town bussing, and the return to neighborhood schools, obviously, the schools in these neighborhoods will re-segregate.
I still ask: How can schools in neighborhoods which are “de facto” segregated, introduce the children to others with different ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds?
Some type of pupil transportation, either voluntary or forced, can engineer the “mix”.
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Charles,
You are an engineer. Figure it out.
Wake County did it with redistricting and Gerald Grant wrote a book about the success: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Wake County.
Then the Tea Party captured the school board, hired a military general to restore segregation (he had previously worked for Rhee), and the miracle disappeared. The Tea Party group was thrown out at the next election.
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Charles I’m not trying to put you off–I’m just saying that’s a problem that needs systematic work in both theory and in applications at the local level. I was just saying that it CAN BE DONE without destroying neighborhoods, schools, and communities and the essential values they constitute to any culture.
Even if there WERE good intentions and good outcomes for desegregation with cross-town busing, like voter rights efforts and laws, such efforts need to be sustained over several generations (apparently) to keep the diseases of all sorts of biases from coming forward to erase all good that has been done. “Failing and crumbling schools” however, speaks to poor funding and support (across-the-board, including teachers) rather than to the fact that re-segregation is occurring (if indeed it IS a fact).
But though you might not know it, that statement itself, and its assumptions, though it may be true in some schools and cities, rings of the propaganda of privatization. Even if a school is completely SEGREGATED it doesn’t mean it will be “failing and crumbling.” And if some schools ARE failing and crumbling, its blended-association with race or even economic class is false. It’s where we need MORE support, not less, and certainly not an emptying-out of neighborhoods via some fairyland version of “economic flight.” (See MaryAnne Glendon’s “Rights Talk.” where she focuses on the oversight of what good actually occurs in “rundown” neighborhoods.)
But the wealthy and well-off not only want to avoid paying their fair share of taxes, they want to direct the taxes they do pay to their own pet projects. I would ask all those “Christians” like Betsy DeVos: How does that square up with the teachings of Jesus?
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“The proportion of schools segregated by race and class — where more than 75 percent of children receive free or reduced-price lunch and more than 75 percent are black or Hispanic — climbed from 9 percent to 16 percent of schools between 2001 and 2014. The number of the most intensively segregated schools — with more than 90 percent of low-income students and students of color — more than doubled over that period.”
Note that this report is about a specific period marked by the draconian testing and triage requirements of NCLB plus the obscenity of Race to the Top. Add USDE posturing about education being the “civil rights issue of our time” and tons of federal/foundation money poured into charter schools, targeting and recruiting low-income students.
NCLB certainly did not help anything. In fact, the Wall Street Journal today put this spin on the report: Educators are responsible for segregated schools and communities.
Not a whisper about red-lining, the demolition of the economy, and rip-offs of low-income families with the bait of mortgages they could not afford. Not a mention of a political culture willing to accept community isolation based on race and social class as if inevitable and acceptable.
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