AP‘s Annie Ma (“70 years ago, school integration was a dream many believed could actually happen. It hasn’t.“):
Seventy years ago this week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled separating children in schools by race was unconstitutional. On paper, that decision — the fabled Brown v. Board of Education, taught in most every American classroom — still stands.
But for decades, American schools have been re-segregating. The country is more diverse than it ever has been, with students more exposed to classmates from different backgrounds. Still, around 4 out of 10 Black and Hispanic students attend schools where almost every one of their classmates is another student of color.
This framing is awful. The unanimous ruling did not require the integration of schools. It merely outlawed segregation mandated by law. As Chief Justice Warren noted in framing the matter before the Court, “In each of the cases, minors of the Negro race, through their legal representatives, seek the aid of the courts in obtaining admission to the public schools of their community on a nonsegregated basis. In each instance, they had been denied admission to schools attended by white children under laws requiring or permitting segregation according to race.”
Regardless, as Ma rightly notes, after years of fighting to actually enforce Brown’s mandate, there was indeed a strong push for integration. That is, to end de facto rather than merely de jure segregation.
We remember Brown v. Board as the end of segregated schools in the United States. But stating values does not, alone, change reality. Though the case was decided in 1954, it was followed by more than a decade of delay and avoidance before school districts began to meaningfully allow Black students to enter white schools.
It took further court rulings, monitoring and enforcement to bring a short-lived era of integration to hundreds of school districts. For the students who took part in those desegregation programs, their life trajectory changed — the more years spent in integrated schools, the better Black children fared on measures like educational attainment, graduation rates, health, and earning potential, with no adverse effects on white children.
For a brief period, it seemed the country recognized the deeper remedies required. “All things being equal, with no history of discrimination, it might well be desirable to assign pupils to schools nearest their homes,” Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote in Swann v. Mecklenburg, a 1971 decision that upheld the use of busing to integrate schools in North Carolina. “But all things are not equal in a system that has been deliberately constructed and maintained to enforce racial segregation.”
But not long after, another series of court decisions would unwind those outcomes. Fifty years ago, in Milliken v. Bradley, the court struck down a plan for integrating Detroit public schools across school district lines. The ruling undermined desegregation efforts in the north and Midwest, where small districts allowed white families to escape integration.
Other decisions followed. In Freeman v. Pitts, the court ruled resegregation from private choice and demographic shifts could not be monitored by the court. More than 200 districts were released from court-monitored desegregation plans. By 2007, when the court ruled in Parents Involved v. Seattle Public Schools, even voluntary integration plans could no longer consider assigning students on the basis of race.
“If you have the tools taken away from you … by the Supreme Court, then you really don’t have a whole lot of tools,” said Stephan Blanford, a former Seattle Public Schools board member.
Bussing and other tools for achieving integration were wildly controversial, among Whites and Blacks alike, for all manner of reasons. Indeed, there was soon significant backlash within the Black community to desegregation, as an unintended consequence was to take Black children who had been in underfunded schools that had caring Black teachers and principals into ones with racist White teachers and principals.
But, while I didn’t agree with the policy while it was a live controversy,* Burger’s analysis is certainly right. If Black kids were overwhelmingly in poor neighborhoods with poorly funded schools, they were at a significant disadvantage that didn’t go away because it was a function of economics (and past racism) rather than Jim Crow laws.
The arc of history is clear in the city where the landmark Swann busing case originated.
At its peak, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools was considered such a success at integrating classrooms and closing the gap between Black and white students that educators around the country came to tour the district. Today, more than 20 years after a court ruling overturned busing students on the basis of race, CMS is the most segregated district in North Carolina.
While there are no laws that keep kids siloed by race and income, in so many schools that is the reality.
Charlotte’s sprawling, complex busing plan brought Black and white students into the same schools — and by extension, made white children’s resources available to Black students for the first time. The district’s integration program ended when white families sued after their children did not get their top choice of school placement in a lottery that considered race.
Instead, the district created a school assignment process that said diversity “will be based on the family’s decisions.” It left the families of Mecklenburg County, some of whom have always had better choices than others, on their own. In the first year of the district’s choice program, Black families were more likely to try to use the choice plan to pick an alternative school. They were also more likely to get none of the magnet schools they wanted.
In the decades that followed, the district re-segregated. Years of busing had unwound the segregated makeup of the schools, but the underlying disparities and residential segregation had been left untouched.
So, obviously, outlawing a specific set of racially-motivated practices doesn’t end racism. (Although, over time, it chips away at it.) But the original sin here isn’t racism but locality-based funding of schools.** There really shouldn’t be “good schools” and “bad schools” within a school system.
*I was in my early teens and considerably more conservative than I am today.
**Which, of course, could have roots in racism. But I suspect not as the main factor.
