Looking to the Future: Legal and Policy Options for Racially Integrated Education in the South and the Nation

Conference Summary

A major focus of the conference was on how to navigate school integration after Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District No. 1.

When federal courts began vigorously enforcing the Brown v. Board of Education decision in the late 1960s, Southern schools became the most integrated schools in the country, a distinction they held for more than thirty years. More recently, public schools in the South and the rest of the United States have experienced rapid resegregation, isolating the growing population of African-American and Latino students--who now comprise one-fifth of students in the South--from equal educational opportunity as well as access to social networks and capital.

This conference premiered a new generation of research commissioned for this event focused on the future of public education in the wake of the United States Supreme Court's 2007 decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (PICS). The PICS decision is widely known for placing limits on what school districts can do to voluntarily pursue racially integrated schools. But the PICS decision was just as important for what it left in place. In PICS, a majority of the Court's justices rejected the idea that school districts and communities have no compelling interest in taking affirmative steps to provide their children with racially integrated public schools. On the contrary, the majority protected the fundamental right of willing school boards to craft contemporary and creative integrative plans for their local schools.

Today our nation stands at a crossroad. We can sit idle and watch as a half century of legal and social victories for our nation’s children are reversed, or scholars, lawyers, public officials, and social justice advocates can apply their knowledge to address the resegregation crisis. This conference brought together a variety of practitioners and scholars to engage on this important topic and to heighten scholarly understanding of the PICS decision and promote discussion about immediate and long-term policy options available to school districts across the nation for whom racial integration remains a priority.

Topics discussed included:

• A multidisciplinary examination of new evidence about the benefits of integration—on math, for young children, on racial attitudes—and an exploration of how this might be viewed by the courts and by the public;

• Possible legal strategies to pursue given the current legal and demographic realities;

• Exploring socio-economic desegregation plans in-depth: analyses examining the varied ways in which SES is being used by districts to understand if some ways of implementing SES plans are more effective, alongside more in-depth analyses of how two districts’ experiences with SES plans are working;

• Since voluntarily-adopted plans rely on the support of the public, a panel focused on how different communities are building support within and across districts for integration strategies;

• A panel debating different policy options that may provide novel opportunities for districts to create integration. These include reframing magnet schools around job locations, thinking about how housing & education policies could be paired at the metropolitan level, whether altering grade configuration might aid integration, and policy options for the current administration.

• The day concluded with a panel of civil rights experts to reflect on the day’s discussions and help think about next steps.