Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation
Introduction
Almost a half century after the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that Southern school segregation was unconstitutional and "inherently unequal," new statistics from the 1998-99 school year show that segregation continued to intensify throughout the 1990s, a period in which there were three major Supreme Court decisions authorizing a return to segregated neighborhood schools and limiting the reach and duration of desegregation orders. For African American students, this trend is particularly apparent in the South, where most blacks live and where the 2000 Census shows a continuing return from the North. From 1988 to 1998, most of the progress of the previous two decades in increasing integration in the region was lost. The South is still much more integrated than it was before the civil rights revolution, but it is moving backward at an accelerating rate.
Until the late 1980s, segregation had actually been decreasing nationally for black students, reaching its low point in U.S. history in the late 1980s. Substantial desegregation was most common in the 17 states which had legal apartheid—segregation mandated by law—in their schools before the 1954 Brown decision. Enforcement action was concentrated on those states. Whites in the South have attended and still attend schools with more minority students than whites in any other region. The highest levels of integrated education are found in the small towns and rural areas of the country and in the large metropolitan counties where the city and suburban schools were part of a single school district that came under a comprehensive desegregation order. The most far-reaching forms of desegregation, often encompassing entire metropolitan areas, tended to be the most stable and long lasting but were largely limited to Southern county-wide school systems. Most Americans live in metropolitan areas, housing remains seriously segregated, and most current segregation is between school districts of differing racial composition, not within individual districts. As Justice Thurgood Marshall predicted a quarter century ago when the Supreme Court rejected desegregation across city-suburban boundary lines in Milliken v. Bradley, the central cities, many of them largely minority before desegregation, became overwhelmingly nonwhite, overwhelming poor, and showed the highest levels of segregation at century's end.
These trends of increasing resegregation are often dismissed because people believe that nothing can be done. Many Americans believe that desegregation is impossible because of white flight, that it led to a massive transfer to private schools, that public opinion has turned against it, that blacks no longer support it, and that it is more beneficial for students to use desegregation funding for compensatory education. None of these things is true. There have, of course, been unsuccessful and poorly implemented desegregation plans and black opinion has always been far from unanimous, but a large majority prefers integrated education.
The 2000 Census tells us that Latinos have become the largest minority group in the U.S. Their vast increase in student enrollment has been evident across the nation throughout the past decade. Unfortunately, Latino enrollment exploded during the post-civil rights era and very little has been done to provide desegregated education for Latino students. They have been more segregated than blacks now for a number of years, not only by race and ethnicity but also by poverty. There is also serious segregation developing by language. Most Latinos are concentrated in high poverty, low-achieving schools and face by far the highest dropout rate. Also, since most are concentrated in the large states where affirmative action for college is now illegal (California, Texas, and Florida), the concentration of these students in schools with a poor record of graduating students and sending them onto college raises important national issues.
The data from the 2000 Census and from national school statistics show that the U.S. is an overwhelmingly metropolitan society, dominated by its suburbs. In the mid-1990s, the electorate chose the first predominantly suburban Congress and the Congresses of the foreseeable future will be suburban. It is no accident that the suburbs have become the central political battleground in recent presidential elections. What is surprising to many Americans is that the suburbs, long seen as the epitome of white middle class society, are becoming much less white and that some are seeing a huge surge of black and Latino residents and students. The suburbs are becoming far more differentiated by race and ethnicity and the lines of racial change have moved out far beyond the central cities. The high level of suburban segregation reported for African American and Latino students in this report suggests that a major set of challenges to the future of the minority middle class and to the integration of suburbia need to be addressed.
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