Schools More Separate: Consequences Of A Decade Of Resegregation
July, 2001
Schools More Separate: Consequences Of A Decade Of Resegregation
By Gary Orfield
Almost a half century after the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that Southern school segregation was unconstitutional and “inherently unequal,” 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 l980s, 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, overwhelmingly 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.
