The Last Have Become First: Rural and Small Town America Lead the Way on Desegregation
Introduction
Back in the early l960s when there were civil rights struggles across the South in large cities, small towns and rural areas, it would have been shocking to suggest that rural areas would become beacons of interracial education while the great urban centers of the Northeast would have vastly more segregated schools, often only a few percentage points from total apartheid. Southern leaders at the time such as Alabama Governor George Wallace and Mississippi Senator John Stennis often predicted that that the North would never desegregate, attacking what he called Northern hypocrisy. The statistics we present in this report shows that such a pattern has clearly developed, though caused in a way they never suspected--driven by a Supreme Court that first limited and then rolled back desegregation efforts to the point where desegregated schools tend to be in areas without large areas of residential segregation. Policies and legal requirements for desegregation in urban schools have now been largely nullified by court decisions but those that desegregated the rural and small town South remain in effect. In communities where there is no significant residential segregation, the basic policy is that children must be assigned to the same school. Where there is serious residential segregation, under current judicial policies, the courts are likely to dissolve existing desegregation plans and to create serious barriers to voluntary desegregation by local school boards. The consequence of spreading segregation and these policies is that rural areas and towns have the most integrated schools while big cities and their suburbs are the most segregated. There has been a substantial increase of segregation, very notable, for example, in the suburbs of large metro areas. The only areas where levels of intense segregation have declined since the early 1990s for black and Latino students are in rural areas and smaller towns.
For black or Latino students, the kind of community you live in is likely to be strongly related to the level of segregation or integration you experience in public schools. The reason is that without desegregation plans, school segregation is strongly related to housing patterns. The Supreme Court’s decision last June to restrict many of the remaining tools used by school districts to design voluntary desegregation plans is likely to make this linkage even more pronounced. Specifically, extensive residential segregation and fragmentation of any metro area into separate school districts as well as the dissolution of desegregation plans that has been accelerating across the country means that those who live in big urban communities have few chances to attend integrated schools. In fact, Professor Amy Stuart Wells of Columbia University’s Teachers College has found that many adults who experienced successful desegregated education in their own lives but live in segregated communities regret that their children will not experience desegregation themselves.
Our annual reports on desegregation trends have shown steadily growing segregation for both black and Latinos on both a national and regional level since 1990. The current level of segregation for Latinos is the highest recorded in the forty years these statistics have been collected while the segregation of African Americans is back to what it was in the late 1960s, before serious urban desegregation began. These trends reflect both the dissolution of court- ordered desegregation plans after a series of Supreme Court decisions in the 1990s and the rising share of Latino and declining share of white students in the country. At the same time, patterns of residential segregation have spread to encompass more of the central cities and inner suburban communities. Residential segregation has been rising for Latinos, and although residential segregation has declined modestly for blacks over the past two decades, it remains extremely high, especially in the older large metropolitan areas and families with school age children are more segregated than the overall population.5 The resulting combination of these forces is that the only kinds of communities with high levels of school integration are the nation’s rural areas and towns, once the center of the most intense resistance. By contrast, extreme segregation is concentrated in the largest metropolitan areas.
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