Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits (original) (raw)
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The struggle to end racial segregation in America’s public schools has been long and arduous. It was ostensibly won in the 1954 Brown v. Tulsa Board of Education Supreme Court ruling. But racist resistance has been intense. Years later, extensive school segregation remains for Black children. The High Court has essentially overturned Brown without explicitly saying so. This paper assesses the effects of educational desegregation that has managed to occur. Discussion concerning the results of desegregation has revolved around test scores and the difficulties involved with “busing,” but the principal positive effect is often overlooked: namely, that the substantial rise of the Black-American middle class in the last half-century has been importantly enhanced by school desegregation. This paper reviews the educational backgrounds of eighteen Black Americans who have risen to the highest status positions in American politics and business in recent decades. They represent the desegregate...
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Singularly tasked with providing a roadmap to equal opportunity for all Americans, public schooling occupies a unique position in the hierarchy of U.S. social policy-making. Still, 50 years after Brown ended formal segregation in American classrooms, poor and minority students continue to trail their white and affluent peers on a host of important schooling performance indicators. As state governments play an increasingly vibrant role in confronting these persistent -achievement gaps,‖ questions about political inequality and representation are brought to the forefront. Using data on race and class-based achievement gaps across the 50 states, this study examines whether state officials are responsive to the educational needs and policy opinions of their most struggling students. We find that state education policy-making is significantly divorced from the needs of minority students, but is somewhat responsive to low-income students. These findings highlight the inherent difficulty of generating support for and enacting social policy reform when those problems are filtered through racialas opposed to class-based frames of inequality.
Students are more racially segregated in schools today than they were in the late 1960s and prior to the enforcement of court-ordered desegregation in school districts across the country. This special issue addresses the overarching theme of policies, practices, or roles and responsibilities of various stakeholders that may directly or indirectly contribute to this new generation of school segregation commonly known as resegregation. I begin this special issue with a brief discussion of the legal milieu that helped set the stage for resegregation and explain why collecting social science evidence may be useful in addressing the resegregation problem in schools.
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For over a century after the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, researchers have been grappling with how to effectively implement educational reform policies to provide students with an equal education in American schools. This literature review examines previous school desegregation cases and school desegregation plans to investigate how schools have been unsuccessful in fully implementing desegregation plans. The paper discusses the role that social and political factors played in prohibiting schools from fully desegregating in the South. It ends with some suggestions on moving from equal to equitable schooling inside and outside of the Southern region of the United States.
Urban Education, 2011
The purpose of this article is to extend the growing counternarrative in education research concerning the negative consequences of school desegregation and its implications for urban education, educational leadership, and policy reform in the post-Civil Rights Era. Guided by qualitative and historical research methods, this article presents the perspectives of eight retired Black school superintendents concerning the goal of integration during the civil rights movement and its disintegration in contemporary urban contexts. Findings reveal that despite desegregation efforts, schools and school systems have never truly integrated and now face a 21st-century brand of educational inequality, what I describe in this article as vestiges of desegregation, which further undermine the educational opportunities and experiences of those students school desegregation efforts were arguably intended to serve.
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Equity & Excellence in Education, 1994
This study shows where school segregation is concentrated and where schools remain highly integrated. It offers the first national comparison of segregation by community size and reveals that segregation remains high in big cities and serious in mid-size central cities. Many African-American and Latino students also attend segregated schools, in the suburbs of the largest metropolitan areas, while rural areas and small towns, small metropolitan areas, and the suburbs of the mid-size metro areas are far more integrated. States with nore fragmented district structures tend to have higher levels of segregation, particularly in states having relatively small proportioqs of minority students who are concentrated in a few districts. Based on these and other study findings, the country and itE achools are perceived as going through vast changes without any strategy. It appears that the civil rights impulse from the 1960s is dead and racial segregation is reemerging. This report recommends policies to school districts, state government, and federal civil rights and education officials to foster integrated education and to make interracial schools function more effectively. It calls for: (1) resumption of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department; (2) restoration of federal aid for successful integration strategies; (3) basic research on the consequences of segregation by race, ethnicity and poverty; and (4) an examination of the ways in which multiracial education functions most effectively. (G11)