Activists rallied in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on the 50th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education in 2004.
Photo by Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images

By Fawn Johnson

By law, schools aren't segregated. In reality, many are. "Education policy is a housing policy," says Economic Policy Institute Research Associate Richard Rothstein in a new paper published to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark desegregation ruling Brown v. Board of Education.

"Brown was unsuccessful in its purported mission," Rothstein writes. Today, black students generally attend schools where only 29 percent of their fellow students are white, down from 36 percent in 1980. (He also notes that in 1954, the percentage was zero in Southern states. So something has changed.)

Rothstein goes on to say that without desegregating neighborhoods, we can't desegregate schools. As a liberal thinker, one of Rothstein's preferred solutions is to aggressively enforce a new rule from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to require municipalities, white suburbs included, to integrate. Conservatives and libertarians blanch at such an idea, but there may be other ways to address a problem that neither Republicans nor Democrats can deny. The libertarian Cato Institute's Neal McCluskey suggests greatly expanding school choice, an idea supported by the vast majority of African Americans.

You don't need me to cite all the stories that I'm about to cite to see the obvious: White students and minorities don't go to school together. It's not because it isn't allowed. It's because they don't live in the same places. Segregation no longer occurs by race, but by zip code, writes Peg Tyre, strategy director at the advocacy group Edwin Gould Foundation.

"There are places where you can look, including New York City, where blocks away students are separated by economic status," said New York State Education Commissioner John King in a speech last week.

The country has changed so much since 1954 that drawing comparisons from that time ignores important demographic shifts, such as the rapid growth in the Latino population, according to the authors of a new report from the Civil Rights Project/Proyeto Derechos Civiles at the University of California. They point out that black and Hispanic students tend to collect together in schools with a substantial majority of poor children. White and Asian students tend to collect together in schools with a substantial majority of middle-class children. "Black and Latino students have especially low exposure to white students in largest metropolitan areas and in midsize central cities," the report says. "This means that these students face almost total isolation not only from white and Asian students but also from middle class peers as well."

It should be no surprise, then, that these clusters of poor and minority-heavy schools cause big achievement gaps. Poor schools don't have the same resources as rich schools, and kids from poor families need considerably more help in school than those from middle-class families. Here's what happens next. The most recent data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that the math and reading proficiency rates of twelfth-grade black and Hispanic students are about one-third that of their white classmates.

The problem, as it turns out, is far more difficult to solve than changing the law.

For our insiders: What is the legacy of Brown and how can modern communities honor it? Can integration occur organically, or is some kind of government muscle needed? How has the massive growth in the Hispanic population changed the equation? What are the societal impacts of rich/poor and minority/white clusters in schools?
 

by Kevin Welner

Segregation is closely linked to policy. We need to dispense with the idea that it is somehow inevitable or even natural.

Throughout our history, segregation did not occur organically, and it does not currently occur organically. This is true of housing segregation, school segregation and other forms (e.g., employment).

Part of this is, of course, our history of slavery, Jim Crow, and various laws that were overtly and painfully discriminatory. Part of this is also our history and our current practices around housing, roads, public transportation, community resources, employment, and education.

Sometimes these policies and practices have expressly denied benefits based on race. Today, the decisions are more likely to be grounded in economics and in political power. So policies about where to locate a new library or school or road or metro line are likely to disadvantage communities of color—as are decisions on where to locate a polluting industry or a trash dump—even if the decision-making dynamics do not include any overt racism.

All of this is relevant to current policy. Any serious attempt to mitigate segregation must be deliberate and strategic; it cannot turn, for example, to unregulated school choice – to the invisible hand of the marketplace. As we have seen again and again, unconstrained markets stratify (for good or for ill).

Accordingly, and using school choice to illustrate, a dual approach is necessary. First, the policy itself needs to be designed in a way that uses school choice as a tool to advance societal goals, including the mitigation of segregation. See the concrete proposals from profs. Julie Mead and Preston Green: http://nepc.colorado.edu/publi....

Second, and at a much broader but even more important level, we as a society need to confront the stark inequality about who makes decisions. The key issue here is about power – about very unequal power over the decision-making process. We can see this at the school level, where, e.g., more efficacious parents maintain tracking systems that they believe benefit their children. And we see it all the way up to presidential elections and executive policies, where the education agenda reflects the ideas and advocacy of the nation’s power elites.

Brought back down to the issue of school choice, the current policies did not arise in a vacuum. They were designed and implemented within a system that gives short shrift to integration goals. Similar statements could be made about the policy making context around school finance laws, school accountability systems, etc.

Unless and until these larger issues of power are addressed, no specific equity-focused policy idea is likely to get a fair hearing. The political voices of the people in the vulnerable communities that are most often the targets of education policy will invariably be drowned out by more powerful voices from outside those communities. Even if an equity-focused policy initiative is adopted (e.g., a school’s detracking reform), it will likely be undermined through other mechanisms (e.g., the threat of opting out through school choice).

This is what I call “whack-a-mole inequality” – in response to a policy that closes off one mechanism of inequality, the exercise of advantage will just pop up via a new mechanism. This will always happen within a system that has an overall level of high power (and economic) inequality.