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FIVE TAKEAWAYS ABOUT SEGREGATION 70 YEARS AFTER THE BROWN DECISION  
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Jill Barshay
May 6, 2024
Hechinger Report
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_ Despite decades of progress, there are some worrying signs _

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It was one of the most significant days in the history of the U.S.
Supreme Court. On May 17, 1954, the nine justices unanimously ruled in
Brown v. Board of Education that schools segregated by race did not
provide an equal education. Students could no longer be barred from a
school because of the color of their skin. To commemorate the 70th
anniversary of the Brown decision, I wanted to look at how far we’ve
come in integrating our schools and how far we still have to go. 

Two sociologists, Sean Reardon at Stanford University and Ann Owens at
the University of Southern California, have teamed up to analyze both
historical and recent trends. Reardon and Owens were slated to present
their analysis at a Stanford University conference
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May 6, and they shared their presentation with me in advance. They
also expect to launch a new website to display segregation trends for
individual school districts around the country
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Here are five takeaways from their work:

* THE LONG VIEW SHOWS PROGRESS BUT A WORRYING UPTICK, ESPECIALLY IN
BIG CITIES

Source: Owens and Reardon, “The state of segregation: 70 years
after _Brown_,” 2024 presentation at Stanford University.

Not much changed for almost 15 years after the Brown decision.
Although Black students had the right to attend another school, the
onus was on their families to demand a seat and figure out how to get
their child to the school. Many schools remained entirely Black or
entirely white. 

Desegregation began in earnest in 1968 with a series of court orders,
beginning with Virginia’s New Kent County schools. That year, the
Supreme Court required the county to abolish its separate Black and
white schools and students were reassigned to different schools to
integrate them.This graph above, produced by Reardon and Owens, shows
how segregation plummeted across the country between 1968 and 1973.
The researchers focused on roughly 500 larger school districts where
there were at least 2,500 Black students. That captures nearly
two-thirds of all Black students in the nation and avoids clouding the
analysis with thousands of small districts of mostly white
residents. 

Reardon’s and Owens’s measurement of segregation compares
classmates of the average white student with the classmates of the
average Black student. For example, in North Carolina’s
Charlotte-Mecklenberg district, the average white student in 1968
attended a school where 90 percent of his peers were white and only 10
percent were Black. The average Black student attended a school where
76 percent of his peers were Black and 24 percent were white. Reardon
and Owens then calculated the gap in exposure to each race. White
students had 90 percent white classmates while Black students had 24
percent white classmates. The difference was 66 percentage points. On
the flip side, Black students had 76 percent Black classmates while
white students had 10 percent Black classmates. Again, the difference
was 66 percentage points, which translates to 0.66 on the segregation
index.

But in 1973, after court-ordered desegregation went into effect, the
average white student attended a school that was 69 percent white and
31 percent Black. The average Black student attended a school that was
34 percent Black and 66 percent white. In five short years, the racial
exposure gap fell from 66 percentage points to 3 percentage points.
Schools reflected Charlotte-Mecklenberg’s demographics. In the graph
above, Reardon and Owens averaged the segregation index figures for
all 533 districts with substantial Black populations. That’s what
each dot represents.

In the early 1990s, this measure of segregation began to creep up
again, as depicted by the red tail in the graph above. Owens calls it
a “slow and steady uptick” in contrast to the drastic decline in
segregation after 1968. Segregation has not bounced back or returned
to pre-Brown levels. “There’s a misconception that segregation is
worse than ever,” Reardon said.

Although the red line from 1990 to the present looks nearly flat, when
you zoom in on it, you can see that Black-white segregation grew by 25
percent between 1991 and 2019. During the pandemic, segregation
declined slightly again.

Detailed view of the red line segment in the chart above, “Average
White-Black Segregation, 1968-2022.” Source: Owens and Reardon,
“The state of segregation: 70 years after _Brown_,” 2024
presentation at Stanford University.

It’s important to emphasize that these Black-white segregation
levels are tiny compared with the degree of segregation in the late
1960s. A 25 percent increase can seem like a lot, but it’s less than
4 percentage points. 

“It’s big enough that it makes me worried,” said Owens. “Now
is the moment to keep an eye on this. If it continues in this
direction, it would take a long time to get back up to Brown. But
let’s not let it keep going up.”

Even more troubling is the fact that segregation increased
substantially if you zero in on the nation’s biggest cities.
White-Black segregation in the largest 100 school districts increased
by 64 percent from 1988 to 2019, Owens and Reardon calculated.

Source: Owens and Reardon, “The state of segregation: 70 years
after _Brown_,” 2024 presentation at Stanford University.

* SCHOOL CHOICE PLAYS A ROLE IN RECENT SEGREGATION

Why is segregation creeping back up again? 

The expiration of court orders that mandated school integration and
the expansion of school choice policies, including the rapid growth of
charter schools, explains all of the increase in segregation from 2000
onward, said Reardon. Over 200 medium-sized and large districts were
released from desegregation court orders from 1991 to 2009, and racial
school segregation in these districts gradually increased in the years
afterward. 

School choice, however, appears to be the dominant force. More than
half of the increase in segregation in the 2000s can be attributed to
the rise of charter schools, whose numbers began to increase rapidly
in the late 1990s. In many cases, either white or Black families
flocked to different charter schools, leaving behind a less diverse
student body in traditional public schools. 

The reason for the rise in segregation in the 1990s before the number
of charter schools soared is harder to understand. Owens speculates
that other school choice policies, such as the option to attend any
public school within a district or the creation of new magnet schools,
may have played a role, but she doesn’t have the data to prove that.
White gentrification of cities in the 1990s could also be a factor,
she said, as the white newcomers favored a small set of schools or
sent their children to private schools. 

“We might just be catching a moment where there’s been an influx
of one group before the other group leaves,” said Owens. “It’s
hard to say how the numbers will look 10 years from now.”

* IT’S IMPORTANT TO DISENTANGLE DEMOGRAPHIC SHIFTS FROM
SEGREGATION INCREASES

There’s a popular narrative that segregation has increased because
Black students are more likely to attend school with other students
who are not white, especially Hispanic students. But Reardon and Owens
say this analysis conflates demographic shifts in the U.S. population
with segregation. The share of Hispanic students in U.S. schools now
approaches 30 percent
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everyone is attending schools with more Hispanic classmates. White
students, who used to represent 85 percent
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the U.S. student population in 1970, now make up less than half. 

Source: Owens and Reardon, “The state of segregation: 70 years
after _Brown_,” 2024 presentation at Stanford University.

The blue line in the graph above shows how the classmates of the
average Black, Hispanic or Native American student have increased from
about 55 percent Black, Hispanic and Native American students in the
early 1970s to nearly 80 percent Black, Hispanic and Native American
students today. That means that the average student who is not white
is attending a school that is overwhelmingly made up of students who
are not white.

But look at how the red line, which depicts white students, is
following the same path. The average white student is attending a
school that moved from 35 percent students who are not white in the
1970s to nearly 70 percent students who are not white today. “It’s
entirely driven by Hispanic students,” said Owens. “Even the
‘white’ schools in L.A. are 40 percent Hispanic.” 

I dug into U.S. Department of Education data to show how extremely
segregated schools have become less common. The percentage of Black
students attending a school that is 90 percent or more Black fell
from 23 percent in 2000 to 10 percent in 2022
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1 in 10 Black students attends an all-Black or a nearly all-Black
school. Meanwhile, the percentage of white students attending a school
that is 90 percent or more white fell from 44 percent to 14 percent
during this same time period. That’s 1 in 7. Far fewer Black or
white students are learning in schools that are almost entirely made
up of students of their same race.

At the same time, the percentage of Black students attending a school
where 90 percent of students are not white grew from 37 percent in
2000 to 40 percent in 2022
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notice the sharp growth of Hispanic students during this period. They
went from 7.6 million (fewer than the number of Black students) to
more than 13.9 million (almost double the number of Black students). 

* MOST SEGREGATION FALLS ACROSS SCHOOL DISTRICT BOUNDARIES

Source: Owens and Reardon, “The state of segregation: 70 years
after _Brown_,” 2024 presentation at Stanford University.

This bar chart shows how schools are segregated for two reasons. One
is that people of different races live on opposite sides of school
district lines. Detroit is an extreme example. The city schools are
dominated by Black students
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Meanwhile, the Detroit suburbs, which operate independent school
systems, are dominated by white students. Almost all the segregation
is because people of different races live in different
districts. Meanwhile, in the Charlotte, North Carolina, metropolitan
area, over half of the segregation reflects the uneven distribution of
students within school districts.

Nationally, 60 percent of the segregation occurs because of the
Detroit scenario: people live across administrative borders, Reardon
and Owens calculated. Still, 40 percent of current segregation is
within administrative borders that policymakers can control. 

* RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION IS DECREASING

People often say there’s little that can be done about school
segregation until we integrate neighborhoods. I was surprised to learn
that residential segregation has been declining over the past 30
years, according to Reardon’s and Owens’s analysis of census
tracts. More Black and white people live in proximity to each other.
And yet, at the same time, school segregation is getting worse.

All this matters, Reardon said, because kids are learning at different
rates in more segregated systems. “We know that more integrated
schools provide more equal educational opportunities,” he said.
“The things we’re doing with our school systems are making
segregation worse.”

Reardon recommends more reforms to housing policy to integrate
neighborhoods and more “guard rails” on school choice systems so
that they cannot be allowed to produce highly segregated schools. 

_This story about segregation in schools today
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written by Jill Barshay and produced by _The Hechinger Report
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nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and
innovation in education. Sign up for __Proof Points_
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newsletters_ [[link removed]]_._ 

_Jill Barshay writes the weekly “Proof Points” column about
education research and data, covering a range of topics from early
childhood to higher education. She taught algebra to ninth-graders for
the 2013-14 school year. Previously, Barshay was the New York bureau
chief for Marketplace, a national business show on public radio
stations. She has also written for Congressional Quarterly, The Wall
Street Journal, The New York Times and the Financial Times, and
appeared on CNN and ABC News. She was a 2016-17 Spencer Fellow in
Education Reporting. In 2019 she received the American Educational
Research Association's award for excellence in media reporting on
education research. A graduate of Brown University, Barshay holds
master's degrees from the London School of Economics and Columbia
University’s Graduate School of Journalism._

* Brown v Board of Education
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* segregation
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* desegregation
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