But as commentators of that controversy this year, few have remarked on the legacy of a much more durable, and more successful, effort to bus underserved kids to better educational opportunities: METCO, an initiative that offers Boston students slots in several dozen suburban communities that participate voluntarily. With considerably less fanfare, the program has made a serious dent in segregation across one of the country’s biggest metropolitan areas.

Until recently, researchers struggled to quantify METCO’s effects. But a paper released in August has provided the fullest overview yet of how students’ lives change after being bused to better-performing school districts.

The , conducted by Tufts University economist Elizabeth Setren, finds that over the last few decades, METCO students enjoyed sizable improvements to their standardized test scores, school attendance, and disciplinary records compared with similar peers who didn’t participate. They were also more likely to both start and graduate from college and later earned substantially higher wages. The effects were especially large for boys and children whose parents didn’t attend college.

Those successes, achieved by a program with little national recognition, could offer lessons to attempting to engineer more racial and socioeconomic balance in their classrooms. Both and changing demographics have made desegregation a more complex process than it was during the movement’s heyday, but many education leaders about national data indicating that racial isolation has ticked upward since the 1990s.

It was in an effort to achieve racial balance across Boston’s heavily segregated neighborhood schools that a federal judge ordered local officials to shuttle students to schools in different parts of the city. Researchers what academic improvements resulted from racially directed school assignment, but the political response was so resoundingly hostile that the project was wound down by the end of the 1990s. By contrast, METCO has grown significantly since its inception and is now one of the longest-running voluntary desegregation programs in the country.

Setren said that her research, which relied on huge troves of student assignment, college enrollment, and later-life employment data, was especially compelling given the “unusual” granularity of information she was able to use to identify METCO’s impact. 

“What the METCO setting tells us is that going to schools in neighborhoods with much higher college aspirations, much higher college-going rates, and more advanced curricula can lead to a transformative change for these students’ academic and career trajectories,” she said.

To pinpoint the direct consequences of taking part in METCO, Setren only studied children whose parents filled out applications, whether successfully or unsuccessfully. Because the program receives many more applications than its roughly 3,300 annual slots, the study could simply compare the outcomes of those who were accepted — at the time, on a first-come, first-served basis, though more recently — versus otherwise-similar students who were not.

In all, Setren found, METCO students scored considerably higher on state tests, drawing 49 percent closer to the Massachusetts average in English than their peers by the third grade. They were only two-thirds as likely as their BPS peers to be suspended, and they accrued between three and nine fewer absences each year, in spite of the transportation hassle and time crunch of getting to school miles away from their own neighborhoods.

Things only got better from there: Making the trip to a suburban school raised children’s rate of graduating from high school on time from 79 to 92 percent, while lowering their chance of dropout from 4 to just 1 percent. Participants’ chances of scoring at least 1000 on the SAT were nearly nine points higher, while their chances of scoring 1200 or above were two points higher. They were 21 percentage points more likely to enroll in college and 12 points more likely to graduate.

Perhaps most striking of all is the impact farthest removed from the K–12 years. For those who work in Massachusetts, METCO students earn, on average, $7,708 more annually by the age of 25 than those who never received an offer. Ten years later, that gap grows to an average of $16,250.

Positive peer effects

If the benefits of busing between districts are clear, how they are achieved is somewhat less so. 

The act of switching school districts amounts to “a bundle of changes about your academic career” all occurring simultaneously, Setren observed, making it difficult to isolate which factors led to academic and behavioral improvements. But some evidence supports the idea that exposure to higher-performing peers and loftier expectations could be exerting the most influence.

In 1966, when METCO was launched, the differences in resources between Boston and its inner-ring suburbs were greater than they are today. But in 2021, Boston Public Schools , one of the highest rates in the nation. That figure is also of the 38 districts that accept METCO transfers, making it unlikely that higher funding is powering participants to more learning.

Setren also found that the various inclusion measures taken by districts to welcome students coming from Boston — including tutoring, after-school transportation, and access to social workers — made little difference to whether they flourished in their new schools; regardless of whether their new districts took such steps, METCO participants massively out-performed their peers in Boston Public Schools.

Some important differences separate the schools in receiving districts, however. They pay their teachers, on average, $3,000 more per year, which could be explained by the fact that they can boast roughly one year more classroom experience than those working in Boston. METCO participants are less likely to be taught by someone with less than two years’ prior experience — but also less likely to be paired with an African American or Latino teacher, which research has consistently shown can boost their achievement and belief in themselves.

By comparison, however, the classmates they encounter are appreciably different from those they leave behind. METCO participants study alongside pupils who are less than one-third as likely to come from low-income families, who score much higher on state exams, and who are less frequently disciplined by teachers. In their freshman year of high school, METCO students are less than half as likely to have a classmate who was suspended the previous year. 

Even more notably, enrolling in the program transforms the expectations they meet every day. While only about half of students in non-METCO classrooms pursue a four-year degree, more than three-quarters of those in METCO classrooms do.

Kenneth Ardon, an economist at Salem State University who on METCO, noted broad commonalities in resources, teacher experience, and curricular materials between Boston and nearby communities. While cautioning that he was not familiar with Setren’s work, he said it made sense that the influence of peers would play a prominent role in lifting students’ life outcomes.

“As you go through and compare urban districts to suburban ones, the biggest difference comes from peers,” Ardon said. “So it’s not surprising if that’s explaining a large part of the improvement in performance.”

Setren agreed, noting that METCO’s largest impact was manifest in children who were previously least exposed to higher education. For both college aspiration and enrollment in four-year degree programs, participants with parents who didn’t graduate from college saw gains more than one-third larger than those with at least one college-educated parent.

“I think that speaks to the importance of this shift in expectations,” Setren argued. “Now these kids are learning more and expected to go to college more than they would have been otherwise.”

Before Brown, in the 17 states that had segregated school systems, . Even in the face of systemic inequities, Black teachers held kids to high expectations, and Black communities came together to schools that helped move young people into greater opportunity. But in the aftermath of the decision, tens of thousands of Black teachers and school leaders of the field due to resistance of some white people to integration. This had a profound impact on who was teaching students, and a detrimental economic effect on the tenuous, emerging Black middle class.

For several years after Brown, young Black people who wanted to become educators — including Marc’s mother — were still denied entry into postsecondary teaching programs in the South, solely because they were Black. Sybil Haydel Morial did go on to earn her master’s degree in education, at Boston University in 1955.

It’s long past time to ensure that the nation’s schoolchildren have the chance to learn from diverse, effective educators.

Today, just and are people of color, and in , students do not have a single teacher of color. Yet, are people of color. Moreover, the proportion of adults aged 25 to 64 who are teachers is nearly for white adults (3%) than adults of color (1.1%). 

Given the depth of the around the country, it’s just common sense to build stronger pipelines to bring thousands of talented, diverse educators into the classroom.  

But solving teacher shortages is not the only reason that educator diversity matters. Research shows that benefit from having educators of color. And , in particular, achieve at higher levels and are less likely to be suspended or drop out of school.  

We know firsthand the powerful effect diverse educators can have on the trajectory of a young person’s life. Tequilla grew up in poverty in rural Arkansas and lived with her grandparents, who were sharecroppers. They didn’t have indoor plumbing until she was 12 years old. She credits early and continued access to effective educators, many of whom looked like her, as a central reason for her climb to Yale and now CEO of TNTP.  

At a time when13-year-olds are recording the and racial wealth gaps are widening, the nation needs to leverage as many strategies as possible to get real results for kids. Curriculum matters a great deal to student success, but it takes diverse, skilled educators to bring even the best academic programming to life. 

It’s clear to us both that the traditional pathway to teaching is not meeting the demand. State and education leaders must embrace new and alternate pathways to teaching that are more attractive to the nation’s increasingly diverse talent pool. According to TNTP’s report , traditional teacher preparation programs are far less diverse than the public school student population. In some programs, participants are more than 90% white. 

Encouragingly, many states and districts are starting to adopt alternative certification programs and “grow your own” programs to provide more accessible and affordable pathways into the classroom for diverse teachers, including high school students, classroom assistants and paraprofessionals.  

We know that the best recruitment strategy is a strong retention strategy. To better retain all educators, including teachers of color, the nation must ultimately rethink the industrial-era model that has dominated public education for the last century. 

Seventy years post-Brown, it’s clear that doing nothing is not an option. That’s why we applaud efforts like the , a coalition of which TNTP is a part, that has an ambitious goal of dramatically expanding and diversifying the educator workforce.   

After all, the nation is at an inflection point. There aren’t enough effective, diverse teachers. But there’s also an incredible opportunity ahead. The nation can draw on evidence-based strategies to diversify the educator workforce. Doing so will benefit students today and have a profound economic impact for families and communities of color in years to come.  

Our hope is that the nation does not waste any more time. Now is the moment to see the full promise and potential of Brown v. Board of Education through the finish line. 

Whether the endeavor has been successful is a debatable proposition, and one that never strays far from the headlines. After years of using affirmative action to accept more African American and Hispanic applicants, elite universities like Harvard were prohibited by the Supreme Court last year from adopting racial preferences in admissions. And diversity programs at the K–12 level have come under greater scrutiny as well, with plaintiffs around the country weighing lawsuits against equity-minded admissions policies at selective high schools. 

In his latest book, political scientist R. Shep Melnick investigates the course that desegregation followed over three generations — and where it fell short. 

, published by the University of Chicago Press, follows the legal maneuverings and unintended political consequences of one of America’s foremost social justice movements. Situating its subject within the larger struggle to extend democratic citizenship to women, minorities, immigrants, and people with disabilities, the book mainly focuses on the era between the exuberant 1960s and the anxious 2000s, when the victories of the Brown coalition seemed to be fading. 

In his work as , as well as the co-chair of the , Melnick has studied the development of what he calls the “civil rights state” as it developed over the 20th century: a colossal edifice of statute, caselaw, and regulatory language that America has built to shape its maturation into a more perfect union. His prior writings on the ever-evolving nature of Title IX have identified the junctures when judges and agency staffers, operating between the lines of federal laws, gradually pushed educational institutions in radically new directions.

Melnick’s treatise on desegregation adopts a similar posture toward federal courts and the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (the precursor to the Department of Education). He argues that unelected civil servants, operating with insufficient guidance from the Supreme Court or Congress, embraced a spate of injunctions and racial balance plans — some still in effect more than a half-century later — that helped shatter the archaic social order of Jim Crow. But when the sweep of legal action turned northward, he argues, the political wars around busing in urban school systems halted much of the progress that racial justice advocates hoped to achieve.

In a wide-ranging discussion with The 74’s Kevin Mahnken, Melnick spoke about the never-ending demographic shifts in American schools, the birth of education reform as a successor to the desegregation movement, and what he deems the poor-quality social science that influenced the courts of Earl Warren and Warren Burger.

“If we could have schools with a good mixture of kids from all racial backgrounds, that would be terrific,” Melnick said. “But what’s the cost? How many hours on the bus? How much isolation of parents from schools? Are the backgrounds of the poor and affluent kids so divergent that they develop stereotypes or animosity?”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: Do you see desegregation as a failure?

No. I’d say that desegregation in the South was a tremendous success, and we have long-term evidence of that. It broke down the racial caste system, it was essential, and we should give a lot of credit to the courts and Congress for passing the Civil Rights Act.

In the North, it was a failure. The situation was different, and the school districts were different. We took the model that applied to breaking down a racial caste system and put it in effect where it did not apply. The long-term consequences there would seem to be null.

As a federal priority, desegregation also had ripple effects on school finance and other disadvantaged groups — such as English learners and students with disabilities — that were often quite good. But race is always the hardest nut to crack.

Can you take me through the earliest stages of desegregation, after the Brown decision in 1954? The historical consensus is that, largely due to resistance from local officials in the South and elsewhere, not a lot of actual integration took place through that initial period.

That’s generally true, but with one important caveat. In the border states, and in some states in the North where segregation was not strongly entrenched, there was very rapid desegregation. I’m talking about places like Kansas, where the Brown case came from, Kentucky, and Tennessee. An interesting one is Delaware, where there had been significant segregation, but they were able to quickly desegregate.

So there was significant change in those border states, in part because school segregation was not part of a broader system of racial segregation to the extent that it was in the Deep South. There also weren’t so many African American students, so the change didn’t seem so great. This shouldn’t be overlooked.

One of the key ideas you explain is the distinction between “colorblind” integration — the early idea that courts could simply strike down segregation laws and let schools do the rest — and the more assertive mandates that followed, which required authorities to actually achieve a specific balance of racial representation in classrooms. When the first, more incremental approach gave way to the second, was it essentially out of frustration that more hadn’t been accomplished by the mid-1960s?

Yes. The use of numerical standards for racial balance grew out of frustration with Southern school officials, who, often aided by judges on Southern district courts, used every trick in the book to avoid desegregating. The claim was, “We’re not using racial classifications, it just turned out that nothing changed!” 

It led to a sense among the courts, as well as the Office of Civil Rights — in what was then the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare — that we needed some standard to determine whether states were making good-faith efforts. That was the beginning of using statistics of racial balance to get some action, and while it was greatly overdone later on, my view is that it was entirely reasonable and necessary at that stage. 

They were simply saying, “You’ve got to show that you have at least 20 percent of African American students going to school with white students.” We needed some standard, and that was the turning point.

Was the critical threshold the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act? That law included Title VI, which allows the government to cut off federal funding to any institution that discriminates on the basis of race or sex. My sense is that power wasn’t frequently used, but it was at least a credible threat against districts that didn’t move toward more racial proportionality.

The threshold was a combination of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. [ESEA] provided the carrot, in the form of more federal funds. Prior to that, there really wasn’t much to cut off. 

We think of Title VI and the threat of federal funds being withheld as the chief enforcement mechanism, but I don’t think that was actually true. The chief enforcement mechanism turned out to be the use of the judicial injunction — desegregation orders. What Title VI and ESEA did was create a civil rights office, which eventually became OCR, that had regulation writing authority. It was those rules they promulgated that were then endorsed by courts, and the courts used their own enforcement powers to follow through. 

There were essentially two choices: Comply now, desegregate, and get federal money; or stall, don’t get the money, and be subject to a judicial order later on.

You’ve written about the interplay between federal agencies and the courts, and how they can create a kind of ad hoc civil rights regime between their rulings and regulations. Did this dynamic play out with respect to desegregation?

That’s right. I’ve called it “leap-frogging” , and the same thing happened in the early days of desegregation. 

The big difference between those two situations was that in the 1970s, both the Nixon administration and Congress told the Office of Civil Rights to stay out of busing. After that, their role became much less significant, and the courts were mostly on their own. But that relationship between the courts and agencies was crucial in the prior years.

Would it even have been possible to crack the resistance of Southern schools without resorting to desegregation orders and enforced racial balancing?

I don’t think so. While I have some sympathy for the colorblind argument in general, if we’d never gone to some kind of numerical standards, nothing would have ultimately changed. It was absolutely essential.

In hindsight, would it have been possible to undertake desegregation differently in various settings — for instance, through racial balancing in the South, but with a more limited intervention in the North, where school assignment patterns were more the result of de facto neighborhood segregation? Of course, there were recalcitrant segregationists in the North — the comes to mind — but busing also met with so much animosity there.

There were opportunities for a different approach. The courts could have said, “If we find some evidence of discriminatory activity in the North, it doesn’t mean the whole panoply of federal interventions will apply.” Instead, they quietly eroded the distinction between de facto and de jure segregation, though they weren’t willing to say outright that they were abandoning it. 

There was also a lost opportunity in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when was debating about the extent to which you had to eliminate all predominantly Black schools. One of the judges, Griffin Bell — who later became attorney general under President Carter — basically said, “We should do what we can to increase the number of Black students who go to school with white kids. But when you have severe racial segregation in housing, we’re not required to eliminate all predominantly Black schools. For practicality’s sake, we need to have limits.” 

He lost that argument, and it was the beginning of widespread busing. But I think it could have very easily gone the other way.

What about the legal rationale behind racial balance mandates, which has been criticized as condescending? Near the end of the book, you find statements from both Clarence Thomas and the critical theorist Derrick Bell — ideological opposites, or close to it — harshly critiquing the idea that African American students need to attend school with whites in order to learn.

If we could have schools with a good mixture of kids from all racial backgrounds, that would be terrific. My granddaughter goes to school in Berkley, California, and they seem to have accomplished that. I think it’s great, but what’s the cost? How many hours on the bus? How much isolation of parents from schools? Are the backgrounds of the poor and affluent kids so divergent that they develop stereotypes or animosity? All kinds of factors come into play.

One of the things that really bothered me while researching this project was the misuse of social science. There was this grand claim repeated over and over again in district courts, that if we had a 70-30 ratio of white and Black students, it would improve everyone’s education. That was based on incredibly . The courts were sold a bill of goods — the argument that, if we had whites and Blacks together, racial harmony would prevail. We know that wasn’t the case in some circumstances.

The problem was that we started by using racial balance to overcome years of de jure segregation and massive resistance, but then we claimed that it was an educational benefit on the basis of shoddy evidence. Going back to the Brown case, it surprised me to learn how much even the NAACP legal team thought it was shoddy and that they shouldn’t cite it.

One of the themes the book keeps returning to is the difficulty of pursuing desegregation in a country where both legal and educational authorities are so decentralized. Can you break that down for me?

The way in which kids are assigned to schools, where schools are located, all of that stuff is done at the local level. Even states have basically no control over it, so all the key decisions were local decisions. In the middle of the 20th century, even funding was mostly local because it was based so much on property taxes.

This was one of the main political reasons for integrating: If kids of different races are kept apart, the white kids can be favored for funding, but if they’re together, you’ll get fairer funding. Fortunately, funding has become much more equitable over time. As a matter of fact, the Urban Institute came out with showing that predominantly black schools actually receive a little more funding per-capita than predominantly white schools. 

With respect to courts, I’m hoping the book makes it clear that it’s a misunderstanding to think that the Supreme Court controls the federal court system. They don’t. They decide so few cases that district courts have huge power, especially over the nature of these structural injunctions that last decades. The Supreme Court basically said, “We don’t know what’s going there, and we’re not going to try to control it.” One of the things I discovered while working on this book was that decentralization is especially important in the enforcement of process. 

The Supreme Court, under Chief Justices Earl Warren and Warren Burger, obviously decided major desegregation cases through the 1970s. But as you say, they mostly seem to have left the lower courts to appoint special masters and issue desegregation orders — some of which remain in effect more than 50 years later — without a lot of guidance from Washington. And it’s not as though Congress filled the gap either.

Congress didn’t give any guidance because it was so badly divided on this issue. Various presidents didn’t want to give any guidance because they realized that, whatever they did, they’d get criticized for it. 

The Supreme Court should have done more, but I think you’re right that Warren didn’t want to take ownership of this. After I finished the book, I found a quotation from former Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. After the Brown case in 1954, he said, “I predict a generation of litigation if we send this ruling back with no standards, and each case has to come here to determine it standard-by-standard.” So some of the justices foresaw what was going to happen. 

I think Warren’s hope was to write an opinion in Brown that would unite people, and I don’t blame him too much for that. What I do blame the Court for is not being more clear in the 15 years after that case, and then for meandering all over the place in the ten years after that.

The generational bookend to Brown is probably the Milliken v. Bradley ruling in 1974. The Court rules that segregation across city lines is permissible in the absence of discriminatory intent, and that largely white suburbs couldn’t be compelled to participate in Detroit’s busing initiative. My sense was that Milliken was responsible for dramatically limiting the scope of desegregation efforts, but the book seems to argue that the politics of busing was becoming untenable either way.

The reaction against what was going on in Detroit was so severe that George Wallace in 1972. That says a lot — Michigan was the home of the United Auto Workers. Even its Republicans were liberal Republicans. At the same time, efforts to pass state constitutional amendments banning busing were gaining steam, and I believe they would have eventually passed if not for the Court’s ruling in Milliken. 

In other words, busing was so politically toxic that I think it would not have survived. That would have been a good time for the Court to reevaluate the standards of constitutionality for desegregation programs, but they didn’t. To some extent, they seemed to pull back a bit, but then expand more after that. It really shows what happens when you have close, shifting majorities on the Supreme Court.

Can you describe the afterlife of that generation of jurisprudence on desegregation between the 1950s and the 1970s? You write a lot about the hundreds of desegregation orders in place around the U.S., some of which really evolved over the decades.

It really took the beginning of the 21st century for most of those injunctions to get unwound. We’re down quite a bit over the last 20 years or so, though some of them still exist. One of the things I discovered while researching the book, much to my surprise, was that because it was so decentralized. Schools often didn’t know whether they were under a court order or not, and the courts sometimes didn’t know whether that order was still in effect. Here’s a great example of the extent of the decentralization: of the remaining injunctions, as did and , and they all came out with different numbers!

Part of the reason for the uncertain state we’re in now is , in which the Court really clamped down on the use of racial assignments in K–12 schools. But Justice Anthony Kennedy was the deciding vote, and he wrote his typically amorphous, “on the one hand, on the other hand” stuff, so there seemed to still be room for some racial assignment in public schooling.One of the consequences of the recent Harvard case [ending racial preferences in college admissions] is that that’s no longer true, and racial assignments are going to be disallowed no matter what form they take. 

That means that it’s just going to take more creativity for school districts to do what they want to do, which is achieve better racial balance. It will affect efforts to have more racial variety in exam schools, for instance. When you’re trying to reduce the number of Asian students at exam schools like Thomas Jefferson High School in Virginia, is that an example of racial discrimination? Those are the next big issues.

Would it be accurate to say that the education reform era was itself an heir to a desegregation movement that eventually had to transform? After the political and legal snares of the ’70s, you start to see more focus from both courts and legislatures on things like equalizing funding between schools, lifting state learning standards, implementing standardized testing, and so on.

You’re exactly right. Education reform grew out of frustration with the failure of previous efforts to provide better education to minority students, English learners and students with disabilities. We’d made progress with some of those, but it seemed to stall, and as pointed out, even average students were starting to fall behind by international standards.

In all the reforms from the presidency of George H.W. Bush through George W. Bush and 

No Child Left Behind, the plight of minority students was clearly central. And one of the most beneficial things that came from that period was testing, which allowed us to see how various schools were doing. I often tell my students that when the Every Student Succeeds Act was being negotiated in 2015, civil rights organizations insisted that there be very careful testing — and reporting of testing results — for minority students, because that’s the only way to tell which schools are doing well.

We’ve gotten much better at making school finance equitable. We’ve experimented with things like smaller classes and school choice, some of which seem to work and some of which don’t. But behind all of it is the idea that we have to improve opportunities for minority kids.

Here’s something you wrote near the end of the book: “It is understandable that half a century ago, federal judges and administrators believed they could use federal mandates to remake public education. With the benefit of decades of hindsight, we are no longer justified in taking such a leap of faith.”

Do you think the long story of federal involvement in K–12 education, typified first by Brown and more recently by NCLB, is coming to a close? Could it?

I think there are two possibilities.

One is that we will move back across the board. If Republicans win the presidency and both houses of Congress, I’m sure that’s going to happen. The other possibility, and what I’m hoping will be the case, is for there to be more experimental initiatives and more encouragement of states and localities to try new things. We should have more federal and state-level support for pre-K, which strikes me as extremely important. Kids enter the first grade with such divergent backgrounds that the most obvious place to begin is to make sure they don’t enter school way behind.

That’s a clear opportunity, and it’s pretty popular. Whether government will go in that direction or stick its head in the sand remains to be seen.

How do you think the desegregation period is remembered in our politics? The debate moment in 2019, in which Kamala Harris confronted Joe Biden about his opposition to busing in the 1970s, was so remarkable in that it felt like the party was totally revising its views of both the substance and the electoral risk of those policies.

Many of the talks I give on this subject are held in Boston, and what many people remember about busing is that it was a disaster in that city. But there are a lot of other school systems, especially in the Northeast and Midwest, where there is still a very bitter aftertaste from that experience.

At the same time, there’s clearly a sense among some people in journalism and the NAACP that desegregation was all working well until Milliken, when it was halted. Nikole Hannah-Jones has said something to the effect of, “It was working until racism stopped it.” That belief is relatively powerful on the Left because once you see everything in terms of racial identity, and once you see white supremacy as dominant, it’s a very easy story to tell. 

We’re seeing what happens when these superficial understandings of oppressor vs. oppressed play out in politics, and it can be a very useful storyline.

Are schools re-segregating now? I’m aware that K–12 demographics have become much more diverse in recent decades, and it’s actually hard to answer that question.

The answer is that it depends on what you mean by “segregation,” since we’ve never really defined it. If you measure segregation as how many white students are in classrooms with Black students, that number of white students has gone down. So if that’s your sole measure of re-segregation, you can make that case, but it’s a very poor measure.

There are other measures: To what extent are Black students in classrooms with classmates of other races and ethnicities? That has been going up because there are more Hispanic and Asian students. To what extent have white students been going to school with non-white students? That’s been going up. If, by “segregation,” you mean white students isolated in all-white classes, that’s been going down. 

The big factor here is that we have decreasing numbers of white students, who are no longer a majority, as well as increasing numbers of Hispanic and Asian students. This is particularly true in large cities. So almost all of this is demographics, and very little of it is policy.

Timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education to end legal segregation in public schools, the research offers further evidence that integration hit its peak during the 1980s, only to recede somewhat in the time since. But it also poses questions about the true scale of that backsliding nationally, as well as the solutions that could be reasonably embraced to counter it.

Notably, the trend toward isolation has been underway even as Americans of different races and national origins are living in increasingly close proximity to one another. Ann Owens, a professor at the University of Southern California and one of the co-authors of the analysis, said that public policy was “undoing the decline in residential segregation.”

“While it’s true that school segregation is higher in places where residential segregation is higher, it can’t explain the increase over the last 30 years because residential segregation has not been increasing over that time,” Owens said.

Owens and her co-author, Stanford professor Sean Reardon, have spent years chronicling demographic changes in school through the lenses of both race and class. Their latest study has not yet been made public, though its findings were presented at a conference at Stanford in early May. The duo has also unveiled a new interactive data tool, the , which allows users to investigate patterns of segregation across schools, districts, cities and counties.

Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the analysis measures children’s exposure to peers of different racial backgrounds, comparing the average African American student’s proportion of white classmates with the average white student’s proportion of African American classmates in the same district. The difference between the two figures, measured on a 0–1 scale, is deemed the district’s “segregation level.” 

As previous historical studies have shown, after falling dramatically in the wake of federally led integration efforts in the 1960s and ‘70s, school segregation began creeping back up in the late 1980s. Between 1991 and 2019, Owens and Reardon calculated, the segregation level rose by over one-third in the 541 U.S. school districts that enroll at least 2,500 African American students. 

But Owens cautioned that, even accounting for that shift, schools are vastly more racially mixed than in the days before Brown. When examined over the last half-century, the growth in segregation is much harder to perceive. The total increase in segregation levels amounts to less than five percentage points since the presidential administration of George H.W. Bush.

Brian Kisida, an economist at the University of Missouri, said that it was critical to monitor changes in cross-racial exposure over time. In his view, however, existing evidence did not constitute “anything that sets off alarm bells compared with the history of this issue.”

“I think segregation is an incredibly important problem, and one we’ve had terrible trouble with in this country,” Kisida said. “But I don’t know if I would look at the trend from 1990 to 2020 and characterize that as ‘resegregation.’”

The charter factor

Kisida added that the paper’s evidence of charter schools’ role in driving racial isolation made for a “very solid finding” that dovetailed with his own prior work.

In 2019, he examining the same phenomenon, incorporating an even wider swath of data than Owens and Reardon. That study showed that charters exerted a meaningful, if modest, impact on the racial composition of the surrounding districts; eliminating the charter sector entirely would lead to a 5 percent decrease in the segregation of Hispanic and African American students, they found. (Kisida added that the effect was substantially counteracted by charters’ propensity to draw students into more integrated environments than their residentially zoned school, lessening segregation between districts.)

The newer research estimates that total growth in segregation would have fallen between two and three percentage points — from around 19 percent on their exposure index to a little under 17 percent — had charter schools not rapidly expanded after the year 2000. 

Another, smaller factor in pushing back integration, the authors argue, was the gradual eclipse of desegregation orders that began in the 1990s. As federal courts from injunctions requiring them to evenly balance racial groups across schools, campuses became about 1 percentage point more segregated than they otherwise would have been. 

Boston College professor Shep Melnick, who published last year on the halting efforts toward desegregation that began in 1954 with Brown, said that the lifting of injunctions accelerated during the early 2000s, eventually releasing more than half of the districts that had previously been under court oversight. In some instances, though, local enforcement — or even awareness — of the orders was so paltry that their sunsetting would not have made much difference.

“Some of these schools that were formerly under court order didn’t even realize they were under court order,” said Melnick. “So the effects of the orders in those cases probably were not that great.” 

Melnick and Owens agreed that the public needed to be conscious of the differing definitions of racial segregation that underlie research studies. For example, multiple waves of immigration from Asia and Latin America have made the U.S. population significantly more diverse than it was in the middle of the 20th century. Efforts to quantify desegregation simply as the exposure of African American students to white classmates must account for the fact that white students represent a much smaller share of the total student body.

“When you say, ‘Black students attend school with fewer white kids than they did 50 or 60 years ago,’ that’s true,” Owens concluded. “But it’s also true that white kids attend school with fewer white kids — because there are fewer white kids around.”

In the American judicial system, the two small words “et al.,” meaning “and others,” erase the names, faces and histories of everyday individuals seeking justice, fighting for their rights. Used as a reference in class action litigation in place of listing the names of each individual plaintiff, those four letters relegate men, women and children to what can be characterized as a “legal wasteland,” rendering them and their stories unknown.

In the instance of Brown v. Board of Education, those four letters diminished the stories of men, women and children who participated in five class-action lawsuits across the nation. Those five suits were consolidated by the United States Supreme Court in an opinion announced on May 17, 1954: Oliver Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (Kansas), Briggs v. Elliott (South Carolina), Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (Virginia), Belton (Bulah) v. Gebhart (Delaware) and Bolling v. Sharpe (Washington, D.C.).

The legal citation in the landmark ruling, one of the most famous and enduring in history, lives on as Oliver L. Brown, et al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka (KS), et al.

Below are more details about these pivotal cases that were joined together at the High Court:

Bolling, et al. v. C. Melvin Sharpe, et al. (Washington, D.C.)

Since its inception, Washington, D.C., has been home to a significant population of African Americans. Yet as the nation’s capital, the District of Columbia did not set a positive example regarding race relations; it merely followed custom. Washington, D.C., was firmly rooted in racial segregation.

After World War II, the country moved to integrate the military, but Washington, D.C., seemed uninterested in challenging racial custom. By 1950 the traditional African-American community leadership, i.e., churches, sororities, lodges, etc., had failed to organize any protest about run-down facilities that served as schools for their children. Even most parents with “good” wages from government jobs remained silent in the matter of substandard segregated schools. That same year, the owner of a local African-American barbershop stepped forward and filled the leadership void in the matter of better schools for their children. His name was Gardner Bishop, a man who simply knew civil right from social wrong.

It has been reported that on Sept. 11, 1950, Bishop led a group of 11 African-American children to the city’s new junior high school for white students. The school, named for John Philip Sousa, was a large modern building, boasting multiple basketball courts and spacious classrooms. At that moment Gardner Bishop asked for admittance for the African-American students who had accompanied him to see Sousa Junior High School. It seemed clear that the building could accommodate a higher enrollment. His request was denied, ensuring that the African-American students continued to have an unequal educational experience.

Bishop had been organizing parents to act regarding the poor school their children were assigned to. After his field trip to Sousa High, it was time for action. He approached attorney Charles Houston on their behalf. The idea was to request that a facility, equal to that of Sousa High, be constructed for their children. Houston worked on this case independently; it was not an NAACP case.

In 1950 while preparing the Bolling case, Charles Hamilton Houston was stricken with a heart attack. As a result, he asked colleague and friend James Nabritt Jr. to help Gardner Bishop and his group. At that point, the idea of equalization of facilities was rejected by Nabritt and replaced by a challenge to segregation per se.

In 1951 in U.S. District Court, the case of Bolling v. Sharpe was filed. This case was named for Spottswood Thomas Bolling, one of the children who accompanied Gardner Bishop to Sousa High. He was among those denied admission based solely on race.

Although unsuccessful, Nabritt trusted his concept of an all-out attack on segregation. The Bolling case would later meet with success as one of the cases combined under Brown v. Board of Education.

Belton (Bulah) v. Gebhart (Delaware)

The final court challenge to segregated schools in Delaware was filed in the wake of a narrowly tailored ruling in state courts that granted relief from racially segregated public schools only for children of the plaintiffs named in the litigation, leaving the matter unresolved. Ending racial segregation in public schools statewide would require federal intervention. In order to accomplish statewide change, two cases bypassed Delaware state courts and were filed in federal court. One case was from Claymont, a suburb of Wilmington, and another from Hockessin, a rural district in New Castle County.

The state court decision focused on the only high school open to African-American students in the entire state of Delaware: Howard High School, which was located in an industrial business area in Wilmington. For African-American parents residing in Claymont, it meant that their children were forced to pass by Claymont High School, a spacious, well-maintained public school, and travel 20 miles round trip each day to Howard High School. Not only was the distance an adverse factor, but class size, incomplete curriculum and teacher qualifications (in terms of advanced degrees) also angered African-American parents. Students interested in vocational training courses had to walk several blocks to the run-down Carver Annex, regardless of the weather.

In March 1951, eight African-American parents sought legal counsel from attorney Louis Redding. At his urging, these parents asked state education officials to admit their children to the local Claymont school. They were denied. Consequently, Redding agreed to take their case. In 1952, Chancellor Collins J. Seitz, presiding judge of the Delaware Court of Chancery in Wilmington, directed the immediate admittance of the African-American plaintiffs’ children into segregated all-white Claymont High School. Although challenged, his decision was upheld by the Delaware Supreme Court. The Delaware decision offered that the doctrine of “separate but equal” was unconstitutional but decreed that any legal determination on the constitutionality of segregation would come on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Delaware attorney general then instructed the superintendent of Claymont schools not to admit the African-American students because two cases from the state had been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Determined to move forward, school administrators defied state officials and decided that the African-American students would be enrolled. School board members, in an act of defiance, called the state board of education and the state attorney general every hour requesting the legal mandate to allow the African-American students to remain enrolled — knowing that the mandate would have to be oral rather than written. At a special late-night board meeting, the state Board of Education finally called and gave permission (an oral mandate) to enroll the students. With that, in 1952, a small group of African-American high school students integrated public schools in Delaware prior to the Brown decision.

Although a victory for children of the named plaintiffs, Judge Seitz’s decision had not dealt the sweeping blow to segregation in public schools they had hoped for. The decision did not apply broadly throughout Delaware. His decision only directed that the 12 students who were children of the named plaintiffs would be immediately admitted to Claymont High School. As a result, the following students became known as the Claymont Twelve: Carol Anderson, Joan Anderson, Merele Anderson, Ethel Louise Belton, Bernice Byrd, Elbert Crumpler, John Davis, Spencer Robinson, Robert Sanford, Styron Sanford, Almena Short and Myrtha Trotter.

The challenge to racial segregation at the elementary school level emerged from the rural community of Hockessin, where Mrs. Sarah Bulah wanted equal opportunity for her adopted daughter, Shirley Barbara. While a bus carrying white children passed her home each day, she had to drive Shirley two miles to an old one-room schoolhouse designated for African-American children. Sarah Bulah decided to share her concern with state officials, so she wrote to the department of public instruction and to the governor. Their replies reaffirmed that no bus transportation would be provided because “colored” children could not ride on a bus serving white children. Undaunted, Mrs. Bulah made an appointment with attorney Louis Redding.

To accomplish more sweeping change, Redding set out to challenge the general notion of racially segregated public schools and developed litigation filed using the names of Sarah Bulah and one of the parents involved in the Claymont case, Ethel Belton. Their cases named the state board of education as the principal defendant. The board members were specifically charged. The first name among the members was Francis B. Gebhart. The resulting cases were led as Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah v. Gebhart. The Belton and Bulah cases would ultimately join four other NAACP cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and become part of the May 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (Virginia)

In the Commonwealth of Virginia, the only way an African American could receive a high school diploma in the early 20th century was by attending a private academy. Private high schools were operated by Catholics, Methodists, Episcopalians and Presbyterians in Virginia. The public schools for blacks were elementary schools (grades 1-8) operated by county school boards. The fact that school boards were county-affiliated rather than city- or town-affiliated might have something to do with the relatively rural population of most school districts.

In Prince Edward County, Virginia, public schooling for blacks was considered “progressive” compared to neighboring counties. Due partly to the fundraising efforts of the Farmville Colored Women’s Club, the Robert Moton School added grades 9-12 by 1947. Prior to 1947, African Americans “graduated” from high school after the 11th grade. Given that the number of school years were fewer than in the white schools, African Americans from neighboring counties came to Farmville to attend Robert Moton High School in the 1930s and 1940s. The original building was a two-story frame building that later became the elementary school once the “new” Robert Moton High School was built in 1943 across the street. The “new” school was never large enough, necessitating the use of tar-paper-covered buildings hastily constructed on the campus for use as classrooms. It was the use of these temporary buildings as classroom space that sparked a student strike in 1951.

One hundred seventeen African-American high school students chose to strike rather than attend Moton High, which was in need of physical repair. The students’ demand was simple: They wanted a new building with indoor plumbing to replace the old school. The students who provided leadership for the strike were from families who were all long-term residents of the surrounding area. Their spokesperson, Barbara Johns, had a family distinguished by activism. Barbara was the niece of Vernon Johns, the legendary minister who served in the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church the 10 years prior to Martin Luther King Jr. Vernon Johns was an outspoken critic of segregation and was involved in numerous protests throughout his career. Although he lived miles away, in Montgomery, Alabama, community members reported that he was influential in giving advice to the striking students. His wife was a former teacher at Robert Moton High School, and he still had numerous family ties in the community of Farmville and the surrounding area.

The Johns family knew the social politics of the area. Farmville is an hour and a half southwest of Richmond, on the same route Robert E. Lee followed during his retreat from Richmond in the spring of 1865. Farmville is just two miles from where the Confederacy made its last stand at the Battle of Sailor’s Creek. Even in 1950, life in the rural South still carried certain risks for adults whose livelihoods were inextricably linked to a group of whites who controlled commerce in the area. Opinion was divided within the African-American community over whether segregated conditions in Farmville should be challenged.

The students were supported by the Rev. Francis Griffin, a local pastor and civil rights activist, who considered the situation unacceptable and used every opportunity to address the need for change. As president of the local NAACP and chair of the Moton High School PTA, he was well positioned to push for change. He joined Moton High Principal M. Boyd Jones in petitioning the school board, asking that the obvious disparity between the county high school for African Americans and white schools be addressed. In short, they called for a new building to replace Moton High. After several months of inactivity by school officials, the stage was set for the Moton students frustrated with their circumstances to take action.

On April 23, 1951, a student strike organized largely by Barbara Johns was underway. School principal Jones was called away by a false claim of racial problems at the bus station downtown. With him absent, the students assembled under the pretense of a school-sanctioned gathering, and Barbara spoke of the plan to strike. The strike amounted to students walking out of school with instructions, from strike leadership, not to leave the school grounds. Some of the students were given signs to carry that expressed their goal of better facilities. With the strike underway, Barbara Johns and classmate Carrie Stokes sought legal counsel from the NAACP in Richmond. The students received a response in the form of a commitment from NAACP attorney Oliver Hill, agreeing to meet with them. The strike lasted 10 days. Hill promised that action would be taken on their behalf. With that, the students returned to school on May 7, 1951.

After a month of legal maneuvering, a suit was filed in federal court by Oliver Hill’s colleague, Spottswood Robinson, citing the students’ complaint. Surprisingly, when the case was filed, it did not carry the name of Barbara Johns as its lead plaintiff. It was by happenstance that the first student listed was a ninth-grade girl, daughter of a local farmer. Her name was Dorothy Davis. The Virginia case was filed as Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County. After filing this case, Spottswood Robinson immediately traveled to South Carolina, where the case of Briggs v. Elliott was scheduled to be argued in another federal court.

In the case of Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, the U.S. District Court ordered that equal facilities be provided for the black students but “denied the plaintiff’s admission to the white schools during the equalization program.” Attorneys for the NAACP filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court. Their case would eventually be argued with appeals from Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina and Washington, D.C., all of which became part of the court’s unanimous ruling as Brown, et al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka (KS), et al.

County officials ultimately defied the Supreme Court ruling and closed public schools for five years, from 1959 until 1964. It would require another action against the county school board to reopen the schools. Rev. Griffin led the push, becoming the named plaintiff in Griffin v. County School Board. The courts directed the Board of Supervisors to immediately reopen and desegregate its public schools. Because this ruling was met with international media attention and the threat of federal enforcement, the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors reopened and desegregated its public schools in 1964.

Briggs v. R. W. Elliott (South Carolina)

In 1947 a chance encounter between the Rev. James Hinton, president of the South Carolina NAACP, and the Rev. J.A. DeLaine, a local schoolteacher, led to a push to improve access to public education for African-American children living in Summerton, South Carolina. The NAACP leader, in a speech attended by Rev. DeLaine, issued a challenge to find the courage to test the legality of the discriminatory practices aimed at African-American schoolchildren.

Rev. DeLaine was teaching in St. Paul Rural Primary School while serving as the pastor of several small African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) churches. Historically, schools for African Americans in Clarendon County held classes in churches and later moved into buildings designated as schools. Consequently, many schools and churches in Summerton and throughout Clarendon County had the same names, such as Liberty Hill A.M.E. and Liberty Hill Elementary. The establishment of these schools presented a challenge for African-American parents because they were located miles from where many of the children lived.

At issue was the lack of access to school bus transportation for African-American schoolchildren in the county. While taxes paid by African-American parents helped support the buses used by white students, their children were forced to walk as far as eight miles each way in order to attend their public schools. To challenge these unequal conditions, Rev. DeLaine appealed to the school officials, but he failed to secure school buses for African-American students in the county. The Clarendon County school officials justified their refusal by claiming that since the African-American community did not pay (collectively) much in taxes it would be unfair to expect white citizens to provide transportation for African-American schoolchildren. Even a letter-writing campaign launched by Rev. DeLaine yielded no assistance from state educational officials. Determined to lessen their children’s long trek to school, African-American parents collected donations within their community and purchased a secondhand school bus. Eventually continual repairs on the bus proved to be too costly for the parents.

Afterward, Rev. DeLaine tried to garner support from District Superintendent L.B. McCord. It was hoped that since McCord was a fellow clergyman, he would be sympathetic. However, he refused to even consider Rev. DeLaine’s request. As the NAACP state president, Rev. DeLaine determined that litigation was the best course of action.

On March 16, 1948, local attorney Harold Boulware, along with Thurgood Marshall, filed in U.S. District Court the case of Levi Pearson v. County Board of Education. Their case was dismissed on a technicality about where Pearson paid his taxes. Since his land straddled more than one school district, the court ruled that Pearson had no legal standing because he paid taxes in District 5 while his children were in schools in Districts 22 and 26.

Unwilling to give up, Rev. DeLaine gathered enough signatures to file a second legal challenge in 1949. The national office of the NAACP agreed to represent the parents. In May 1950, with the help of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the case of Briggs v. Elliott was filed. Their legal strategy shifted from simply pursuing equalization of facilities and obtaining buses to attacking racial segregation.

The court ruled against the NAACP argument to end the practice of racial segregation in the public schools of Clarendon County. Instead, the court ordered schools to be equalized, focusing on equalization and ignoring the broader question of the constitutionality of racial segregation. The state’s action resulted in an NAACP appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the Briggs case became part of the Brown v. Board of Education litigation.

The Briggs case elicited extreme reactions from whites opposed to desegregation. The petitioners, who were African-American parents of school-age children, suffered swift and severe hardships for their courage. Harry Briggs was fired from his job. Annie Gibson lost her job as a motel maid, and her husband lost land that had been in his family for eight decades. Rev. DeLaine saw his home burned to the ground. Federal Judge Julius Waites Waring, who sided with the parents, was forced to leave the state by a joint resolution of the South Carolina House of Representatives.

By appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the Briggs case was consolidated with four cases already on the court docket, it became part of the final ruling on the matter of racially segregated public schools. On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren announced in an unanimous decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that racial segregation in the nation’s public schools was unconstitutional.

Brown, et al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka (Kansas)

In the fall of 1950, members of the Topeka, Kansas, chapter of the NAACP agreed to again challenge the “separate but equal” doctrine governing public education. The road to their decision came by way of 11 school desegregation cases dating from 1881 to 1949 that had been argued at the Kansas Supreme Court. Kansas law permitted but did not require racially segregated elementary schools in what they defined as “first class” cities with populations of 15,000 or more. Several of the early cases heard by the state Supreme Court successfully integrated schools in Kansas towns that did not meet the population standard of a “first class” city.

For a period of two years prior to legal action, McKinley Burnett, president of the Topeka NAACP, attempted to persuade Topeka school officials to integrate their elementary schools. The Topeka Board of Education did in fact have leeway to comply with the NAACP request to desegregate the elementary schools, since the community met the standard of being a “first class” city, thereby permitting but not requiring racially segregated elementary schools. The NAACP felt that school board refusal to end the practice of racially segregated schools necessitated litigation. Junior and senior high schools in Topeka had already integrated.

The strategy for legal action was conceived by the chapter president, Burnett, attorneys Charles Scott, John Scott, Charles Bledsoe and Elisha Scott and NAACP chapter secretary Lucinda Todd. Their plan involved enlisting the support of fellow NAACP members and personal friends as plaintiffs in what would be a class action suit filed against the Board of Education of Topeka Public Schools. A group of 13 parents agreed to participate on behalf of their children. Each plaintiff was to watch the newspaper for enrollment dates and take their child to the elementary school for white children that was nearest to their home. Once they attempted enrollment and were denied, they were to report back to the NAACP, which provided attorneys with the documentation needed to file a lawsuit against the Topeka School Board.

African-American schools appeared equal in facilities and teacher salaries. However, with only four elementary schools for African-American children, compared with 18 for white children, attending neighborhood schools was all but impossible for African-American children. In many instances, the schools for African-American children were forced to use out-of-date textbooks and were not permitted to participate in districtwide programs. What was not in question was the dedication and qualifications of the African-American teachers and principals assigned to these schools.

The NAACP, with the assistance of the national organization’s legal team, led by attorneys Robert Carter and Jack Greenberg, filed suit against the Board of Education on Feb. 28, 1951. At that time, the name of Oliver Brown was assigned as lead plaintiff. It is suspected that this was a strategy to have a male leading the roster since he was the only man among the local plaintiffs. Their case became Oliver L. Brown, et al. vs. the Board of Education of Topeka (KS). The district court ruled in favor of the school board, forcing the NAACP to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. At the U.S. Supreme Court, the Topeka case joined four school desegregation cases from Delaware, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington, D.C. already on the court docket. The court consolidated the five cases under the heading of Oliver L. Brown, et al. vs. The Board of Education of Topeka, et al.

On May 17, 1954, at 12:52 p.m., the United States Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision, ruling that it was unconstitutional, violating the 14th Amendment, to separate children in public schools based on race. Brown v. Board of Education ushered in a period of unprecedented change. One year later, in December 1955, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decree that desegregation of public schools should occur “with all deliberate speed.” This pronouncement is known as Brown II.

The process of school desegregation proved to be a challenge for school districts across the country. In 1979, a group of young attorneys concerned about a policy in Topeka Public Schools that allowed open enrollment, fearing it would lead to resegregation, filed suit against the local board of education. They believed that this choice would encourage white parents to take their children out of schools with diverse student bodies, thereby creating predominately African-American or predominately white schools. As a result, these attorneys petitioned a federal court to reopen the original Brown case to determine if Topeka Public Schools had in fact complied with the 1954 ruling.

The 1979 case is commonly known as Brown III. The attorneys involved, Richard Jones, Joseph Johnson and Charles Scott Jr. (son of one of the attorneys in the original case), in association with Chris Hansen from the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) in New York, proved the premise that the local school board was presiding over “racially identifiable” schools and had failed to fully end the practice of racial segregation. In the late 1980s, Topeka Public Schools were found to be out of compliance. The Topeka Board of Education appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the court declined to place the case on the docket. On Oct. 28, 1992, after several appeals, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a final denial. Instead, the federal district court directed the Topeka Board of Education to develop plans for compliance. The approved plan entailed building three magnet schools. These schools are excellent facilities and made every effort to be racially balanced. Ironically, one of these new schools is named the Scott Computer and Mathematics Magnet School after the Scott family attorneys for their role in the Brown case and civil rights.

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to The 74 and funded The Brown Foundation for Educational Equity, Excellence and Research to produce the new book Recovering Untold Stories: An Enduring Legacy of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision.

A recent decision by the Louisiana Supreme Court handed a decisive win to backers of a long-running campaign to create a new, overwhelmingly white Baton Rouge-area school system, further concentrating poverty in the remaining, majority-Black part of the district. 

When finalized, the secession will likely cost East Baton Rouge Parish Public Schools 10,000 students and 25% of its $700 million budget, school board member and former board president Dadrius Lanus estimated. 

“This is all rooted in institutional racism,” he said in an interview. “It’s about what white, middle-class people want for their kids.” 

Barring complications, it will be the fifth time in nearly a quarter-century that part of the district has broken off and formed its own school system. Currently, the district — Louisiana’s second-largest — has 40,000 students. Ninety percent are impoverished. 

A complicated tangle of laws governs the creation of new school districts, with the most straightforward path being the formation of a new municipality corresponding to the area seeking to break away. A decade ago, residents of the affluent southeast quadrant of the parish began campaigning to , St. George.

In 2019, 54% of the area’s residents voted to incorporate as a standalone municipality. Baton Rouge leaders sued, and in late April the state’s high court ruled in favor of the new city’s proponents. Republican Gov. Jeff Landry will now appoint St. George’s first mayor and five city council members.

The St. George area is represented by East Baton Rouge School Board member Nathan Rust, who backed the breakaway. Rust could not immediately be reached for comment, but his campaign website includes a statement decrying the condition of local schools.

“Our schools in District 6 are overcrowded and fraught with violence, disruption and an exodus of quality teachers,” it states. “After 20 years of Board Tenure, how is this the best public education offered to our children?” Many parents, it adds, “resort to spending their hard-earned money on private schools because they have no better option.”

In 2109, The 74 published a deep dive into a decades-long school integration scheme that shaped the district, the first four secessions and the potential implications of a St. George . Under the terms of a desegregation order — no longer in force — many East Baton Rouge students attend magnet schools that are spread throughout the district. Consequently, many children who live in the most impoverished neighborhoods — many still devastated by recent floods — attend schools in the St. George area. 

According to Lanus, the existing district has 90 days to “annex” the 10 existing schools and two properties where it had planned to build schools within the new city’s boundaries — all of which were purchased or built by parish taxpayers. St. George residents would then have a choice: pay to build their own schools, or attempt to buy existing school facilities and lots from the East Baton Rouge district. As yet unknown is whether the district would be willing to sell and, if not, how many students would be bused into the new city to attend existing district schools. 

The secession would also shift an unknown but significant amount of local tax revenue to the new city, further straining the East Baton Rouge district’s coffers. Lanus estimates the district will lose some $150 million in per-pupil state and federal aid, plus money that is supposed to flow to children in poverty, magnet school students and those receiving special education or gifted-and-talented services.  

“I can’t tell you how many calls I’ve gotten from parents saying, ‘What’s going to happen to my kids?’ ” said Lanus. “We don’t have any time to waste.”

Correction: Dadrius Lanus’s term as East Baton Rouge Parish School Board president ended Jan. 11, 2024.

Sixteen months ago, North Carolina’s highest court ordered the state legislature to spend $800 million to improve K-12 education — a landmark ruling that seemed to end a decades-long legal battle over adequate funding for schools.

The opinion, delivered 28 years after the suit was filed, was supposed to fund efforts in some of the state’s poorest districts for teacher and principal training, more books and supplies and expanded pre-K.

But those remedies are now in jeopardy as the Supreme Court, with a fresh political makeover, once again considers the case. 

When a trial court ordered the state to spend surplus funds on the remedies, Republican leaders who control the legislature appealed. They argue that the court never had the authority to issue “a sweeping statewide order” based on the claims of the original plaintiffs: five poor, rural districts. 

To the districts and equity advocates, however, the move smacks of a political power play. Under the former Democratic majority on the court, the ruling was tight — a 4-3 vote for the districts. Following the November 2022 election, the court flipped to a 5-2 majority in the Republicans’ favor.

If the court overturns the opinion, today’s students would be the “third generation of children since this lawsuit was filed to pass through our state school system without the benefit of relief,” Melanie Dubis, lead attorney for the districts, said during oral arguments in late February. The state, she said, has the “constitutional duty to provide the children the opportunity for a sound basic education.”

Matthew Tilley, the attorney who argued the case for House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger, said it is his firm’s “policy not to comment on ongoing client cases.”

It could be months before the court issues an opinion on the case. That leaves districts in the state, which ranks nationally in per-student funding, in limbo. But experts suggest the case has implications beyond the education budget. In a state where lawmakers seek over Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, and last year overrode 19 of his vetoes, the court’s decision to rehear the case raises questions about whether the legislature is exceeding its authority.

“This case is about having power over the courts,” said , a lawyer who co-founded The Innovation Project, a school leadership network. “The balance of power that helps government function properly is … at stake.”

‘Righting that wrong’

With the 70th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision ending school segregation this spring, other observers see the conservative court’s decision to reopen Hoke County Board of Education v. North Carolina — also known as the “Leandro” case — as a setback for efforts to address segregation’s legacy. 

“It’s important for us as a country to be righting that wrong and to ensure that we invest in schools and districts having high concentrations of students of color,” said Ary Amerikaner, co-founder of , a nonprofit promoting integration. “Underfunding of public schools in certain districts and states is deeply connected to racial segregation and racial inequities. That is certainly no different in North Carolina.” 

The statewide between poor and non-poor districts has grown wider in recent years, according to a 2020 report from Public School Forum, a research and advocacy group. School systems without a strong tax base, like the five original plaintiffs, predominantly serve minority students — those who were more likely to because of the pandemic and need extra help. Meanwhile, districts have turned to for-profit companies to provide and long-term substitutes to fill vacancies as they await the additional funding the was supposed to provide.

To Anthony Jackson, superintendent of the Chatham County Schools, west of Raleigh, the plan would address some of the growing district’s greatest needs, including more funding for competitive salaries and additional pre-K slots for 4-year-olds on waiting lists.

“It would mean resources to recruit, retain and reward the best teachers and get them in front of our kids,” he said. “It would mean a strong leader standing at the schoolhouse door in every one of our schools.”

Jackson previously served six years as superintendent of Vance County schools, one of the original plaintiff districts. Located next to the Wake County district, the state’s largest, Vance struggles to fill classrooms with qualified staff, Jackson said.

Under the plan, Vance would receive an extra $16 million by 2028, a that could pay for 35 more teaching assistants, 47 more nurses and mental health professionals, and 46 more spaces for pre-kindergartners, according to Every Child NC, an advocacy group that calculated the impact on each district. 

According to the most recent from an early-childhood education research and advocacy group, the state serves 19% of its 4-year-olds in public pre-K, but no 3-year-olds.

“We’ve got to support parents from the day they have that child. Kids go home for five years and then we expect them all to show up at the schoolhouse door at the same place,” Jackson said. Noting the state’s passage last year of a universal that provides up to $7,500 per student for private school tuition and other educational expenses, he added that if the state can find resources for school choice, “I’m sure we could find resources for universal pre-K.”

But others say the plan does not directly address student achievement.

“Will the teachers get paid adequately? Will people be able to go to schools without mold? Those are things that are important, but they’re not about performance,” said Marcus Brandon, executive director of NorthCarolinaCAN, a nonprofit that advocates for school choice. A former Democratic state representative, he said he supports the Leandro plan in principle, but still thinks the court has the authority to throw it out.

During February’s oral arguments, Tilley, who represents legislative leaders, argued that the remedial plan “dictates virtually every aspect of education policy and funding” and that the court’s ruling removed “those decisions … from the democratic process.” He stressed that an earlier court order in 2004 limited the relief to just one county, Hoke, and said the court should not have found a statewide violation.

In her response, Dubis accused the lawmakers of “gamesmanship” and said it’s illogical to apply the solutions only to Hoke, but not to other districts with, for example, similar teacher vacancies.

“It is a system that works on a statewide basis,” she said.

The outcome of the long-running case also rests on a second, but no less significant, matter.

Just months after the 2022 opinion, the new conservative court undercut the decision by ruling, in what McColl called “shadow litigation,” that the state controller can’t transfer surplus funds to pay for the relief. That means that even if the school districts win, it’s likely that funding for the plan would be further delayed.

“That’s what makes this so odd,” McColl said. “Without the ability to enforce a money remedy, these cases just don’t serve a lot of purpose.”

Like McColl, Derek Black, a University of South Carolina law professor and a member of the Brown’s Promise advisory board, has followed the Leandro case for years. He was among the legal scholars who submitted a January amicus brief, arguing that, unlike state legislatures, which often repeal prior laws when the party in power changes, courts are obligated to uphold prior judicial decisions even when they disagree.

The brief noted that over the course of the litigation, both Democratic and Republican justices authored unanimous decisions in the case. 

“If overturned, it would be a huge shock to the rule of law,” Black told The 74. “To allow do-overs would mean that litigation would never end and that no judicial decision would ever be binding. I hope and believe that this court understands that.”

Plaintiffs had sought the Supreme Court decision to short-circuit the standard trial court process, asking the justices to rule that the existence of racially imbalanced Twin Cities schools by itself proved their case.

If the families who brought the 2015 suit, Alejandro Cruz-Guzman vs. State of Minnesota, move forward, they will not have to prove that the state intended to create segregated schools. They will need to show only that schools in each community ended up with racial imbalances.

They will, however, have to demonstrate that those enrollment patterns deprive some groups of students of the “adequate” education they are guaranteed under the state constitution. Over the last quarter-century, Minnesota has required traditional school districts to make good-faith efforts toward integration, resulting in a tangle of ineffective “voluntary” rules.

In trying to craft rules that conform to the law, officials have not been able to prove that racial isolation per se results in poor academic outcomes. Nonetheless, the task forces and policymakers have repeatedly concluded that a large bipartisan majority of people value diverse schools for moral and cultural reasons. 

The decision overturns a ruling from a state appellate court, which held that only “intentional segregation of the type described by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education” would violate the state constitution.

The lawsuit asks the court to find that Minnesota laws allowing students to attend schools outside their home districts and in public charter schools contribute to segregation. Charter schools are specifically exempted from the state’s integration rules, which require districts to make good-faith efforts to foster diversity. The plaintiffs asked the court to overturn the relevant portion of the charter school law. 

In response, a number of charter schools were allowed to join the case. While students apply for seats in blind lotteries, a number of Minnesota charters now enroll students almost entirely of a single race or culture. Several of the schools that joined the suit dramatically outperform their traditional district counterparts, complicating the plaintiffs’ argument that racial imbalances alone deny students their right to an adequate education.

If the plaintiffs prevail, attorneys for the charter schools have argued, the high-performing schools would be hard-pressed to continue with their culturally affirming models — which serve the families who sought them out — while responding to pressure to enroll a racial and ethnic cross-section of students. 

In the main opinion, the justices made a distinction between state and district policies that exclude particular groups of students — intentionally isolating or segregating children — and the existence of racial imbalances. 

Newly installed Chief Justice Natalie Hudson, the first Black woman to hold the post, issued a blistering dissent, arguing that “de facto segregation” in Twin Cities schools by definition violates the state’s constitution. 

Attorneys for the plaintiffs have not yet said whether they plan to proceed to trial.

And so it was recently that seven jurists found themselves on the auditorium stage in a midcentury brick school a few blocks outside Minneapolis, hearing a desegregation case that could have tectonic ramifications — including for Richfield High School. 

The question at hand: The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board decision declared de jure — intentional, state-sanctioned — segregation to be unconstitutional. But what about de facto segregation, which in Cruz-Guzman v. State of Minnesota focuses on schools that are nearly entirely single-race because families of color have sought welcoming places for their children?

And what about places like Richfield, where Associate Justice Paul Thissen’s mother once taught? While the neighborhood was once home mostly to working-class whites, today, the school’s enrollment is 75% students of color and 65% low-income.

If the plaintiffs win, Richfield will have to enroll a different student body, Thissen said in posing a question to one of the lawyers arguing before him: “But there’s no other high school to go to in this district. What are they supposed to do?” 

In the eight years since it was filed, Cruz-Guzman v. State of Minnesota has been the subject of a long, stalled mediation, two trips to an appellate court and, now, two trips to state Supreme Court. It’s nowhere near ready for trial.

Sitting alongside a Who’s Who of state officials, some 600 students watched silently throughout the hour-long hearing. It was a fast-paced drama, as the justices interrupted attorneys with pragmatic questions about desired outcomes and intellectual puzzles about the meaning of the state Constitution’s education clause.

If the debate among the attorneys was intense and seemingly irreconcilable, the students who lined up to question the justices after the hearing were equal parts hilarious and prescient. 

“My question is for this lady in pink — gorgeous, by the way,” said Niya Briggs, the first teen at the mic, gesturing at Associate Justice Natalie Hudson and her vivid, two-tone jacket: “How do you guys get into this sort of thing?”

Hudson’s response: Go to law school, get a liberal arts education and make sure to take classes that will teach you to write. 

A long line formed while she was answering. 

What do you do when the language in the Constitution doesn’t directly address the arguments before you? Or if you do not personally agree with it?

Do you have a judicial philosophy, such as being a constructivist? 

Do you take into account the changing values of younger generations?

Chief Justice Lorie Skjerven Gildea had cautioned the students that the judges couldn’t take questions about the case being heard that day, but one asked anyhow, explaining that she and her friends were confused. As Gildea demurred, it was easy to imagine their confusion. 

The state Constitution’s — the actual words are “general and uniform,” a phrase that is often described as an adequacy clause — lies at the heart of the case. The plaintiffs are several Minneapolis and St. Paul families who want the justices to decide the case in their favor before it goes to trial by agreeing that racially imbalanced schools are . 

During the oral arguments, the state’s attorneys countered that schools and districts determine the quality of the education their students receive; nothing in the state Constitution or legal precedents requires a racial balance.

Several charter schools are participating in the case as intervenors because the remedy the plaintiffs seek could force them to enroll a cross-section of students, rather than taking all comers — regardless of their racial or socioeconomic background. This, they say, would devastate a number of small, culturally affirming schools where a majority of students are of a single race or ethnicity and are flourishing. 

What Brown v. Board outlawed, their attorneys argue, is different from the current situation. The 1954 decision ruled that barring students of color from the same schools as white children violated the Equal Protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.

It’s not segregation, lawyers for the charter schools argued, when a family chooses a school for its children. Minnesota charter schools are required to admit students by lottery when there are more applicants than seats, so a school can’t exclude anyone based on race, class or ability. 

The justices seemed unconvinced that the plaintiffs had established a relationship between integration and an adequate education. One asked repeatedly whether the case should be sent back to the trial court so that question might be probed in front of a jury.

Among the last questions posed by the students were a couple suggesting that, complicated though the proceedings were, the kids were listening: 

When both sides make good arguments, how do you decide? 

How can someone my age get involved?

Nearly seven decades after the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous landmark in 1954, the court’s declared goal of integrated education is still not yet achieved.

American society continues to . But many of the nation’s public K-12 and are instead predominantly attended by students of one race or another.

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As an , I fear that the nation has effectively decided that it’s simply not worth continuing to pursue the goals of Brown. I also fear that accepting failure could portend a return to the days of the case that Brown overturned, the . That case set “” facilities for different races, including schools and universities, as the national priority.

The Brown decision was based upon a repudiation of that idea and the recognition that “separate but equal” was never achieved. I remain convinced it never will be.

A historic push

In many ways, it would be startling to declare the ideal of integrated schooling a lost cause. Integration was so important in 1957 that Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower to Little Rock, Arkansas, to ensure that nine Black students were safe when they enrolled in the city’s Central High School.

Despite the federal government’s intervention, in the 1960s and 1970s, many communities across the U.S. experienced . Many white citizens actively and violently opposed school integration, which often came in the form of of Black students to schools in predominantly white neighborhoods.

Despite the opposition, many Americans to make integration happen, and its : Many American children have experienced enhanced educational opportunities and improved academic success as a result of these efforts.

Separated, if not segregated

However, in 2018-2019, the most recent school year for which data is available, , and 56% of Hispanic students attended majority-Hispanic schools. Even more striking, 79% of white students in America went to majority-white schools during the same period.

Those statistics signal the existence of what is, in fact, a racially separate educational system. But these statistics about race don’t show how common separation by socioeconomic status is in most urban schools throughout the U.S. Low-income Black and Hispanic students are most likely to attend schools where the and the .

Since 2001, education policymakers have made bold promises to close what has been called the “.” Yet they have largely ignored the fact that throughout the nation, poor children of color are most likely to attend schools where they are not only separated by race and class, but where the that of their white peers.

Housing and school choices

Several factors help to explain the degree of race and class separation and educational inequality that is now pervasive in America. To begin with, many communities throughout the United States continue to be characterized by a high degree of racial and socioeconomic separation. However, while residential patterns pose an obstacle, a 2018 study by the Urban Institute found that current patterns of school segregation. The study identified several cities and suburban communities where schools are significantly more segregated than the neighborhoods in which they are located.

Policies that allow parents to choose which of their district’s public schools their children attend have done little to alter these trends and, in fact, may contribute to the problem. Several studies have shown that are than traditional public schools.

Furthermore, in most major American cities, affluent residents are in private schools than public schools. This includes many affluent parents of color, who often choose to enroll their children in predominantly white independent schools in search of a better education, even when their children .

In the past 20 years, cities such as , , , , and have seen affluent – but the overwhelming majority of students in those cities’ public schools are from . Those sorts of racial imbalances have increasingly become the norm.

Integration can succeed

When the poorest and most vulnerable children are concentrated into particular schools, it is even more difficult to achieve racial equality in educational opportunity, either through integration as called for by Brown or by pursuing “separate but equal” as called for by Plessy.

There is good reason to be concerned. For decades there has been that when schools serve a disproportionate number of children in poverty, they are .

The evidence also shows that when Black and Hispanic children attend racially integrated schools, they tend to . For example, students who have participated in the , a voluntary desegregation effort that makes it possible for children of color from Boston to be bused to affluent schools in the suburbs, have than their counterparts who remained in Boston’s racially isolated schools. The research doesn’t show whether that is because of the superior resources available in predominantly white suburban schools or the fact that they have parents who are active enough to get them into suburban schools. It may be that both factors play a role.

A from UCLA found that all the schools that produce significant numbers of Black students who are eligible for admission to the University of California are racially integrated. Unfortunately, the study also found that most Black students in Los Angeles don’t attend integrated schools.

However, the study also found one notable exception: the in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. That school, which serves almost exclusively Black and Hispanic students, than any other high school in the state of California.

At King/Drew, students have a that includes many honors and . Those opportunities are the norm at many affluent suburban schools, but they are .

The scarcity of schools like King/Drew – well-resourced and serving a low-income or majority-minority student body – should serve as a reminder that racially separate schools are rarely equal. When Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP took the Brown case, they knew that .

That was true in 1954, and it is largely true today. A recent study found that nonwhite school districts in the U.S. receive than predominantly white schools, though they serve the same number of students.

For this reason, on the occasion of the 68th anniversary of the Brown decision, I believe it is important to remember why and how civil rights and educational opportunity remain so deeply intertwined. Despite its flaws and limitations, the effort to racially integrate the nation’s schools has been and continues to be important given the type of the U.S. is becoming. It also plays a central role in the ongoing pursuit of racial equality.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

But until recently, it remained unclear what impact the decision had on California’s Chicano students.

This spring, in a published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, scholars Francisca Antman and Kalena Cortes filled the gap with the first-ever quantitative analysis of the case’s long-run impacts. 

Participating in desegregation, they found, led to a significant increase in educational attainment for Mexican-American students. Those born after the ruling completed nearly a full year of schooling more than a comparison cohort born 10 years prior and were nearly 20% more likely to graduate from high school. In the decades following the case, Chicano students in highly segregated counties were able to cut by more than half the disparity in their schooling outcomes with those of Chicano students in minimally segregated counties.

“What we see is really a dramatic rise in educational attainment for Hispanics after the end of de jure segregation,” said Antman, an associate professor of economics at the University of Colorado Boulder. That finding, she noted, held true “particularly in those areas that we think were most likely to be segregated.”

In California before the Mendez decision, segregating Mexican-American students into separate schools was common practice, driven to a large extent by . Those who advocated for separate schools claimed Hispanic students were unclean, intellectually inferior and lacking English language skills — even though Mexican-American youth who did not speak Spanish were also segregated.

Today, Latino residents make up of the U.S. population and an even of the nation’s public school student body. Yet Latino youth continue to be . Analyzing the Mendez decision is key to understanding the present circumstances for Latino students and families, the authors .

With desegregation, Antman explained, “Hispanic students [began to] have access to white classrooms or schools that they didn’t before” — meaning more resources and improved facilities. Though exact data on the flow of financial resources does not exist, she and her co-author hypothesize that such shifts may have triggered the outsized benefits for Chicano youth.

At the same time, education outcomes improved for all learners, Mexican-American and white students alike.

“Educational attainment is rising for all groups,” she said, adding that students nationwide tended to complete more schooling over the time period her study observed.

There is no official record of which areas separated Mexican-American students into separate schools as exists for school segregation in the American South — posing a major obstacle to research on the topic. That did not stop Antman and Cortes.

“A lot of times, researchers only pursue questions that they can answer [cleanly with existing data],” said the CU Boulder economist. But “sometimes the question is so important that you want to pursue it even if you can’t get the absolute best, clearest answer.”

She and her co-author got around the limitation by using 1940 census data to create a proxy measure for segregation levels. According to historical accounts, areas with the highest share of Hispanics in their population were the locales with the most rampant segregation. The researchers then identified the top quarter of California counties with the highest share of Hispanic residents and compared them to the bottom quarter with the least to represent high- and low-segregation counties.

In another key hurdle, records are also absent on how effectively each school district followed through on the desegregation effort. Implementation varied at the local level with some districts opening separate schools or maintaining segregation in certain grade levels while desegregating others. The authors account for the messy rollout using what’s called an “intent-to-treat” approach that includes all students in their analysis, regardless of their district’s follow through on desegregation. The method simply measures the effect of students’ exposure to the legal change. If anything, the approach would understate the impacts of integration, the authors explain, by grouping students who experienced desegregation together with those who remained separated.

As with the Brown case, impacts grew over time, Antman and Cortes found. Mexican-American students who were toddlers at the time of Mendez were likely to complete more total years of schooling than those who were in primary school (who in turn were more likely to see higher educational attainment than their older peers). Achievement gaps between Chicano and white students closed over time.

Compared to cohorts that began school before Mendez, those who matriculated after segregation was outlawed were 18.4% more likely to graduate from junior high school and 19.4% more likely to graduate from high school, the analysis revealed.

Fast forward to the current day, and school segregation levels nationwide have — with a for Latino students, who continue to have than any other racial or ethnic group in the U.S. and have been hit especially hard by the pandemic. With that backdrop, Antman said her results underscore the continued need for integration.

“Some might might say, ‘Well, would it really matter to desegregate [in the present day]?’” she said. “This certainly would suggest that it would matter very much.”