August 8, 2002

Race in American Public Schools: Rapidly Resegregating School Districts

By Erika Frankenberg and Chungmei Lee

Introduction

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing state-mandated separate schools for black and white students.¹ Since that decision, hundreds of American school districts, if not more, have attempted to implement desegregation plans. In the early years of desegregation most of these plans focused on the South and resulted in the most integrated schools being located in the South by the early 1970s.² From the late 1960s on, some districts in all parts of the country began implementing such plans although the courts made it much more difficult to win desegregation orders outside the South and the 1974 Supreme Court decision against city-suburban desegregation made real desegregation impossible in a growing number of overwhelming minority central cities.³ We are now almost 50 years from the initial Supreme Court ruling banning segregation and more than a decade into a period in which the U.S. Supreme Court has authorized termination of desegregation orders. These plans are being dissolved by court orders even in some communities that want to maintain them⁴ in addition, some federal courts are forbidding even voluntary desegregation plans.⁵ Given this context, it is crucial to continue to mark the progress of these policies and examine how their presence or absence affects the schooling experience for all students.

Nationally, segregation for blacks has declined substantially since the pre-Brown era and reached its lowest point in the late 1980s. For Latinos, the story has been one of steadily rising segregation since the 1960s and no significant desegregation efforts outside of a handful of large districts. These changes in segregation patterns are happening in the context of an increasingly diverse public school enrollment. In particular, the 2000 Census shows an extraordinary growth of Latino population in the past decade.⁶ This change in overall population is reflected in the school population as well. High birth rates, low levels of private school enrollment and increased immigration of Latinos have resulted in a rise of Latino public school enrollment, which is now more than 7 million. Nationwide, the Latino share of public school enrollment has almost tripled since 1968, compared to an increase of just 30% in black enrollment and a decrease of 17% in white enrollment during the same time period. A smaller percent of students attend private schools than a half-century ago and white private school enrollment is lowest in the South and West where whites are in school with higher proportions of minority students.⁷ Yet, little attention has been paid to the results of these two trends - rising segregation and increasing diversity - on the racial composition of our public schools.

Rearch Questions

This brief report, which disaggregates school racial composition at the district level in order to more deeply explore the patterns of segregation as they affect our nation's youth, is the first of several reports. Specifically, this study examines segregation trends in large school districts across the country and addresses the following key questions:

• Are metropolitan countywide districts, which had shown considerable integration through the mid-1980s⁸ still integrated?
• To what extent are children in central city school districts segregated from children of other races?
• Are there effects of the dramatic increase in minority enrollment in large suburban systems?

This report is the first of several reports, which will also include an examination of charter and magnet schools and a new national study of segregation trends.

Patterns of segregation by race are strongly linked to segregation by poverty,⁹ and poverty concentrations are strongly linked to unequal opportunities and outcomes.¹⁰ Since public schools are the institution intended to create a common preparation for citizens in an increasingly multiracial society, this inequality can have serious consequences. Given that the largest school districts in this country (enrollment greater than 25,000) service one-third of all school-age children, it is important to understand at a district level the ways in which school segregation, race, and poverty are intersecting and how they impact these students' lives. In our analysis we focus on two important components, race and segregation.

Data and Methods

We analyze enrollment data collected by the U.S. Department of Education in the NCES Common Core of Data from the school year 2000-01, examining the 239 school districts with total enrollment greater than 25,000.¹¹

Using exposure indices, we calculate the racial isolation of both black and Latino students from white students; that is, we calculate the percent of white students in school of typical black and Latino students.¹² We also investigate the racial isolation of white students to determine whethertheir schooling experience is becoming more integrated as the minority share of the public school enrollment continues to increase. To do so, we calculate the percentage of black students and the percentage of Latino students in school of the average white student. We use this measure because it reports the actual racial composition of the school, and desegregated schools have been shown to have educational and diversity benefits for their students.¹³ This measure is not a measure of discrimination or of the feasibility of desegregation in a given district—just of the actual level of interracial exposure that existed in 2000-2001.

Additionally, this study looks specifically at districts that have, at various times, been under court-mandated desegregation plans. We examine districts in each of several categories pertaining to designs of desegregation plans: busing within city, magnet plans, city-suburban desegregation, no plan, court rejected city-suburban, and partial or complete unitary status declared by mid-1980s. We compare exposure of black students to white students, since most desegregation plans were primarily concerned with the segregation of blacks from whites. We compute the 2000 exposure indices for these districts to identify any trends among districts, based on the type of desegregation the district did (or did not) have, as well as to compare the 1988 and 2000 exposure indices.

Findings

The racial trend in the school districts studied is substantial and clear: virtually all school districts analyzed are showing lower levels of inter-racial exposure since 1986, suggesting a trend towards resegregation, and in some districts, these declines are sharp. As courts across the country end long-running desegregation plans and, in some states, have forbidden the use of any racially-conscious student assignment plans, the last 10-15 years have seen a steady unraveling of almost 25 years worth of increased integration. From the early 1970s to the late 1980s, districts in the South had the highest levels of black-white desegregation in the nation; from 1986-2000, however, some of the most rapidly resegregating districts for black students’ exposure to whites are in the South. Some of these districts maintained a very high level of integration for a quarter century or more until the desegregation policies were reversed.
Other findings include:

• Many of the districts experiencing the largest changes in black-white exposure are also having similar changes in Latino exposure to whites.
• Districts that show the least resegregation in black-white exposure are mostly in the South, likely due to lingering effects of desegregation plans in districts where the plans have been dissolved and the continuing impacts of plans still in place.
• The lowest levels of black-white exposure are in districts with either no desegregation plan or where the courts rejected a city-suburban plan. The highest exposure rates are in districts with city-suburban plans, even though all of these districts have since been declared unitary and show a trend toward resegregating.
• Despite an increasingly racially diverse public school enrollment, white students in over one-third of the districts analyzed became more segregated from black and/or Latino students.

As attention to civil rights issues is waning, it is even more important to document the segregation in our public schools in order to inform educational policy discussions on racial segregation and its related effects on public school children, particularly when these students attending racially isolated and unequal schools will be punished for not achieving at high levels.

We find that since 1986, in almost every district examined, black and Latino students have become more racially segregated from whites in their schools. The literature suggests that minority schools are highly correlated with high-poverty schools and these schools are also associated with low parental involvement, lack of resources, less experienced and credentialed teachers, and higher teacher turnover—all of which combine to exacerbate educational inequality for minority students.¹⁴ Desegregation puts minority students in schools with better opportunities and higher achieving peer groups.¹⁵

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[1] Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). In this decision, the Court declared that separate but equal in public education was “inherently” unequal, and that segregated schools for black and white student must be eliminated.
[2] Gary Orfield, Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation, (Cambridge, MA: The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University, July 2001).
[3] Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974).
[4] For example, see Belk v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 269 F.3d 305 (4th Cir. 2001), cert. denied, 122 S.Ct. 1538 (2002), People Who Care v. Rockford Board of Education School District No. 205, 246 F.3d 1073 (7th Cir. 2001); Berry v. School District of the City of Benton Harbor, 195 F.Supp.2d 971 (W.D. Mich. 2002).
[5] Tuttle v. Arlington County School Board, 195 F.3d 698 (4th Cir. 1999), cert. dismissed, 529 U.S. 1050 (2000), Eisenberg v. Montgomery County Public Schools, 197 F.3d 123 (4th Cir. 1999), cert. denied, 529 U.S. 1019 (1999), Wessman v. Gittens, 160 F.3d 790 (1st Cir. 1998).
[6] Elizabeth M. Grieco and Rachel C. Cassidy, “Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin,” Census 2000 Brief, U.S. Bureau of the Census, March 2001.
[7] Sean F. Reardon and John T. Yun, Private School Racial Enrollments and Segregation, (Cambridge, MA: The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University, June 2002).
[8] Gary Orfield and Frank Monfort, Racial Change and Desegregation in Large School Districts: Trends through the 1986-87 School Year, (Alexandria: National School Boards Association, 1988).
[9] Orfield, Schools More Separate
[10] For example, dropout rates have been shown to be highest in segregated high-poverty high schools. See Robert Balfanz and Nettie Legters, “How Many Central City High Schools Have a Severe Dropout Problem, Where Are They Located, and Who Attends Them?” paper presented at Dropouts in America conference, Harvard University, January 13, 2001.
[11] Due to the fact that enrollment data disaggregated by race was not available for the Tennessee districts on CCD, we used the data as reported by the Tennessee Department of Education.
[12] Exposure index is a measure of the proportion of a particular racial group in the school of the average student of another group (Massey and Denton 1988; Orfield, Bachmeier, James, and Eitle 1997; Orfield, Glass, Reardon, andSchley 1993; Reardon and Yun 2002). For example, a black-white exposure index of 23% indicates that there are 23% white students in the school of the average black student. If a district is perfectly integrated, the exposure index is a summary measure: it describes the average exposure of one group to another among all schools in a given district.
[13] Robert L. Crain and Rita E. Mahard, “The Effect of Research Methodology on Desegregation-Achievement Studies: A Meta-Analysis,” American Journal of Sociology 88, No. 5. (March 1983): 839-854.
[14] Orfield, Schools More Separate; Janet Ward Schofield. “Review of Research on School Desegregation’s Impact on Elementary and Secondary School Students,” in Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education, ed. James Banks and Cherry McGee Banks (New York: Simon & Schuster MacMillan, 1995), pp. 597-617; Gary Orfield, Susan Eaton, and the Harvard Project on School Desegregation, eds., Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education (New York: New Press, 1996).
[15] Amy Stuart Wells and Robert L. Crain, “Perpetuation Theory and the Long-Term Effects of School Desegregation,” Review of Educational Research, 64 (1994), 531-555; Orfield et al., Dismantling Desegregation.

To view the COMPLETE REPORT and study conducted by The Civil Rights Project go to:

Race in American Public Schools: Rapidly Resegregating School Districts (in PDF Format)