‘Threatening the Future’: The High Stakes of Deepening School Segregation

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The 65th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education is on Friday, but fights over school segregation, rather than decreasing, are becoming more common. Cities like New York and San Francisco are debating how to assign students to schools in ways that foster classroom diversity, and school secession movements — in which parents seek to form their own, majority-white districts — are accelerating.

A new report from U.C.L.A. and Penn State outlines the changes in school segregation since the landmark Supreme Court ruling named after Oliver Brown, a black father who sued to enroll his daughter, Linda, in an all-white elementary school blocks from their home in Topeka, Kan.

The court’s unanimous 1954 ruling declared separate educational facilities “inherently unequal.” But the case is one of several major civil rights rulings, alongside those on voting rights and housing discrimination, that have been substantially weakened by more recent decisions.

Today, the decreasing white share of the public school population across the country may lead some to believe that schools are becoming more integrated. But the reverse is true, according to the report. The percentage of intensely segregated schools, defined as those where less than 10 percent of the student body is white, tripled between 1988 and 2016, from 6 to 18 percent.

In “a heightened period of racial conflict in our public life,” the report warns, deepening school segregation by race and class “are very high stakes trends threatening the future.”