Schools - and American society - have gone from segregated to integrated, and are now becoming resegregated. Students of color from backgrounds of poverty often attend run-down schools with overcrowded classrooms, less experienced teachers, outdated textbooks and outmoded technology.
In fact, most of the integration progress made by African American students since the 1960s has been lost, according to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard. Its report, "Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation," also finds that Latinos, the nation's largest ethnic minority, have become more isolated, and that their segregation has surpassed that of blacks nationwide.
"This resegregation is happening despite the nation's growing diversity, in particular the rapid growth (245 percent) in the Latino student population in the last 30 years," notes the study. Resegregation is contributing to a growing gap in quality between the schools attended by white students and those serving mostly minority students.
According to the study, 70 percent of the nation's African American students attend predominantly minority schools compared to nearly 63 percent in 1980. Approximately 37 percent of the nation's African American students attend schools with a minority enrollment of 90 to 100 percent.
White students, on average, attend schools where more than 80 percent of the students are white.
Segregation, notes the study, is strongly related to class and income. Except for schools that serve predominantly white populations, racially segregated schools almost always have high concentrations of students from backgrounds of poverty.
"Research consistently shows that schools are becoming increasingly segregated and offering students vastly unequal educational opportunities," notes the Harvard study. "This is ironic considering that evidence exists that desegregated schools both improve test scores and positively change the lives of students, and that Americans increasingly express support for integrated schools. Minority students with the same test scores tend to be much more successful in college if they attended interracial high schools."
More than 500 court-ordered and voluntary school desegregation plans have been eliminated over the last decade.
"Under the new, eased restrictions, school districts across the country are coming to terms with the end of court desegregation orders that for years influenced or even dictated many of their decisions about educational policy," notes an Education Week article. "Many are relieved to see an end to expensive judicial intrusion. They are saying good riddance to such things as labyrinthine busing maps and mandates they feel took precedence over common sense.
"But critics, including civil rights activists, say this shift marks a step backward. They argue that as the nation becomes more multicultural, integration is more important than ever."
The Supreme Court itself took some of the wind out of the sails of the Brown ruling with later decisions.
"Because the Supreme Court later held that public schooling was not a federal responsibility, even where schools serving black or Latino kids have vastly inferior resources, there was no constitutional violation," writes Peter Schrag in the Sacramento Bee. "In effect, Brown became a decision not about decent schools or equal funding, but only about de jure segregation. That threw the issue back to the states, where it's been for the past 30 years, both as a legal and a political issue, and, perhaps more importantly, as a moral one."
Much of today's segregation is due to neighborhood demographics or choice - not mandated by law. Even on integrated campuses, students frequently "self-segregate" as a matter of choice.
Fifty years after the Supreme Court outlawed segregation, there is still no consensus on how to best integrate schools, and the energy seems to have gone out of the effort. "We tried busing and it was a fiasco," says Lisa Buckner, a Bakersfield teacher who serves on CTA's Brown v. Board of Education Commemoration Committee. "I'm not sure why, but having to get up and ride a bus to another school in another neighborhood because your own school doesn't have enough members of a particular race - well, maybe there was something wrong there."
Some believe the answer lies in creating more magnet schools, with enrollment open to those outside regular school boundaries. Some magnet schools in urban districts offering specialized programs in such fields as the arts, math or science have attracted white students from suburban schools and achieved integration voluntarily. The advantage of such schools is that students are going "to" something rather than "from" something, and they're doing it because they want to.
"Segregation, regardless of who is doing it, is wrong," says Benee Hopson, a member of the Sacramento City Teachers Association. "I think it's important for people to learn to mix and get to meet one another. You can't lock yourself off and stay with one little group. The world is a diverse place, and the more we know each other, the better off we are."
"I think there is a lot to be said for having the support of people who are like you," says Buckner. "At the same time, we live in a society with different races, especially here in California. We have to learn to live together and work together and be together. We're not going to do that by being segregated in our schools or neighborhoods.
"If we stay segregated, it instills ignorance. And ignorance instills fear."
Resources
http://www.landmarkcases.org/ - This website offers resources and activities to support teaching about landmark Supreme Court cases.
http://www.archives.gov/digital_classroom/ - The National Archives and Records Administration website offers a Digital Classroom section with resources for teachers, including material on desegregation.
http://www.brownat50.org/ - The Howard University Law School offers information about organizations and events commemorating the Brown decision.
