Commentary

Abstract

Both school segregation and organized efforts to end segregation have a long and deep history in the United States. One of the first documented instances of school segregation occurred in Boston, Massachusetts (Nieman, 1991). In the early 1800s, the Boston School Committee created a separate elementary school for Black students and prohibited them from attending the other elementary schools in the city. Black citizens began challenging school segregation in the 1840s. While this policy survived a legal challenge, the state legislature ended school segregation in Massachusetts in 1855. Between 1865 and 1933, 113 lawsuits challenging school segregation were heard in state supreme courts in 29 states (Peterson, 1935). In every case challenging the constitutionality of segregation, state supreme courts upheld segregation.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) has been lauded for decisively declaring that segregation was unconstitutional, and as such, it reflects the promise of American democratic principles. Yet 62 years after the Supreme Court’s decision, a 2016 United States General Accounting Office (GAO) report highlights how school segregation remains woven into the fabric of American public education. For example, in 2013–2014, only 29% of all public schools served between 26% to 74% Black or Hispanic students—a crude indicator of diversity—while the remaining 71% of schools served low (25% or fewer) or high concentrations of Black and Hispanic students (75% or more) (GAO, 2016). As these statistics suggest, in the absence of policies aimed at ameliorating segregation, the prospects for creating schools that serve multiracial student populations are narrowing. U.S. public schools are also increasingly segregated by race and socioeconomic status. In 2013–2014, 16% of all public schools were schools that served high concentrations of minority students and high poverty students or schools that served 75% or more free and reduced lunch students. The GAO report also documents a substantial increase in such schools since 2001.

These sobering statistics reflect the complicated trajectories of segregation, desegregation, and resegregation in the United States. School segregation is a deeply entrenched social practice grounded in the racial subordination of minority students and White race privilege. Creating robust social policies that will address school segregation remains a central challenge of our time. Researchers play an important role in this process by informing and analyzing these policies as well as contributing to the body of knowledge about the value of such policies that can, over time, shape public opinion and the direction of future public policies (Welner, 2012; see also Mickelson & Nkomo, 2012). Frankenberg’s analysis furthers these crucial goals.

The Jefferson County Public Schools’ (JCPS) student assignment program that is the focus of the Frankenberg article might be understood as part of the legacy of the Supreme Court’s second, less celebrated Brown decision (1955). In the latter, the Court began to address the dilemma of how to remedy segregation. The Court’s solution was to require districts to desegregate “in all deliberate speed.” The massive, state-sanctioned, and often violent resistance to desegregation in Brown II’s wake revealed the deep chasm between the ideal proclaimed in Brown I and the reality of segregation (Bell, 1980). There was only a brief period between the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Supreme Court’s decision in Milliken v. Bradley in 1974 that federal courts and policies strongly promoted desegregation (Minow, 2010; Orfield & Frankenberg, 2014). As Frankenberg points out, JCPS, a district with a long commitment to integration, was created during this period.

Beginning in the 1990s, the Supreme Court began to limit the scope of desegregation plans, culminating in the Court’s 2007 decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (PICS), which struck down districts’ voluntary desegregation programs. Within the same timeframe, many school districts were released from desegregation orders by federal courts (Reardon, Grewall, Kalogrides, & Greenberg, 2012). As these court decisions have unfolded, public schools in the United States have been transformed by a significant demographic shift—a decline in the percentage of White students and dramatic increases in the percentages of Latino/a and Asian American students enrolled (Orfield & Frankenberg, 2014). Taken together, these trends will increase the likelihood that schools will become increasingly segregated if districts do not enact or maintain policies aimed at preventing segregation and in their more ambitious form, facilitating the creation of diverse, multiracial schools. However, as Minow (2010) observed, racially mixed schools alone may not result in the creation of truly integrated schools organized around the principles of equity, social equality, and a commitment to fostering the civic participation and capacity of all community members.

JCPS is one of the few districts in the country that is implementing a controlled choice plan with a generalized use of race that complies with the Supreme Court’s (2007) decision in Parents Involved. As Frankenberg’s analysis demonstrates, while there is evidence of increased segregation, the controlled choice plan has allowed JCPS to maintain the low overall levels of segregation that resulted from its historic commitment to desegregation. However, Black students are more segregated under the post-PICS controlled choice plan than they were in prior years. The controlled choice plan also results in less school segregation than would result from two other scenarios, neighborhood and first-choice assignments.

As Frankenberg highlights, the lesson from JCPS is that a controlled choice plan with a generalized use of race can help a district maintain its commitment to desegregation. More importantly, it may also point the way for other districts interested in fostering diversity within their schools as the demographic shift underway in U.S. public schools continues to unfold. As we move into AERA’s second century, a next step for both policymakers and researchers is to ensure that their efforts foster integrated schools that are focused on “creating shared communit[ies] of mutual respect, common goals, and joint ownership of education within multiracial student bod[ies]” (Minow, 2010, p. 6).

Footnotes

Jeanne M. Powers is an associate professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University (ASU), PO Box 1811, Tempe, AZ 85287-1811; e-mail: jeanne.powers@asu.edu . Dr. Powers received her PhD in sociology from the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on school segregation, school choice, and school finance litigation. Dr. Powers is an associate editor of Education Policy Analysis Archives, an open-access peer-reviewed scholarly journal, and a member of the editorial boards of the American Educational Research Journal; Race, Ethnicity, and Education; and the National Education Policy Center (NEPC).

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