The racial integration of students fostered through decades of legal action against intentional discrimination in public schools is eroding, particularly in the South.
That's the conclusion of recent research led by Graduate School of Education professor Sean F. Reardon. In a study far more extensive than any previous analysis, Reardon and three other Stanford researchers found that racial segregation increases, albeit gradually, when school districts are released from the oversight of court-ordered desegregation plans. The pattern of growing segregation was found in more than 200 medium and large districts following the end of their court supervision from 1991 to 2009, with the most pronounced increases occurring "in the South, in elementary grades, and in districts where prerelease school segregation levels were low."
The study, published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, makes no interpretations about the relationship between the end of judicial control and ongoing academic results, such as test scores and graduation rates. Indeed, as notable as the research is in its scope (including the formulation of a list of all districts ever under court order), it's not clear how consequential resegregation is, in the context of either current education or race relations in general.
Reardon is cautious about sounding ominous, but he thinks the shift toward resegregation is more than a temporary fluctuation or stall along the path to fuller integration. "This looks more like the canary in the coal mine of a reversal," he says. That segues to the question, he acknowledges, of "should we care?"
On that note, education expert Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, offers a resounding "yes," in part because of the impact on the math and reading achievements of black children. "Racial concentration for black kids is an extraordinarily important issue," he says. "The higher the concentration of the black students in a school, the worse black kids do." Possible explanations, says Hanushek, include negative peer pressures and low expectations from teachers.
The Reardon-led study emerges from the effects of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision that said state-established legal protection for separate black and white schools was unconstitutional. The enforcement that eventually followed "led to substantial decreases in school segregation throughout the South." But later Supreme Court decisions determined that mandated desegregation plans were not meant to be permanent.
In the absence of judicial intervention, school integration is limited by a variety of social factors, starting, as Reardon notes, with the persistence of racially segregated neighborhoods and school districts nationally. Hanushek points, for instance, to particularly entrenched concentrations of black students in some urban school systems.
Photo: Courtesy Christopher ReardonOne wrinkle found by the Stanford study is that a high level of residential segregation may not dictate a rapid return to school segregation. Among the reasons: Parents may want their children to remain in the same schools they attended before the district's release from court oversight (at which point districts may change their methods for assigning students to schools). Districts may also move slowly in revising their assignment policies. "Nonetheless," the study finds, "despite the gradual nature of resegregation trends, the degree of resegregation is substantial"—although not comparable to the pre-integration era.
Part of the findings, for example, measure how evenly students are distributed by race among all the schools in a district. Consider this 10-year trend in districts released from court orders: On average, the percentage of black or white elementary school students who would need to be reassigned to different schools to achieve the same racial balance throughout a district rose from a quarter of the students to over a third, an increase of 40 percent. In districts still under court orders, there was no significant change in segregation levels over that same period.
Hanushek is pessimistic about communities and educational policy makers taking notice in any practical way. Ultimately, he thinks, it's a conversation that people don't want to revisit.
"I agree," says Reardon, "that broad policy attention and interest in desegregation—and other policies aimed at reducing racial inequality—has waned over the last few decades." But, he adds, "Although policymaking is not always guided by evidence, my hope is that the accumulation of rigorous evidence on the patterns, causes, consequences of racial disparities in education will lead to more informed policy discussions and the development of more effective remedies."
The study "Brown Fades: The End of Court-Ordered School Desegregation and the Resegregation of American Public Schools" has three co-authors: Elena Grewal, a doctoral candidate in the economics of education program; Demetra Kalogrides, a research associate at Stanford's Center for Education Policy Analysis, and Erica Greenberg, a doctoral candidate in the education policy program.
