Where We Are Today

Efforts To Desegregate Schools

Brown v. Board of Education prompted a string of important Supreme Court rulings dealing with the desegregation of public schools including:

• Green v. County School Board (1968), which distinguished several factors, called the Green Factors, defining the duties of schools to desegregate. These factors included student assignments, faculty and staff assignments, transportation, extracurricular activities, and facilities—all of which must be equal and desegregated in order to consider a school "unitary" or fully integrated.

• Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971), in which the Supreme Court mandated the use of busing as a means of desegregation.

Schools nationwide started to implement systems and policies to promote integration:

• Magnet schools were created. These schools had racial quotas and were designed with a special program and system of instruction.

• Some districts ordered students to attend assigned schools to promote a more balanced racial student body.

• Other districts began merging and offering parents a system of choice from among several schools.

• Extensive bus systems were developed to transport children from their own neighborhoods to schools across the district, thus allowing for more racial diversity throughout the school system.

Progress Made, But Work Remains

In 1991, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Oklahoma City v. Dowell that districts could declare themselves unitary, end desegregation, and return to neighborhood schools even if it resulted in segregated schools. A January 2004 study from Harvard University’s Civil Rights Project found that only four of 35 school districts found unitary since the 1991 ruling saw a gain in desegregation after their court ordered the desegregation plan ended. The majority of districts saw more than a 10 percent decrease in the percent of white students in class with a black student; for a number of the districts the decline was 15 percent or more.

As districts across the country reach unitary status and court desegregation orders are no longer maintained, a system of resegregation is emerging. This is because most parents want their children to attend the school closest to home, and many minority families are isolated in the same neighborhoods, thus attending schools with little racial diversity. The busing required to desegregate schools angered many minority parents in recent years, because their children often had to attend the second or even third closest school to their homes.

The return to segregation is coming about not as a consequence of the color of children's skin, but as the result of their economic backgrounds. Often, minorities are from low-income families, residing in heavily urban districts, which creates schools that are poor, and predominantly minority, or rich (in the suburbs) and predominantly white. In 1996, the Connecticut Supreme Court recognized this as de facto segregation. The case, Sheff v. O'Neil, found that due to socioeconomic segregation, and the way districts were demarked, in Hartford, Conn., children in urban areas were receiving a poorer education and were attending racially imbalanced schools. Due to racial and ethnic isolation in inner-city Hartford school districts, the Supreme Court found that the districts were responsible for remedying this problem under supervision of the courts.

The promise of Brown and the civil rights movement has been achieved in one area: Access. No longer are people segregated or excluded from public facilities based on race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. This is a significant milestone that should be celebrated. The promise of access does not guarantee quality, however. It is clear that there is still much work ahead to guarantee quality programs and services for all children. One look at the academic achievement gap between whites and blacks dramatically illustrates that quality has not been addressed adequately—if at all. While hundreds of school districts nationwide remain under desegregation orders, the country must address the issues of equity and quality—issues that originate from the painful roots of slavery and segregation, and the continuing struggle for civil rights. 

Classroom Resources
Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell
Text of U.S. Supreme Court Ruling.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scropts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=237

Revisiting "Separate but Equal": Examining School Segregation 45 Years After Brown v. Board of Education
This two-day lesson from the New York Times was created by a teacher. It is intended to teach students in grades 6-12 about the history of segregation and civil rights in education, with a look at the recent trend towards resegregation.
www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/lessons/
19990614monday.html

Brown At 50: King's Dream or Plessy's Nightmare?
This new report by Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee of Harvard University's Civil Rights Project looks at public school resegregation since the 1991 Dowell v. Oklahoma City ruling. The report includes a focus on the districts included in Brown v. Board of Education.
www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/research/
reseg04/brown50.pdf