Writing for Chalkbeat, Erica Meltzer looks at a new study that shows school choice taking us backwards when it comes to desegregation.
Over the last three decades, school segregation has been increasing — and it has increased the most within the large school districts that enroll many of the nation’s students of color.
Schools have become more segregated in these communities even as neighborhoods have become more racially mixed and as economic inequality between racial groups has declined.
Two main factors are driving the increase: the end of most court oversight that required school districts to create integrated schools, and policies that favor school choice and parental preference.
Those are the findings of new research on school segregation from Sean Reardon of Stanford University and Ann Owens of the University of Southern California. Their analysis coincides with the 70th anniversary this month of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ended legally mandated racial segregation in public schools and overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal.” They said the findings should “sound an alarm for educators and policymakers.”
“Although school segregation is much lower than 60 years ago, both racial and economic segregation are increasing,” the authors wrote. “Those increases appear to be the direct result of educational policy and legal decisions. They are not the inevitable result of demographic changes — and can be changed by alternative policy choices.”
Between 1991 and 2019, Black-white segregation increased by 3.5 percentage points in the 533 districts that serve at least 2,500 Black students, an increase of 25% from historically low levels. But in the 100 largest school districts, which serve about 38% of all Black students, the analysis found segregation increased by 8 percentage points — a 64% increase.
Hispanic and Asian American students attend more integrated schools on average than Black students, but rates of white-Hispanic and white-Asian American segregation have nearly doubled since the 1980s, the analysis found.
In Denver, advocates found that Latino students and English learners are especially likely to attend very segregated schools. A study last year that looked at wealthy California school districts found that white families move away as more Asian American families move in — and fear of academic competition may be a factor.
Economic segregation increased considerably in that same time period, Reardon and Owens found. In 2019, the average Black student attended a school where the rate of students receiving free- or reduced-price lunch was 18 percentage points higher than in schools attended by white students in the same district.