A look at the state of desegregation

Remember desegregation? Whatever happened to the school desegregation mandate, an outgrowth of the U.S. Supreme Court’s groundbreaking decision in _Brown v. Board of Education_ in 1954? This

defining decision sparked the era of busing children to integrate schools, and then—what? A _New York Times_ opinion piece by David L. Kirp, a professor of public policy at the University

of California, Berkeley, gives a retrospective on desegregation’s roots, its apparent success, and large scale abandonment. With the headline, “Is Segregation Back in U.S. Public Schools?,”

Kirp’s article introduces a “Room for Debate” selection of viewpoints from a variety of experts, including two adults who were bused as public school students—and who praise the value of

that life-changing opportunity. “To the current reformers, integration is at best an irrelevance and at worst an excuse to shift attention away from shoddy teaching. But a spate of research

says otherwise,” he writes. “Between 1970 and 1990, the black-white gap in educational attainment shrank—not because white youngsters did worse but because black youngsters did better,”

writes Kirp. The success extended beyond school well into adulthood, providing economic and health benefits to the black youths who spent five years in desegregated schools, according to a

2011 study by Rucker C. Johnson, a Berkeley public policy professor. As recently as 2009, the school board of Wake County, N.C. voted to dismantle the district’s long-running policy of

assigning students to schools based on socioeconomic diversity—a move that caused a cascade of consequences, one of which put the district’s high schools on the “accredited warned” list.

(The current school board appears to favor a controlled choice school assignment policy, _Education Week_‘s Christina Samuels reports.) Magnet schools were once considered a way to help

integrate racially divided districts, but they, too, have been forced to evolve, writes _Education Week_‘s Nora Fleming in her story, “Magnets Adjust to New Climate of School Choice.” A

recent Brookings Institution report links housing prices and zoning practices as two factors that effectively deprive low-income students of high-quality schools, writes Nirvi Shah of

_Education Week_ in “Study Links Zoning to Education Disparities,” demonstrating a disparity that continues to affect the country’s students, particularly in the Northeast. With the

ever-changing landscape of public opinion, school choice, and socioeconomic conditions, what is the future of integration? Kirp maintains that despite desegregation’s success, it has no

constituency advancing it today. And, if parents and the public are not actively pursuing it, who will?