Excerpt: Race in American Public Schools: Rapidly Resegregating School Districts

Frankenberg, Erica., and Chungmei Lee. [2002] 2005. "Race in American Public Schools: Rapidly Resegregating School Districts". Pp. 292-296 in Understanding Society, 2nd ed., edited by Margaret L. Andersen, Kim Logio, and Howard Taylor. Belmont, CA: Thomson Learning, Inc.

Almost fifty years after the "landmark" Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, Frankenberg and Lee examine how desegregated American public schools really are. What they find is startlingly retrogressive: that public schools are becoming increasingly diversified but also increasingly segregated.

The authors compiled data from the U.S. Department of Education on 239 school districts with enrollment greater than 25,000 to study the "racial isolation" of black and Latino students from white students, and white students from blacks and Latinos. Most of the districts studied have been under court-mandated desegregation plans at various times over the previous fifty years.

Their findings are that "virtually all" school districts experience lower levels of inter-racial exposure. The most integrated and most rapidly re-segregating schools are in the South, where long-standing desegregation plans expire and aren't renewed by the courts. Blacks and Latinos experience very similar changes with regard to segregation, and whites are becoming more segregated from them in one-third of the districts analyzed.

This pattern of re-segregation will undoubtedly have long-term effects:

We find that since 1986, in almost every district examined, black and Latino students have become more racially segregated from whites in their schools. The literature suggests that minority schools are highly correlated with high-poverty schools and these schools are also associated with low parental involvement, lack of resources, less experienced and credentialed teachers, and higher teacher turnovers—all of which combine to exacerbate educational inequality for minority students.

The authors accuse the Supreme Court of relaxing standards for court oversight in the 1990s and for deciding against city-suburban desegregation in 1974, which "made real desegregation impossible in a growing number of overwhelmingly minority central cities".

There are several topics this article relates to: from the conservative politics of the power elite (namely the Supreme Court) to institutional racism and the perception of a color-blind society (due to the increasing diversity) to the myth of progress. A good deal of insight can be gained, I believe, from studying this topic further and discovering what structural causes underlie this re-segregation.

Relevance: 5/5 (very relevant)
Salience: 4/5 (salient)

References:

• Brown v. Board of Education - as a cause.