The unexpected explanation for why school segregation spiked

The unexpected explanation for why school segregation spiked

It’s well documented that after falling for years, school segregation has risen again in the United States. But why? New research by academics at the University of Southern California and Stanford University concludes that some popular theories are not to blame.

Ahead of the 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, a study being released Monday shows a pronounced increase in school segregation since 1988, particularly in large school districts with significant numbers of Black students.

Overall, school segregation between Black and White students has increased by 25 percent since 1991 in the 533 large districts serving at least 2,500 Black students — a significant increase but nowhere near the decline that occurred in the aftermath of Brown, according to the study. (Of note: the paper makes clear that most of the school segregation in the United States is driven by demographic differences between districts, not within them.)

A school district that was entirely segregated would score 1.0 on the researchers’ segregation scale, whereas a perfectly integrated district, where every school perfectly matched the overall district’s demographics, would score 0.0.

Looking at the nation’s 100 largest districts, segregation was 0.45 in 1968. That fell to 0.17 by 1986 and then rose to 0.28 by 2019, researchers found. So while schools are nowhere near as segregated as they were before courts began enforcing the Brown decision, segregation has risen in recent decades.

Researchers offered the example of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools system in North Carolina, where segregation was absolute — a score of 1.0 — in 1950, before Brown. By 1968, it remained a still-high 0.66 — at that time, the average White student’s school was 10 percent Black, while the average Black student’s school was 76 percent Black (the difference between 10 and 76 produces the score of 0.66).

Then, in 1971, after the courts ordered a desegregation plan in another landmark court case, this one involving the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district, the segregation score there shrank to just 0.03. (The average White student’s school was 31 percent Black; the average Black student’s school was 34 percent Black.) By 1991, it was still low at 0.10 before rising again. In 2022, segregation had reached 0.44.

The study finds that the rise nationally was not driven by increasing housing segregation. Housing segregation certainly helps explain school segregation. But since 1991, housing has become less segregated.

The study also finds that rising school segregation is not driven by racial economic inequality because racial economic inequality also declined over this period.

Both of these trends “would have led to lower school segregation, had nothing else changed,” said the paper by Ann E. Owens, a sociologist at USC, and Sean F. Reardon, a professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford.

So what does explain the rise?

Rather than systemic forces that are difficult to change, these trends are driven by policy choices, they conclude. The researchers point to two specific policies: federal courts releasing school districts, including Charlotte-Mecklenburg, from obligations to desegregate schools beginning in significant numbers in the late 1990s; and school-choice policies that let parents pick what school their children attend.

“It’s not these big structural factors that are outside the school districts’ control that are driving this,” Reardon said in an interview. “It’s things that are under the control of the educational system.”

Court-ordered desegregation plans implemented based on the Brown decision had reduced segregation. But then judges began lifting those orders. “If you switch from an active desegregation effort and go back to neighborhood schools, school segregation is going to go up a lot,” Reardon said.

Had those court orders not been lifted, the study estimates that school segregation would have grown 20 percent less than it did.

At the same time, choice systems such as the introduction of charter schools allowed parents more control — and many used that to choose schools with students like their own. The new study specifically looked at the growth of charter schools and found that if charter schools had not expanded, school segregation would have grown 14 percent less.

These two factors account for all of the rise in school segregation from 2000 to 2019, the paper found.

The rising segregation “appear to be the direct result of educational policy and legal decisions,” the paper concludes. “They are not the inevitable result of demographic changes — and can be changed by alternative policy choices.”