School segregation in the United States

Antebellum era African Free School was in New York City in the 18th century. Education during the slave period in the United States was limited. Richard Humphreys, Samuel Powers Emlen Jr, and Prudence Crandall established schools for African Americans in the decades preceding the Civil War. In 1832, Prudence Crandall admitted an African American girl to her all-white Canterbury Female Boarding School in Canterbury, Connecticut, which was the subject of public backlash and protests. She converted the boarding school to one for only African American girls, but Crandall was jailed for her efforts for violating a Black Law. In 1835, an anti-abolitionist mob attacked and destroyed Noyes Academy, an integrated school in Canaan, New Hampshire founded by abolitionists in New England. In 1849, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools were allowed under the Constitution of Massachusetts (Roberts v. City of Boston). Emlen Institution was a boarding school for African American and Native American orphans in Ohio and then Pennsylvania. Richard Humphreys (philanthropist) bequeathed money to establish the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia. Yale Law School co-founder, judge, and mayor of New Haven David Daggett was a leader in the fight against schools for African Americans and helped block plans for a college for African Americans in New Haven, Connecticut. Black schools were established by some religious groups and philanthropists to educate African Americans. Oberlin Academy was one of the early schools to integrate. Lowell High School also accepted African American students. Reconstruction era in the Southern United States (shaded red) required school segregation, 1877–1954. Other states outside the south prohibited school segregation (green) or allowed local choice (blue). The formal segregation of black and white people began following the end of the Reconstruction Era in 1877. The United States Supreme Court's Dred Scott v. Sandford decision upheld the denial of citizenship to African Americans and found that descendants of slaves are "so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." (1941) Following the American Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified and ended slavery nationwide. The Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing equal protection under the law, was ratified in 1868, and citizenship was extended to African Americans. Congress also passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, banning racial discrimination in public accommodations. But in 1883, the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, finding that discrimination by individuals or private businesses was constitutional. Jim Crow era The Dunning School at Columbia University, provided the intellectual underpinning for Jim Crow era discrimination. Segregation continued in de jure form with the passage of Jim Crow laws in the 19th century. The Reconstruction era saw efforts at integration in the South, but discriminatory laws were also passed by state legislatures in the South and parts of the lower Midwest and Southwest, segregating public schools. These stated that schools should be separated by race and offer equal amenities, but conditions were far from equal. The constitutionality of Jim Crow laws was upheld in the Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which ruled that separate facilities for black and white people were permissible provided that the facilities were of equal quality. These restrictions in loans further separated black and white neighborhoods, which introduced the long term effects of residential segregation projects on schooling. The boundaries housing projects were intentionally drawn so that black neighborhoods had less access to education and jobs. The establishment of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) in 1939 serves as the foundation of the efforts and funding to challenge school segregation. Charles Hamilton Houston initially ran the LDF, and focused heavily on proving that black schools were severely unequal to white schools Eventually, the LDF shifted its leadership to Thurgood Marshall, who became the first director of the LDF and was a leader in significant court battles including Brown v. Board of Education. Civil Rights era case, hung at the Historic Site in Topeka, Kansas, USA Plessy v. Ferguson was overturned in 1954, when the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education ended de jure segregation in the United States. The state of Arkansas would experience some of the first successful school integrations below the Mason–Dixon line. In the decade following Brown, the South resisted enforcement of the Court's decision. In response to pressures to desegregate in the public school system, some white communities started private segregated schools, but rulings in Green v. Connally (1971) and Runyon v. McCrary (1976) prohibited racial discrimination in private schools and revoked IRS-granted non-profit status of schools in violation. Desegregation efforts reached their peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the South transitioned from complete segregation to being the nation's most integrated region. Following the Great Depression, funding from the New Deal and legislation such as the 1934 Sugar Act enabled the creation of segregated schools for Mexican American children in Wyoming. According to the district records, the schools and neighborhoods in Oxnard were segregated based on ethnicity. The number of Latino migrants in Oxnard was climbing, causing overcrowding in the schools, which triggered local officials to "solve" this issue by creating a "school-within-a-school" form of segregation, and eventually by establishing a separate school for Latino students. School segregation occurred due to the residential segregation that was also present in Oxnard. By placing restrictive policies and covenants on properties, officials in Oxnard were able to keep Latino residents in a separate neighborhood from the "American" (or non-Latino residents), which provided a justification for segregating the schools. and Texas. The Blackwell School in Texas is one of the few remaining formerly de facto segregated Mexican school buildings. Parents of Mexican-American students challenged school segregation themselves and won by boycotting the newly segregated school and taking the school board to court, as happened with 75 students in the historic 1931 case commonly known as the Lemon Grove Incident (Roberto Alvarez vs. the board of trustees of the Lemon Grove School District). The Lemon Grove case paved the way for another historic case in 1946, when a group of 5 Mexican-American parents challenged Westminster school district (Mendez v. Westminster) in federal court, successfully proving that the segregation of Mexican-Americans in public schools in California was unconstitutional, and setting a precedent for future cases. Parents of both African-American and Mexican-American students also challenged school segregation in coordination with civil rights organizations such as the NAACP, ACLU, and LULAC. Both groups challenged discriminatory policies in court, with varying success. The NAACP initially challenged graduate and professional school segregation asserting that desegregation at this level would result in the least backlash and opposition by whites. Catholic schools Initially, Catholic schools in the South generally followed the pattern of segregation in public schools, sometimes enforced by law. However, most Catholic dioceses began moving ahead of public schools to desegregate. Prior to the desegregation of public schools, St. Louis was the first city to desegregate its Catholic schools in 1947. Following this, Catholic schools followed in Mississippi (1965), Atlanta (1962), Tennessee (1954), and Washington, DC (1948). Due to different integration plans in different locations, some schools decided to desegregate before public schools in their own communities. The first African American Catholic schools were established in states with large Catholic populations and a history of slavery, such as Maryland and Louisiana. Protestant schools In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when some states (including Alabama, Virginia, and Louisiana) closed their public schools to protest integration, Jerry Falwell Sr. took the opportunity to open "Christian academies" for white students. == Contemporary segregation ==

Segregation since the 1960s From 1968 to 1980, segregation declined. In the 1990s and early 2000s, minority students attended schools with a declining proportion of white students, so that the rate of segregation as measured as isolation resembled that of the 1960s. A study by The Civil Rights Project found that in the 2016 to 2017 school year, nearly half of all black and Latino students in the U.S. went to schools where the student population was 90% people of color, while the average white student went to schools that were 69% white. There is some disagreement about trends since the 1980s; while some researchers presented trends as evidence of "resegregation," others argue that changing demographics in school districts, including class and income, are responsible for most of the changes in the racial composition of schools. Residential segregation is related to growing income inequality in the United States. The deterioration of cities and urban education systems between the 1950-80s was the consequence of several post-war policies like the Home Owners' Loans Corporation, Federal Housing Administration, Interstate Highway Act, and discriminatory zoning practices. The loss of war-time industrial employment perpetuated 'white flight' and suburban sprawl at the expense of poor, marginalized urban residents. A study conducted by Sean Reardon and John Yun found that from 1990 to 2000, residential black/white and Hispanic/white segregation declined by a modest amount in the United States, while public school segregation increased slightly during the same time period. In the 2005 Civil Rights Project conducted at Harvard University, researchers reported that over 80% of high-minority schools—where the student population is over 90% non-white—are high poverty schools as indicated by a large majority qualifying for free and reduced lunch. In correspondence to high poverty environments, students are likely to face various obstacles that prevent effective learning environments including food and housing insecurity. Katel also reported that educational experts viewed high densities of marginalized students as a loss of funding that most white families do not experience, because they are more likely to have the capability to attend different schools. The court's ruling in Milliken v. Bradley in 1974 prohibited interdistrict desegregation by busing. The 1990 decision in Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell declared that once schools districts had made a practicable, "good faith" effort to desegregate, they could be declared to have achieved "unitary" status, releasing them from court oversight. The decision allowed schools to end previous desegregation efforts even in cases where a return to segregation was likely. School choice While greater school choice may increase integration by drawing students from more diverse areas, expanded choice often has the opposite effect. Furthermore, studies that compare individual students' demographic characteristics to the schools they are leaving (public schools) and the schools they are switching to (charter schools) generally demonstrate that students "leave more diverse public schools and enroll in less diverse charter schools". Private schools constitute a second important type of school choice. A 2002 study found that private schools continued to contribute to the persistence of school segregation in the South over the course of the 1990s. Enrollment of whites in private schools increased sharply in the 1970s, remained unchanged in the 1980s, and increased again over the course of the 1990s. Because the changes over the latter two decades was not substantial, however, researcher Sean Reardon concludes that changes in private school enrollment is not a likely contributor to any changes in schools segregation patterns during that time. In contrast to charter and private schools, magnet schools generally foster racial integration rather than hinder it. Such schools were initially presented as an alternative to unpopular busing policies, and included explicit desegregation goals along with provisions for recruiting and providing transportation for diverse populations. Although today's magnet schools are no longer as explicitly oriented towards integration efforts, they continue to be less racially isolated than other forms of school choice. == Outcomes ==

Education Desegregation in the 1970s and 1980s led to academic gains for black students. As integration increased, the educational attainment of black students increased while that of whites remained largely unchanged. These schools also tend to have less challenging curricula and fewer offerings of Advanced Placement courses. A 2009 study determined that attending school with a high proportion of black students negatively affected black academic achievement, even after controlling for school quality, differences in ability, and family background. The effect of racial composition on white achievement was insignificant. However, a 2006 study found that white students are more inclined to take higher level courses at integrated schools to decrease exposure to minorities while the black-white test score gap still decreases with movement from a segregated city to an integrated city. The categorization of 'at-risk' youth typically defines learning differences as disabilities based on a standardized, non-inclusive curriculum; the label 'at-risk' inherently follows students of color and low-income students as a generalized academic failure. National academic standardization also extends to federal policies like the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which implemented high-stakes standardized testing across the country in an attempt to address socio-economic disparities in learning outcomes. Schools that were labelled "failures" and faced sanctions under the NCLB Act were typically high poverty schools in segregated districts. Integrated education is positively related to short-term outcomes such as K–12 school performance, cross-racial friendships, acceptance of cultural differences, and declines in racial fears and prejudice. Short-term and long-term benefits of integration are found for minority and white students alike. Students who attend integrated schools are more likely to live in diverse neighborhoods as adults than those students who attended more segregated schools. Integrated schools also reduce the maintenance of stereotypes and prevent the formation of prejudices in both majority and minority students. On the other hand, a 2014 study highlights that as segregated schooling increases, the socioeconomic inequalities based on race increases. Billings, Deming, and Rockoff demonstrate how a certain school district focused on the allocation of funds redistributed to schools with a high volume of minority students. A 1994 study found support for the theory that interracial contact in elementary or secondary school positively affects long-term outcomes in a way that can overcome perpetual segregation against black communities. The study reviewed previous research and determined that, as compared to segregated Black people, desegregated Black people are more likely to set higher occupational aspirations, attend desegregated colleges, have desegregated social and professional networks as adults, gain desegregated employment, and work in white-collar and professional jobs in the private sector. In schools with a relatively high average income per students, students are more likely to perform better because they feel safer. Urban high schools reported significantly greater drop-out rates than their suburban counterparts. Nationwide, high school drop-out rates are centered in a few hundred public schools that are overwhelmingly impoverished, urban, and non-white. This resulted in racial incongruence between teachers and student population. D'Amico et al. (2017) stated that Brown v. Board of Education "mandated the integration of the nation's schoolchildren but said nothing of the teacher labor force, effectively diminishing the demand for black teachers and thus eliminating these community-supported schools and the teachers who staffed them," (p. 29). And additionally, "fewer than one-in-ten teachers were either black (7%), Hispanic (9%) or Asian American (2%)". This suggests that public elementary school teachers are significantly less racially and ethnically diverse and not keeping up with the diversity within their student body. == Proposals ==

Although the Supreme Court's ruling in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 limited school districts' ability to take race into account during the school assignment process, the ruling did not prohibit racial considerations altogether. According to the UCLA Civil Rights Project, a school district may consider race when using: "site selection of new schools; drawing attendance zones with general recognition of the racial demographics of neighborhoods; allocating resources for special programs; recruiting students and faculty in a targeted manner; [and] tracking enrollments, performance, and other statistics by race." Other researchers argue that, given restrictive court rulings and the increasingly strong relationship between neighborhood and school segregation, integration efforts instead focus on reducing racial segregation in neighborhoods. Expanding the availability of magnet schools—which were initially created with school desegregation efforts and civil rights policies in mind—could also lead to increased integration, especially in those instances when magnet schools can draw students from separate (and segregated) attendance zones and school districts. Kahlenberg refers the low overall socioeconomic status of a school is linked to reduced learning, even after controlling for age, race, and socioeconomic status. The socioeconomic composition of a school may lead to lower student achievement through its effect on "school processes", such as academic climate and teachers' expectations. == See also ==