Brown at 100
Richard D. Kahlenberg
The Century Foundation, 5/17/04

As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, overturning the policy of "separate but equal" in schooling, much of the focus has been on the past. But it's also important to ask where we're headed. What will schools look like 50 years from now on the 100th anniversary of Brown?

In 1979, on the 25th anniversary of the Brown decision, tremendous progress had been made. In the South, by the 1970s, one-quarter of black students attended intensely segregated minority schools (90-100% minority), down from 100% at the time of the 1954 decision. On the 50th anniversary, we've slid back some, with 31% of black students attending intensely segregated minority schools, according to the Harvard Civil Rights Project. And, according to a study conducted by David Rusk for The Century Foundation, schools are becoming more segregated by economic status as well.

The courts have held that school desegregation must be a temporary matter, and have released districts from desegregation plans despite the continued de facto segregation of students. In a number of districts, even voluntary efforts to use race in student assignment have been declared unconstitutional. Worse, our public policy discussion is dominated by education reforms that are essentially about the job of making "separate but equal" work – No Child Left Behind, vouchers, smaller class size, teacher development and the like.

The good news is that a small but growing number of districts are addressing segregation in a new way: by socioeconomic status. In Wake County, North Carolina; Cambridge, Massachusetts; La Crosse, Wisconsin and elsewhere, districts are seeking to make sure that all schools have a strong core of middle class families. The number of students attending districts with socioeconomic integration programs has increased from 20,000 in 1999 to almost a half million today. These districts rely primarily on public school choice rather than compulsory busing, to achieve this goal.

School policies that promote integration by socioeconomic status avoid the legal complications of student assignment by race. More importantly, the social science research evidence suggests that where integration raised African American achievement, it was not because black kids need to sit next to white kids to learn, but because poor kids of all races do much better in middle class environments.