Last week, in a public address commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board decision, Michelle Obama warned that "today, by some measures, our schools are as segregated as they were back when Dr. [Martin Luther] King gave his final speech."
This is a stark statement -- made even more stark by the fact that virtually no school integration occurred between the Brown decision in 1954 and Dr. King's assassination in Spring 1968. Southern communities operating separate school districts for whites and blacks were in no hurry to merge them. And even once merged, residential segregation -- which reached its highest point at mid-century -- implied that a reliance on neighborhood schools would perpetuate segregation. It would take a series of further court cases, beginning in 1968, to make integration happen
Can it really be true, then, that America's public schools are as segregated now as they were at a point where the word "busing" had not even entered our vocabulary? It all boils down to the definition of the word "segregation."
Consult your favorite dictionary and the term segregation will most likely incorporate the word "separation." By this definition, schools are segregated when students of different races attend separate schools.
By this definition, schools are in fact much less segregated today than they were in 1968. The series of court decisions that began in 1968 dramatically reduced the degree to which white and black students attended separate schools. In more recent years, courts have reversed those decisions in some cases. At the same time, though, America's neighborhoods have become significantly more integrated than they once were. These two countervailing trends have more or less canceled one another out. This is the conclusion of a comprehensive review released by Sean Reardon and Ann Owens last fall. Students of different races are much less likely to attend separate schools than they were in 1968.
This explains Michelle Obama's use of the term "by some measures." She's right that there are some measures employed by school segregation researchers that establish different trends. But they do not define segregation as the tendency for students to attend separate schools. Instead, they define segregation as the tendency for black students to attend schools with a high concentration of nonwhite students.
Back in 1968, attending a majority-nonwhite school was exceptional. Nationwide, white students accounted for nearly 4 out of every 5 public school attendees. In most parts of the country, "nonwhite" was a euphemism for "black." The fact that over three-quarters of black students attended a school where the majority of their classmates were black served as a stark indicator of efforts to keep students of different races in separate schools.
Things are very different today. For one thing, the public school population has changed. Only 52% of public school students are white. For another, "nonwhite" no longer means "black." Attending a majority-nonwhite school is no longer all that exceptional. The National Center for Education Statistics projects that within 10 years the public school population will be majority nonwhite. So schools could be 100% integrated -- every school a microcosm of the nation -- and every school would be majority nonwhite. Segregation measures based on the two different concepts -- separation versus exposure to nonwhite majorities -- would yield exactly opposite conclusions.
In summary, "some measures" of segregation are highly misleading because they mistake demographic trends for actual decisions to send students of different races to different schools. Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom pointed this out a week ago.
Now, to be fair, there is definitely resegregation going on in some parts of the country. In districts that stop busing, there is a definite uptick in the tendency for students of different races to attend different schools. High-poverty schools often struggle to attract and retain high-quality teachers. But we no longer live in a world where it is possible to judge a school by the color of students' skin. Majority-nonwhite schools are the emerging norm. Many of these schools -- not enough, but many of them -- do an excellent job of educating children. My own children attend a public school where over 70% of their classmates are nonwhite. It's a great school. We need to focus our efforts on the schools that aren't succeeding, which is not the same thing as the schools serving nonwhite students.
It seems wrong to count only public school students though. Has white flight to private schools led to resegregation?
Posted by: Dan | 05/20/2014 at 07:52 PM