Still Separate, Still Unequal: The Relation of Segregation in Neighborhoods and Schools to Education Inequality

(ProQuest: . denotes formulae omitted.)Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas (1954), the nation has secured racially separate schools once again. School desegregation reached the height of its success during the Nixon-Ford administrations (1969-1977). For example, the percentage of African Americans in southern schools that were at least 99 percent Black declined from 99.5 percent in 1962 to 17.9 percent by 1975 (The South includes the states of DE, DC, FL, GA, MD, NC, SC, VA, WV, AL, KY, MS, TN, AR, LA, OK, and TX). A similar trend occurred in the North, where the proportion of African Americans in schools that were at least 99 percent Black declined to 14.4 percent (Mazmanian & Sabatier, 1989). In the South, school desegregation was assisted by racial segregation's decline within specific geographic units. For example, the Black-White segregation index (i.e., the proportion of African Americans needing to change geographic units for each unit's Black population to equal its percentage of the overall population) in major southern cities was relatively high and ranged from . 62 to . 86 in 1950 (Taeuber & Taeuber, 2009), in contrast to segregation at the county level which declined from a high of . 70 in 1910 to a low of . 49 in 1960 (Massey, 2001). Since southern school systems were organized by counties rather than by cities, this lower level of county segregation provided the racial diversity necessary for the desegregation of southern schools once the Civil Rights Act of 1964 enabled enforcement of the Brown rulings of 1954 and 1955.As the migration of southern African Americans to the cities of the North reduced racial segregation in southern counties, it gave northern cities motive to confine Black settlers to ghettos and exacerbate residential levels of racial segregation and isolation (i.e., measure of interracial exposure expected among races that share residential areas). The influx also encouraged "Whiteflight", that is, a corresponding increase in White residents' departure from central cities or metropolitan areas. On this point, Boustan (2010) estimated every Black arrival to Northern cities between 1940 and 1970 resulted in 2.7 White departures, while Reber (2005) showed an exodus of White students followed the implementation of desegregation plans large enough to offset approximately one-third of a district's reduction in segregation. Segregation indices among northern large cities consequently increased from an average of . 56 in 1910 to . 81 in 1960 and exceeded average southern segregation levels by 10 percent (Massey, 2001). Subsequently, the school systems of cities such as St. Louis, Missouri (Wells & Crain, 1997), Yonkers, New York (Briggs, Darden, & Aidala, 1999), and Columbus, Ohio (Jacobs, 1998) became more racially homogeneous, and required urban-suburban busing and mobility plans to achieve the region's eventual decline in school segregation. Nonetheless, even the desegregation plans of large counties such as Prince George's, Maryland (Orfield & Eaton, 1996) could not survive persistent Whiteflight, and the Supreme Court eventually restricted the use of urban-suburban desegregation plans to combat the growing de facto segregation (i.e., by fact, not law) White-flight had left behind (Milliken v. Bradley, 1974). While the Milliken decision blunted Brown's ability to address de facto segregation, other court rulings granted southern school systems unitary status (i.e., release from judicial oversight) after systems attempted to desegregate, regardless of how unsuccessful or limited the remedy appeared (Orfield & Eaton, 1996). Furthermore, the Supreme Court in 2007 limited the use of race by northern and southern districts to achieve school racial balances (Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, 2007; Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 2007). Research has shown that once released from desegregation plans and judicial oversight, school systems tended to re-segregate (Reardon et al. …