Nineteen years after Brown, in 1973, the Supreme Court opened the door to desegregation lawsuits outside the South for both black and Latino desegregation but created … far more demanding standards of proof of violations than in the South …
People protest outside the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., while the Supreme Court is considering whether school districts in Seattle and Louisville, Kentucky, are violating the U.S. Constitution in their efforts to integrate their classrooms. Both districts have limited the ability of parents to choose schools by imposing numerical ranges for racial composition. (Photo by Ken Cedeno/Corbis via Getty Images)
24 UCLA Ed&IS FALL 2019
The data in this report shows a disconcerting increase of black segregation in all parts of the country. This is true even though African Americans are a slowly declining share of the total student population, and many now live in suburban areas. It shows a very substantial loss from the high point of desegregation in the late 1980s. We also see that in the West where blacks are now only 5 percent of the total enrollment, most are attending schools that are predominantly Latino. This pattern is evident in many areas including parts of the South, traditionally the heartland of the African American community, where there are now larger numbers of Latinos than blacks. Very little attention has been given to these trends. A troubling development has been the enormous growth and intensifying segregation by ethnicity and poverty of the Latino students, who are now by far the largest nonwhite community. They are now more segregated in their own group than are blacks; and often, particularly in the Southwest and the West,
African American students are not only isolated from whites and from the middle class but they are, on average, attending schools where they are a minority group within a Latino school. Latino students now are typically in schools with insignificant white and middle-class populations, a particularly dramatic historic change in the West. Sometimes they are also segregated from students whose home language is English. Schools of choice have played a greatly increased role in public education. There was a huge growth of intentionally integrated magnet schools in the 1970s. Since 1990 most of the desegregation requirements in choice plans have been dropped, and there has been a vast expansion of charter schools, which are schools of choice. Typically they have no integration policies and are even more segregated than regular public schools, though unlike those districts and schools, they often are not tied to particular segregated neighborhoods.
THE SUBURBS ARE EXPERIENCING PROFOUND CHANGES. At the time of the civil rights movement the suburbs were white, and significant racial change did not develop until the 1970s. The data in this report shows that the change has been faster and more sweeping than most Americans understand, and there is now a majority of nonwhites in the suburban rings of our largest metros. Many of these suburban communities never had a desegregation plan, and many of their residents came to the suburbs after leaving racially changing city neighborhoods. White suburbs usually have much smaller school systems and not much diversity among teachers and administrators, and there has been little training or planning in communities now facing threat of resegregation. There have been no significant programs or policies to help these communities deal successfully with diversity either in education or housing policy.