School Segregation 70 Years After Brown vs. Board of Education

It was one of the most important days in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court. On May 17, 1954, the nine justices ruled unanimously in Brown v. Board of Education that schools segregated by race did not provide equal education. Students could no longer be excluded from school because of their skin color. To commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Brown decision, I wanted to take a look at how far we’ve come in integrating our schools and how far we still have to go.

Two sociologists, Sean Reardon of Stanford University and Ann Owens of the University of Southern California, collaborated to analyze both historical and recent trends. Reardon and Owens were scheduled to present their analysis on May 6 at a Stanford University conference, and they shared their presentation with me beforehand. They also expect to launch a new website to show segregation trends for individual school districts across the country.

Here are five lessons from their work:

1. The long term shows progress, but a worrying upswing, especially in big cities

Nearly fifteen years after the Brown decision, not much changed. Although black students had the right to attend another school, it was up to their families to demand a seat and figure out how to get their child into the school. Many schools remained all-black or all-white.

Desegregation began in earnest in 1968 with a series of court orders, beginning with the New Kent County schools in Virginia. That year, the Supreme Court required the province to abolish its separate black and white schools and students were transferred to different schools to integrate them.

This graph above, produced by Reardon and Owens, shows how segregation plummeted across the country between 1968 and 1973. The researchers focused on about 500 larger school districts that were home to at least 2,500 black students. That includes nearly two-thirds of all black students in the country and avoids clouding the analysis with thousands of small districts with mostly white residents.

Reardon and Owens’ measurement of segregation compares classmates of the average white student to the classmates of the average black student. In North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenberg County, for example, the average white student in 1968 attended a school where 90 percent of his peers were white and only 10 percent were black. The average black student attended a school where 76 percent of his peers were black and 24 percent were white. Reardon and Owens then calculated the difference in exposure to each race. White students had 90 percent white classmates, while black students had 24 percent white classmates. The difference was 66 percentage points. On the other hand, black students had 76 percent black classmates, while white students had 10 percent black classmates. Again, the difference was 66 percentage points, which translates to 0.66 on the segregation index.

But in 1973, after court-ordered desegregation took effect, the average white student attended a school that was 69 percent white and 31 percent black. The average black student attended a school that was 34 percent black and 66 percent white. In five short years, the racial exposure gap has fallen from 66 percentage points to 3 percentage points. Schools reflected the demographics of Charlotte-Mecklenberg. In the graph above, Reardon and Owens averaged the segregation indices for all 533 counties with a significant black population. That’s what each dot represents.

In the early 1990s, this level of segregation began to increase again, as shown by the red tail in the graph above. Owens calls it a “slow and steady rebound,” in contrast to the dramatic decline in segregation after 1968. Segregation has not rebounded or returned to pre-Brown levels. “There’s a misconception that segregation is worse than ever,” Reardon said.

While the red line from 1990 to the present seems pretty much flat, if you zoom in, you can see that black-white segregation grew by 25 percent between 1991 and 2019. During the pandemic, segregation has decreased slightly again.

It is important to emphasize that these levels of segregation between black and white are small compared to the levels of segregation in the late 1960s. A 25 percent increase may seem like a lot, but it is less than 4 percentage points.

“It’s so big that I’m worried about it,” Owens said. “Now is the time to keep an eye on this. If things continue in this direction, it will be a long time before we get back to Brown. But let’s not let it rise any further.”

Even more troubling is the fact that segregation has increased significantly if you focus on the nation’s largest cities. White-black segregation in the 100 largest school districts increased by 64 percent between 1988 and 2019, Owens and Reardon calculated.

2. School choice plays a role in recent segregation

Why is segregation creeping back?

The expiration of court orders mandating school integration and the expansion of school choice policies, including the rapid growth of charter schools, explains all of the increase in segregation since 2000, Reardon said. More than 200 medium and large districts were released from court desegregation orders from 1991 to 2009, and racial segregation in schools in these districts gradually increased in subsequent years.

However, school choice appears to be the dominant force. More than half of the increase in segregation in the 2000s can be attributed to the rise of charter schools, the number of which began to rise rapidly in the late 1990s. In many cases, white or black families flocked to different charter schools, leaving a less diverse student population in traditional public schools.

The reason for the increase in segregation in the 1990s, before the number of charter schools soared, is harder to understand. Owens speculates that other school choice policies, such as the ability to attend any public school in a district or the creation of new magnet schools, may have played a role, but she doesn’t have the data to prove that. The white gentrification of cities in the 1990s could also be a factor, she said, as white newcomers preferred a small number of schools or sent their children to private schools.

“We may be dealing with a moment where one group arrives before another group leaves,” Owens says. “It is difficult to say what the numbers will look like in ten years.”

3. It is important to separate demographic shifts from increases in segregation

There is a popular narrative that segregation has increased because black students are more likely to go to school with other students who are not white, especially Hispanic students. But Reardon and Owens say this analysis conflates demographic shifts in the U.S. population with segregation. The share of Spanish-speaking students in American schools is now approaching 30 percent, and everyone is attending schools with more Spanish-speaking classmates. White students, who represented 85 percent of the U.S. student population in 1970, now make up less than half.

The blue line in the graph above shows how the number of classmates of the average black, Hispanic, or Native American student has increased from about 55 percent black, Hispanic, and Native American students in the early 1970s to nearly 80 percent black, Hispanic, and Native American students today . . This means that the average non-white student goes to a school that consists overwhelmingly of non-white students.

But look at how the red line, representing white students, follows the same path. The average white student attends a school that has gone from 35 percent non-white students in the 1970s to nearly 70 percent non-white students today. “It is completely driven by Hispanic students,” Owens said. “Even the ‘white’ schools in LA are 40 percent Hispanic.”

I turned to U.S. Department of Education data to show how extremely segregated schools have become less common. The percentage of black students attending a school that is 90 percent or more black fell from 23 percent in 2000 to 10 percent in 2022. Only 1 in 10 black students attend an all-black or nearly all-black school. Meanwhile, the percentage of white students attending a school that is 90 percent or more white has fallen from 44 percent to 14 percent over the same period. That’s 1 in 7. Far fewer black or white students learn in schools that consist almost entirely of students of the same race.

At the same time, the percentage of black students attending a school where 90 percent of students are not white grew from 37 percent in 2000 to 40 percent in 2022. But notice the sharp growth of Hispanic students during this period. They went from 7.6 million (less than the number of black students) to over 13.9 million (almost double the number of black students).

4. Most segregation occurs across school district boundaries

This bar chart shows how schools are segregated for two reasons. One is that people of different races live on opposite sides of school district lines. Detroit is an extreme example. The city schools are dominated by black students. Meanwhile, Detroit’s suburbs, which operate independent school systems, are dominated by white students. Almost all segregation is because people of different races live in different districts. Meanwhile, in the Charlotte, North Carolina, metropolitan area, more than half of the segregation reflects the unequal distribution of students within school districts.

At the national level, 60 percent of segregation takes place because of the Detroit scenario: people live across administrative boundaries, Reardon and Owens calculated. Yet 40 percent of current segregation takes place within administrative boundaries that policymakers can control.

5. Residential segregation is decreasing

People often say that little can be done about school segregation until we integrate neighborhoods. I was surprised to learn that residential segregation has declined over the past thirty years, according to Reardon and Owens’ analysis of the census data. More and more black and white people live near each other. And yet at the same time, school segregation is getting worse.

All this matters, Reardon said, because children learn at different rates in more segregated systems. “We know that more integrated schools provide more equal educational opportunities,” he said. “The things we do with our school systems are making segregation worse.”

Reardon recommends more housing policy reforms to integrate neighborhoods and more “guardrails” for school choice systems so that highly segregated schools cannot be allowed to emerge.

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Jill Barshay is a senior reporter at The Hechinger Report, where she writes the weekly “Proof Points” column on education research and data. This column was originally published by The Hechinger Report.