The Twilight of Brown: Empirical Analysis of Re-Segregation and Voluntary Adoption of School Integration Policies Across the United States

Abstract

Based on the extensive work of Gary Orfield and others, scholars and legal practitioners have long known that across the United States, significant resegregation of public-school districts is occurring rapidly as states debate new modes of student assignment, increase charter school offerings, and the Supreme Court loosens rules for removing the taint of discrimination in public education. However, we lack systematic knowledge of how resegregation is being counteracted and the factors contributing to the choice of school districts to adopt voluntary desegregation plans. This empirical study attempts to fill that void. We found sixty experimental school districts that meet our strict criteria for voluntary adoption of school desegregation policies. Using student enrollment size at the school district level, we selected fifty-nine contiguous control districts that have not adopted voluntary desegregation plans for inclusion in our study. We relied on multiple analytical methods to examine the data, including correlation and logistic regression. Our findings highlight the importance of both institutional and contextual conditions in a school district’s choice of voluntary adoption of desegregation plans. Institutional factors such as the number of schools in the district, the history of court-ordered desegregation, and contextual conditions such as the proportion of students receiving free and reduced-price lunch and the race and ethnicity of students significantly explains whether a school district would adopt voluntary integration policies. We discuss the implications of our findings within the context of a Supreme Court and polity that remain split about the worthiness of school desegregation.