Court-ordered Desegregation Research Articles

The role of noncontiguous attendance zones in shaping school populations: A case study of Tucson, Arizona and Fort Bend, Texas

Noncontiguous school attendance zone boundaries (AZBs) have a unique, relatively uncommon shape that assign two or more non-adjacent residential areas to the same school. Given their ability to shape school enrollments by taking advantage of residential sorting, noncontiguous AZBs have historically been linked to explicit efforts to both segregate and desegregate schools. In this paper, we use a novel, longitudinal dataset of AZBs and descriptive quantitative and geospatial methods to understand how the relationship between noncontiguous zones, school diversity, and neighborhood demographics changed from 1990-2020 in two southwestern school districts—Tucson Unified School District, Arizona and Fort Bend Independent School District, Texas. Each district has a unique legal history and demographic context that informs their use of noncontiguous AZBs. We find noncontiguous AZBs are more strongly associated with racially diverse schools and are more likely to bring together neighborhoods with different compositions in Tucson compared to Fort Bend. However, the association between Tucson’s noncontiguous AZBs and racially diverse schools has waned since 1990, as the district has negotiated the end of its court-ordered desegregation plan. Our findings provide insight into when and how noncontiguous AZBs can effectively contribute to ethnoracially diverse schools.

The end of court-ordered desegregation and U.S. children's health: Quasi-experimental evidence.

School racial segregation significantly impacts racial disparities in U.S. children's health. Recently, school segregation has been increasing, partially due to Supreme Court decisions since 1991 that have made it easier for school districts to be released from court-ordered desegregation. We investigated the association of the end of court-ordered desegregation with child health using the 1997-2018 waves of the National Health Interview Survey (N=8,182 Black, 16,930 White children). We exploited quasi-random variation in the timing of school districts' releases from court orders to estimate effects on general health, body weight, mental health, and asthma, using difference-in-differences and event-study methods (including traditional and heterogeneity-robust estimators). Heterogeneity-robust difference-in-differences analyses show that release was associated with increased school segregation, improved mental health among Black children, and better self-reported health among White children. For heterogeneity-robust event-study analyses, school segregation increased steadily over time after release, with worse self-reported health and higher risk of asthma episodes among Black children 18+ years after release. Black children's mental health temporarily improved in the short term. In contrast, White children had improved self-reported health, mental health, and risk of asthma episodes in some years. Interventions to address the harms of school segregation are important for reducing racial health inequities.

School racial segregation and long-term cardiovascular health among Black adults in the US: A quasi-experimental study.

BackgroundCardiovascular disease (CVD) disproportionately affects Black adults in the United States. This is increasingly acknowledged to be due to inequitable distribution of health-promoting resources. One potential contributor is inequities in educational opportunities, although it is unclear what aspects of education are most salient. School racial segregation may affect cardiovascular health by increasing stress, constraining socioeconomic opportunities, and altering health behaviors. We investigated the association between school segregation and Black adults’ CVD risk.Methods and findingsWe leveraged a natural experiment created by quasi-random (i.e., arbitrary) timing of local court decisions since 1991 that released school districts from court-ordered desegregation. We used the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) (1991 to 2017), linked with district-level school segregation measures and desegregation court order status. The sample included 1,053 Black participants who ever resided in school districts that were under a court desegregation order in 1991. The exposure was mean school segregation during observed schooling years. Outcomes included several adult CVD risk factors and outcomes. We fitted standard ordinary least squares (OLS) multivariable linear regression models, then conducted instrumental variables (IV) analysis, using the proportion of schooling years spent in districts that had been released from court-ordered desegregation as an instrument. We adjusted for individual- and district-level preexposure confounders, birth year, and state fixed effects. In standard linear models, school segregation was associated with a lower probability of good self-rated health (−0.05 percentage points per SD of the segregation index; 95% CI: −0.08, −0.03; p < 0.001) and a higher probability of binge drinking (0.04 percentage points; 95% CI: 0.002, 0.07; p = 0.04) and heart disease (0.01 percentage points; 95% CI: 0.002, 0.15; p = 0.007). IV analyses also found that school segregation was associated with a lower probability of good self-rated health (−0.09 percentage points; 95% CI: −0.17, −0.02, p = 0.02) and a higher probability of binge drinking (0.17 percentage points; 95% CI: 0.04, 0.30, p = 0.008). For IV estimates, only binge drinking was robust to adjustments for multiple hypothesis testing. Limitations included self-reported outcomes and potential residual confounding and exposure misclassification.ConclusionsSchool segregation exposure in childhood may have longstanding impacts on Black adults’ cardiovascular health. Future research should replicate these analyses in larger samples and explore potential mechanisms. Given the recent rise in school segregation, this study has implications for policies and programs to address racial inequities in CVD.

The Legacy of Busing and Brown: How School Desegregation Experiences Shape Public Perceptions and Communities’ School Diversity Priorities in the Resegregation Era

In a context that privileges neighborhood zoning and school choice over within-district busing, we examine urban residents’ perceptions of the benefits of racial diversity. We analyze public opinion trends by race and residents’ experience as a student in a district under court-ordered desegregation—Nashville, TN. We find racial differences regarding the values of proximity and school diversity that are moderated by experience as a school-age resident in a city under mandatory desegregation. We build upon literature showing long-term impacts of attending integrated schools, underscoring the influence of time, place, and experience in shaping perceptions of school diversity policies.

Desegregation of City Parks and the Civil Rights Movement: The Case of Oak Park in Montgomery, Alabama

This article analyzes the history of desegregation of city parks in Montgomery, Alabama. The article chronicles the sixteen-year legal battle to desegregate parks in Montgomery and the efforts of city officials to keep parks segregated, including closing all of the parks for seven years, contracting with the Montgomery YMCA to operate segregated private recreation facilities, and allowing only segregated schools to use the parks. The article explores the connection between park segregation and the Montgomery Bus Boycott and school segregation, and questions why public officials fought to keep parks segregated after other public facilities began court-ordered desegregation, and why the story of park desegregation in Montgomery is largely unknown. The article concludes with a call to confront the history of park segregation in Montgomery.

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

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.

Flint Goodridge Hospital and Black Health Care in Twentieth-Century New Orleans

Flint Goodridge Hospital and Black Health Care in Twentieth-Century New Orleans

The association between the end of court-ordered school desegregation and preterm births among Black women.

Racial segregation, and in particular school segregation, likely plays an important role in affecting health outcomes. To examine this connection, this paper explores the relationship between the end of court-ordered school desegregation and preterm births among Blacks using birth certificate information between 1992 and 2002 (n = 183,178). The end of court-ordered oversight has important implications for the level of racial segregation in schools: If residential segregation remains high, neighborhood-based student assignment plans would naturally increase school segregation. A rise in school segregation may lead to worse educational, labor, and health outcomes among Blacks. Using multiple difference-in-differences framework that exploits variation in exposure to schools that declared unitary status, it finds that school districts’ release from court oversight is associated with a 0.8 percentage point increase in preterm births among Black mothers. This paper contributes to literature that finds that the end of court-ordered school desegregation in the 1990s have negative implications for Blacks. More research should be conducted to understand the causal relationship between school segregation and infant health.

Ruth Carbonette Yow, Students of the Dream: Resegregation in a Southern City

With eloquence and passion, Ruth Carbonette Yow presents a challenging picture of school integration in the United States in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Her work adds to the growing scholarship on the issue of resegregation, the re-institution of segregation after the court-ordered desegregation in the 1960s. It was in the late 1980s that researchers really began to identify a distinctive trend toward resegregation in American p...

Countering White Conceit Through the Commemoration of Keyes

ABSTRACTTo mark the 20-year anniversary of the end of federal court-ordered desegregation in Denver Public Schools (DPS), the Front Porch newspaper gathered leaders in Denver's educational community for a roundtable discussion. In her role as a journalist, the author facilitated this conversation and wrote a newspaper article about the event. In her role as a scholar of rhetoric and race, she recognized that the memories warranted further analysis. Through a theoretical framework constructed from scholarship in collective memory, public deliberation, and critical Whiteness studies, she more fully engaged the educational leaders' discussion about both the desegregation era in DPS as well as the contemporary implications of their prevailing public memory. Pairing her analysis of the educational leaders' reflections about the desegregation era with a consideration of contemporary public discourse regarding the resegregation of DPS suggests how collective memory about the Supreme Court ruling Keyes v. School District No 1 continues to cloud public deliberation and overshadow policymaking within DPS. Beyond the specific example of DPS, the author's analysis builds upon the concept of “White conceit” to provide a useful theoretical framework for not only recognizing the ways in which Whiteness eclipses public deliberation, but also for potentially countering its overshadowing influence.

“Revolutions Happen through Young People!”

From the late 1960s through the early 1970s, thousands of black high school students in Boston protested their educational marginalization by staging school boycotts, forming student organizations, and leading demonstrations. They demanded dramatic changes in the content and delivery of education in the Boston Public Schools (BPS). They called for a “culturally relevant education” that valued black culture, to be mentored by black educators, and for collaboration between school and community. Through these arguments for the value of black culture, students rejected characterizations of their racial heritage as inadequate—in a time when theories of cultural inferiority were widespread. Black youth were key players in a decades-long movement led by black Bostonians for educational justice in the BPS. This story challenges a dominant narrative of desegregation and civil rights in Boston, which focuses on busing, white resistance, and court-ordered desegregation. This narrative portrays black Bostonians as apathetic to racial politics and blindly following court-ordered desegregation plans. The story of the black student movement highlights the vital political work performed by black youth in civil rights protest. The erasure of black youth activism from the historical record strengthens stereotypes of black urban teens as apathetic, dangerous, and culturally depraved, which served as a justification for the criminalization of black youth. Their demands for black studies courses, black educators, and the revision of student dress and disciplinary codes forced educators and city leaders to grapple with changing understandings of quality education within the nation’s diverse urban public school systems.

Postracial Remedies

The Supreme Court’s equal protection jurisprudence is decidedly postracial. The Court has restricted the Equal Protection Clause to intentional discrimination by the government, concluding that the Constitution does not prohibit private acts of discrimination and rejecting challenges based on disparate impact, even when rigorous statistical analysis indicates that race is likely a factor. It has held that remedying the effects of past societal discrimination is an insufficient basis for race-specific remedies such as affirmative action. It has also ended remedies of this sort designed to combat previous state-sponsored racial discrimination, such as court-ordered desegregation measures in the schools and the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Constitutional litigation currently provides little or no recourse to address racial disparities in outcomes that are not demonstrably caused by intentional governmental racial discrimination, and race-specific remedies face a level of judicial scrutiny that is especially difficult to satisfy. This Article asks what can be done under these circumstances to ameliorate racial inequality in a manner that is politically feasible and does not run afoul of constitutional limits. It argues that “postracial remedies” are a necessary component of an effective strategy to combat racial disparities in areas such as wealth, incarceration, education, and housing. Postracial remedies seek pragmatic solutions for the economic, social, and structural problems that disproportionately burden blacks in the United States. These remedies are not race specific because they do not treat people differently based on race, but they are race sensitive because they target the manifestations of racial inequality and recognize the salience of race in today’s political and legal environment. This approach, which seeks legally achievable remedies, is also consistent with “antibalkanization” perspectives associated with “race moderates” whose civil rights equal protection jurisprudence is motivated, in part, by a concern with preserving social cohesion. Although postracial remedies are necessary within this postracial ethos, pursuing them does not require acceptance of the postracial narrative or the abandonment of advocacy to combat ongoing racial discrimination.

The Interruptive Voice: Engaging Race in Public School Deliberations

ABSTRACTThe Denver Public School (DPS) District was the first district outside the southern states to undergo court-ordered desegregation. DPS is now the fastest growing urban school district in the country. As such, the societal ill of resegregation that has plagued school districts across the country also strongly influences DPS’s public deliberation. DPS-led efforts to overcome current racial isolation provide one instance to examine how citizens actually engage race in everyday contexts. Consideration of the district’s communicative successes, as well as its pathologies, forms the basis of an alternative approach, namely, encouraging the interruptive voice. This approach draws upon insights from rhetorical and political theory to offer innovative ideas about how public school districts might generate healthier discourse regarding race.

Influences of Segregation and Desegregation on the Bands at Historically Black High Schools of Hillsborough County, Florida

Much of the twentieth century was a turbulent time in the United States for African Americans. During this time of segregation on numerous legal and social levels, bands were becoming part of the culture of many schools across the nation. Despite great adversity, many successful band programs were established at black schools as a result of the efforts of pioneering music educators, often as a result of a deep and lasting commitment to the children of their home communities. This study is a narrative history that sheds light on the band programs at the black public high schools of Hillsborough County, Florida. The events that took place here may be similar to developments that occurred elsewhere throughout the country, especially those in the segregated south. This history examines the legacy of Michael “Prof” Rodriguez and other band directors, and the experience of being a student and a band member at schools like Blake High School and Middleton High School. Topics include the origins of these bands at the end of World War II through Brown v. Board of Education, through court-ordered desegregation and school closings, to reestablishing the high schools in a way that would honor their heritage but avoid re-segregation. While desegregation helped some problems related to equality of opportunity, it also created problems by taking away the pride and sense of community that was centered largely in the high schools.

Effects of School Segregation and School Resources in a Changing Policy Context

Desegregation policies have been rolled back across the country. Some advocates for dismantling desegregation argue that resources allocated to desegregation would pay off better if allocated to improve education in schools with disadvantaged populations. We test this claim by examining student achievement before, during, and after the end of court-ordered desegregation in Nashville, Tennessee. School-by-grade fixed effect models reveal no evidence that increases in a school’s proportion of Black students impeded achievement growth. Increased exposure to students in poverty curtailed achievement growth, but enhanced option schools, which bring extraordinary resources to high-poverty, racially isolated schools, compensated for the effects of concentrated poverty. Schools that became specialized magnet schools, however, did not contribute to achievement gains and in some cases curtailed growth.

Race, Genomics, and Philosophy of Science

Race, Genomics, and Philosophy of Science

Race, Genomics, and Philosophy of Science

Race, Genomics, and Philosophy of Science

Segregation 2.0

Students are more racially segregated in schools today than they were in the late 1960s and prior to the enforcement of court-ordered desegregation in school districts across the country. This special issue addresses the overarching theme of policies, practices, or roles and responsibilities of various stakeholders that may directly or indirectly contribute to this new generation of school segregation commonly known as resegregation. I begin this special issue with a brief discussion of the legal milieu that helped set the stage for resegregation and explain why collecting social science evidence may be useful in addressing the resegregation problem in schools.

Halting White Flight

Focusing on the city of Atlanta from the mid-1970s to the 2000s, this article examines the response of middle- and upper-middle-class white families to the court-ordered desegregation of public schools and growing fears over metropolitan busing. While the majority of white families fled the city and its public schools as part of the growing suburbanization across the Sunbelt, a small number of liberal activists remained committed to integrated public education and formed neighborhood-based organizations to stop white flight. By historicizing this activism, we suggest that the grassroots political response to white flight in the 1970s and the circuits of schooling it produced paved the way for the “return” of white middle- and upper-middle-class families to Atlanta’s public schools by the 2000s.

The End of Court-Ordered Desegregation

In response to three Supreme Court rulings in the early 1990s, numerous court-ordered desegregation plans have been terminated. Using a unique dataset and an event study research design, this paper explores the impact of these terminations. The results suggest that termination produces a moderate increase in racial segregation. Outside of the south, dismissal also increases the rate at which black students drop out of school and attend private school. In the south, in contrast, there is no change in the school attendance patterns of blacks. Finally, evidence is presented that whites re-enter dismissed districts in large numbers in the south. (JEL H75, I21, I28, J15, K10)