A quick point about school resegregation, to follow up on the last post.
Since the mid-1990s, African American and Latino students have been dramatically more likely to attend schools where they are a significant majority. At present, about one-sixth of African American students and one-ninth of Latino students attend schools that are at least 99 percent minority. What’s more, these schools tend to be very high poverty, and as I noted in the last post, educational outcomes suffer hugely in schools where the majority of students come from high-poverty backgrounds.
Demographic, economic, and educational trends have fed into the shift; minorities -- particularly blacks and Latinos -- are still concentrated in a small number of geographic regions and are still most likely to live among each other. When combined with persistently high unemployment, this creates a situation where large numbers are living in segregated areas of concentrated poverty. And because most school districts are uninterested in creating racial or socioeconomic diversity, this has fed into a steady resegregation of the nation's schools. What’s more, there’s some evidence to suggest that charter schools are pushing some school districts toward inadvertent resegregation, as white students leave standard public schools for their alternatives.
Of course, you can’t discount the ongoing effort on the part of the Supreme Court’s conservatives to dismantle mandated desegregation. In the 1991 Dowell case, the Court ruled that a federal desegregation order could be ended even if it subsequently resulted in resegregation. The next year in Freeman v. Pitts, the Court held that a school district that had been under judicial review for school segregation could be freed of this review, even if some desegregation targets remained. This was followed by Missouri v. Jenkins in 1995, where the Court overturned the ruling -- from a lower court -- that the state was required to correct for de facto segregation in its schools. And in 2007, Chief Justice John Roberts -- writing for himself, Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito -- ruled that racial balancing for the purpose of diversity is unconstitutional, with Roberts capping his argument by disingenuously asserting that "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
The regress in Raleigh, North Carolina, is depressing, but the (worse) truth is that it is only one data point among many; as a country, we've long been on the path away from Brown v. Board of Education.
-- Jamelle Bouie
