70 years after Brown vs. Board of Education, public schools still deeply segregated

• At the time of the 1954 ruling, 17 U.S. states had laws permitting or requiring racially segregated schools.
• With Brown, the justices overturned decades of legal precedent that kept Black Americans in separate and unequal schools.
• As a professor of education and demography at Penn State University, I research racial desegregation and inequality in K-12 schools.

Recent setbacks

• The decision followed the COVID-19 pandemic, which exacerbated racial inequalities in the U.S.
• Meanwhile, politicians and school boards have banned or removed books by authors of color from school libraries and restricted teaching about racism in U.S. history.
• I believe these legal setbacks amid the current political climate make finally realizing the full promise of Brown more urgent.

Resistance to Brown ruling

• The Brown vs. Board of Education decision did not immediately change the nation’s public schools, especially in the completely segregated South, where there was massive resistance to desegregation.
• Resistance was so fierce in the first decade after Brown that compliance with desegregation orders at times required federal troops to escort Black students to enroll in formerly all-white schools.

While only 2% of Southern Black K-12 students attended majority white schools in 1964 – 10 years after Brown – the number had grown to 33% by 1970. The South surpassed all other regions in desegregation progress for Black students.

Segregation persists

• At the time of Brown, about 90% of students were white and most other students were Black.
• Today, according to a 2022 federal report, 46% of public school students are white, 28% are Hispanic, 15% are Black, 6% Asian, 4% multiracial and 1% American Indian.
• Based on my analysis of 2021 federal education data, public schools in 22 states and Washington, D.C., served majorities of students of color.
• In 2021, approximately 60% of Black and Hispanic public school students attended schools where 75% or more of students were students of color.

Benefits of diversity

While Brown was an attempt to address the inequality that students experienced in segregated Black schools, the harms of segregation affect students of all races. Racially integrated schools are associated with reduced prejudice, enhanced critical thinking or simply building cross-racial friendships that teach children how to work effectively with others.
White students are the least exposed to students of other races and ethnicities, and therefore they often miss out on the benefits of diversity. Nearly half of white public school students attend a school in which white students are 75% or more of the student body.

Factors that exacerbate segregation

• How those boundaries are drawn or redrawn can exacerbate or alleviate school segregation.
• A high level of income and racial segregation also exists between neighboring school districts.
• And district secession – when schools leave an existing school district to form a new district – is linked to higher segregation.
• One study found that areas with more students enrolled in charter schools were associated with higher school segregation.

Potential solutions

• For the rest of the country, voluntary integration efforts are attempts to finally achieve the goals of the Brown decision.
• Finally, since reducing residential segregation could also reduce school segregation, some efforts have combined school desegregation and housing integration policies.

Erica Frankenberg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.