From Brown to Busing

An extensive literature debates the causes and consequences of the desegregation of American schools in the twentieth century. Despite the social importance of desegregation and the magnitude of the literature, we have lacked a comprehensive accounting of the basic facts of school desegregation. This paper uses newly assembled data to document when and how Southern school districts desegregated as well as the extent of court involvement in the desegregation process over the two full decades after Brown. We also examine heterogeneity in the path to desegregation by district characteristics. The results suggest that the existing quantitative literature, which generally either begins in 1968 and focuses on the role of federal courts in larger urban districts or relies on highly aggregated data, often tells an incomplete story of desegregation.

Symposium: Brown v. Board of Education and Its Legacy: A Tribute to Justice Thurgood Marshall, Learning Together: Justice Marshall\u27s Desegregation Opinions

In this Article, Professor Marcus examines the influence of Justice Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court\u27s current school desegregation agenda. Justice Marshall was part of the majority in desegregation cases during his earlier years on the high Court subsequently, however, his role became one of dissenter. Professor Marcus analyzes the divisive issues facing the Court in desegregation litigation, Marshall\u27s positions on such issues, and his legacy to the Court in this area. Finally, the Article assesses the vitality of this legacy in light of two Supreme Court decisions issued after Justice Marshall\u27s retirement

Segregating California's Future: Inequality and Its Alternative, 60 Years after Brown v. Board of Education

California has had serious issues of separation and discrimination in its schools since it became a state. It was little affected by the Brown decision, which was directed primarily at the 17 states that had laws mandating the segregation of African Americans. Although the California Supreme Court recognized a broad desegregation right in the state constitution, and the legislature briefly mandated that school boards take action to enforce this right, both were reversed by voter-approved propositions. The 1979 Proposition One led to the termination of the city's desegregation plan -- the first major city in the U.S. to end its plan. U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the 1990s led eventually to the termination of the federal desegregation orders in San Francisco and San Jose. Major court decisions in California mandating desegregation that occurred in the 1970s were overturned by the 1990s, thus California presently has no school integration policy. Segregation has grown substantially in the past two decades, especially for Latinos. White students' contact with nonwhite and poor students has increased significantly because of the dramatic change in overall population. Black and Latino students are strongly concentrated in schools that have far lower quality, according to state Academic Performance Index (API) ratings. Conversely, a far larger share of whites and Asians attend the most highly related schools and thus are the most prepared for college. A half-century of desegregation research shows the major costs of segregation and the variety of benefits of schools that are attended by all races

Keep on Keeping On : African Americans and the Implementation of Brown v. Board of Education in Virginia

This chapter examines African American efforts to implement the Brown decision in Virginia. While considering how government officials, segregationist organizations, and white supporters influenced the implementation process, this study focuses on how the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and its supporters in Virginia sought to bring about school desegregation in the state. Blending African American, southern, legal, and civil rights history, the story sheds new light on the school desegregation process and the early years of the civil rights movement in Virginia

Racial Segregation and the Black-White Test Score Gap

Segregation, desegregation, SAT scores, cities, urban economics

A Study of Regulatory Intervention in Labor-Management Relations: School Desegregation in Los Angeles, Dade County, and Boston

This article analyzes the interaction between public school desegregation and labor relations in Los Angeles, Dade County, and Boston. First enumerating the ways in which desegregation led to specific changes in either personnel policies or collective bargaining agreements in the three school systems, then providing an evaluation of the performance of the court’s regulatory intervention within labor management relations in the three school systems. After comparing regulatory performance, the factors that influence the observed variations in performance are assessed. A distinction is found between those causal factors that are ‘environmental’ and those that are under the direct control of the parties. The article concludes with a theoretical discussion of the differences that exist between the court’s regulatory intervention in collective bargaining and arbitration

Backpedaling Toward Plessy

When the Supreme Court overturned two desegregation plans, the majority opinion was based on a distortion of both programs, and of the history of desegregation in general

Busing did not fail. We did. : Doublespeak, Whiteness, and the Contradictions of Liberalism in Public Schooling

Using an interdisciplinary approach and a gear metaphor, I look at why an early 2000s school desegregation program in the Twin Cities was praised as revolutionary, but ended up resulting in greater segregation in the cities. This dissonance serves as an entry point for my greater project, in which I attempt to understand how doublespeak functions as a tool of white resistance to desegregation efforts in the North, and by extension, as a tool of white supremacy. Zooming out, I look at how the contradictions of liberalism harness the manipulation of language and the construction of whiteness to ensure that public schools serve as a site for the reproduction of white supremacy

Bilingual Education: The Hispanic Response to Unequal Educational Opportunity

Discusses the nature of the right to bilingual education, the nature of the program that must be provided, who is directly responsible for it, and the potential conflict between court-mandated desegregation and the support of bilingual programs

Updated Analysis of Racial Segregation in Pulaski County Charter and Traditional Public Schools

In September of 2009, the Office for Education Policy (OEP) released a report titled “An Analysis of Charter Schools on Desegregation Efforts in Little Rock, Arkansas.” In this report, we presented data from the 2005 to 2009 schools years for students who transferred to open-enrollment charter schools in Pulaski County from the Little Rock School District (LRSD). The aim of this report was to show what impacts – if any – these transfers were having on the desegregation efforts of the LRSD. The motivation for this report was an ongoing legal debate about how charter schools impact desegregation, in which critics of charter schools argued that these schools lead to greater segregation, whereas charter proponents suggested that there was no necessary link between charters and segregation