The Racial Achievement Gap, Segregated Schools, and Segregated Neighborhoods: A Constitutional Insult

• In Event: 52.053 - Learning From the Federal Market-Based Reforms: Lessons for the Every Student Succeeds Act

Abstract

We cannot substantially improve the performance of the poorest African American students – the “truly disadvantaged,” in William Julius Wilson’s phrase – by school reform alone. It must be addressed primarily by improving the social and economic conditions that bring too many children to school unprepared to take advantage of what even the best schools have to offer. Social and economic disadvantage – not only poverty, but a host of associated conditions – depresses student performance (Sharkey, 2013). Concentrating students with these disadvantages in racially and economically homogenous schools depresses it further (Guryan, 2001; Johnson, 2011; Rothstein, 2004). Schools that the most disadvantaged black children attend are segregated because they are located in segregated high-poverty neighborhoods, far distant from truly middle-class neighborhoods (King, 1995). Living in such high-poverty neighborhoods for multiple generations adds an additional barrier to achievement, and multigenerational segregated poverty characterizes many African American children today. Reacquainting ourselves with that history is a step towards confronting it. When knowledge of that history becomes commonplace, we will conclude that Parents Involved was wrongly decided by the Supreme Court in 2007: Louisville, Seattle and other racially segregated metropolitan areas not only have permission, but a constitutional obligation to integrate.

Education policy is constrained by housing policy: it is not possible to desegregate schools without desegregating both low-income and affluent neighborhoods. However, the policy motivation to desegregate neighborhoods is hobbled by a growing ignorance of the nation’s racial history. It has become conventional for policymakers to assert that the residential isolation of low-income black children is now “de facto,” the accident of economic circumstance, demographic trends, personal preference, and private discrimination. But the historical record demonstrates that residential segregation is “de jure,” resulting from racially-motivated and explicit public policy whose effects endure to the present. School integration policies are worth pursuing, but generally, our most distressed ghettos are too far distant from truly middle-class communities for school integration to occur without racially explicit policies of residential desegregation. Many ghettos are now so geographically isolated from white suburbs that voluntary choice, magnet schools, or fiddling with school attendance zones can no longer enable many low-income black children to attend predominantly middle class schools (Rothstein & Santow, 2012).

Avoidance of our racial history is pervasive and we are ensuring the persistence of that avoidance for subsequent generations. This session will outline how the public and policymakers need to re-learn our racial history. Remembering this history is the foundation for an understanding that aggressive policies to desegregate metropolitan areas are not only desirable, but a constitutional obligation. Without awareness of the history of state-sponsored residential segregation, policymakers are unlikely to take meaningful steps to understand or fulfill the constitutional mandate to remedy the racial isolation of neighborhoods, or the school segregation that flows from it. (457 words)

Author

• Richard Rothstein, Economic Policy Institute