Segregation Trends: Implications for the Legacy and Enduring Promise of Brown

• In Event: Research, Remedy, and Repair . . . Lessons From the 70th Anniversary of Brown

Abstract

Drawing on Boddie’s 2016 adaptive discrimination framework, this article analyzes changes in demographic trends, specifically patterns of national school and district demographic change, racial segregation, and charter school enrollment for the period 2002-2022. Our overarching findings point toward a continuation of several longstanding trends, including increased racial/ethnic diversity in the public school enrollment; deepening racial isolation within districts according to several measures; persistent, high isolation for Black students; high but declining isolation for white students; growing isolation for Hispanic and Asian students; and substantial variation across regions. The growing scope of charter school enrollment and segregation since 2002 is striking, with especially intense increases in many urban schools and districts. These trends reveal the continued effects of adaptive discrimination via privatization. The implications for the current education policy landscape, and advantages of adaptive discrimination frame for understanding it, are discussed. The purpose of this article is to reexamine major patterns of national, regional, and urban school segregation over the last two decades in the context of resistance to Brown. These decades included ongoing housing segregation, isolation of urban schools by rigid school district boundaries, and funding disparities that have shaped racial segregation since the mid-1970s (Holme & Finnigan, 2018). Yet this period also had new policy factors: limitations for race-conscious student assignment policies, rapid proliferation of market-oriented policies like charter schools and accountability, and the gentrification of cities alongside growing racial diversification and segregation in the suburbs (i.e. Wells et al., 2019; Welsh & Swain, 2020).
Our study utilizes the framework of adaptive discrimination to understand how new mechanisms sustain discriminatory levels of racial segregation via maintenance of race-evasive strategies (Boddie, 2016). We emphasize segregation by race rather than socioeconomic status because of the racially discriminatory effects of school district boundary segregation resulting from urban isolation extending back to Milliken (Holme & Finnigan, 2018) and from publicly subsidized privatization plans following Brown (Hannah-Jones, 2024). At the 70th anniversary of Brown, we also posit that remedies to ongoing segregation must be race-conscious (Scott et al., 2023).
In the context of rigid school district boundary lines, demographic change in metropolitan areas, ongoing residential segregation and the increasing privatization of public schools, these descriptive findings offer insight into preliminary patterns/relationships of the persistence of racial segregation in U.S. elementary and secondary schools. This macro-level analytic approach provides useful information for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers as they consider what types of interventions might be useful and how we might understand the current education landscape related to demographic change and segregation (Loeb et al., 2017). In this period of enormous shifts and challenges to a democratic, multiracial system of public education, this study serves as a baseline analysis of contemporary school segregation, on which future analyses may draw.

Authors

• Erica Frankenberg, Pennsylvania State University

• Caprial E. Farrington, University of Georgia

• Elizabeth H. DeBray, University of Georgia

• Genevieve P. Siegel-Hawley, Virginia Commonwealth University

• Talia S. Leibovitz, University of California - Berkeley

• Sarah McCollum, University of Georgia

• Janelle T. Scott, University of California - Berkeley

• Kathryn A. McDermott, University of Massachusetts - Amherst