It was probably the most important days within the historical past of the U.S. Supreme Court docket. On Might 17, 1954, the 9 justices unanimously dominated in Brown v. Board of Training that faculties segregated by race didn’t present an equal training. College students might not be barred from a college due to the colour of their pores and skin. To commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the Brown determination, I needed to have a look at how far we’ve are available in integrating our faculties and the way far we nonetheless must go.
Two sociologists, Sean Reardon at Stanford College and Ann Owens on the College of Southern California, have teamed as much as analyze each historic and up to date tendencies. Reardon and Owens had been slated to current their evaluation at a Stanford College convention on Might 6, and so they shared their presentation with me upfront. Additionally they anticipate to launch a brand new web site to show segregation tendencies for particular person college districts across the nation.
Listed below are 5 takeaways from their work:
- The lengthy view exhibits progress however a worrying uptick, particularly in large cities

Not a lot modified for nearly 15 years after the Brown determination. Though Black college students had the fitting to attend one other college, the onus was on their households to demand a seat and work out how you can get their youngster to the college. Many faculties remained totally Black or totally white.
Desegregation started in earnest in 1968 with a collection of court docket orders, starting with Virginia’s New Kent County faculties. That yr, the Supreme Court docket required the county to abolish its separate Black and white faculties and college students had been reassigned to completely different faculties to combine them.
This graph above, produced by Reardon and Owens, exhibits how segregation plummeted throughout the nation between 1968 and 1973. The researchers targeted on roughly 500 bigger college districts the place there have been at the very least 2,500 Black college students. That captures practically two-thirds of all Black college students within the nation and avoids clouding the evaluation with hundreds of small districts of largely white residents.
Reardon’s and Owens’s measurement of segregation compares classmates of the common white scholar with the classmates of the common Black scholar. For instance, in North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenberg district, the common white scholar in 1968 attended a college the place 90 % of his friends had been white and solely 10 % had been Black. The typical Black scholar attended a college the place 76 % of his friends had been Black and 24 % had been white. Reardon and Owens then calculated the hole in publicity to every race. White college students had 90 % white classmates whereas Black college students had 24 % white classmates. The distinction was 66 proportion factors. On the flip aspect, Black college students had 76 % Black classmates whereas white college students had 10 % Black classmates. Once more, the distinction was 66 proportion factors, which interprets to 0.66 on the segregation index.
However in 1973, after court-ordered desegregation went into impact, the common white scholar attended a college that was 69 % white and 31 % Black. The typical Black scholar attended a college that was 34 % Black and 66 % white. In 5 quick years, the racial publicity hole fell from 66 proportion factors to three proportion factors. Faculties mirrored Charlotte-Mecklenberg’s demographics. Within the graph above, Reardon and Owens averaged the segregation index figures for all 533 districts with substantial Black populations. That’s what every dot represents.
Within the early Nineties, this measure of segregation started to creep up once more, as depicted by the pink tail within the graph above. Owens calls it a “sluggish and regular uptick” in distinction to the drastic decline in segregation after 1968. Segregation has not bounced again or returned to pre-Brown ranges. “There’s a false impression that segregation is worse than ever,” Reardon mentioned.
Though the pink line from 1990 to the current appears to be like practically flat, if you zoom in on it, you may see that Black-white segregation grew by 25 % between 1991 and 2019. In the course of the pandemic, segregation declined barely once more.

It’s essential to emphasise that these Black-white segregation ranges are tiny in contrast with the diploma of segregation within the late Sixties. A 25 % enhance can look like quite a bit, but it surely’s lower than 4 proportion factors.
“It’s sufficiently big that it makes me frightened,” mentioned Owens. “Now could be the second to regulate this. If it continues on this path, it will take a very long time to get again as much as Brown. However let’s not let it maintain going up.”
Much more troubling is the truth that segregation elevated considerably when you zero in on the nation’s greatest cities. White-Black segregation within the largest 100 college districts elevated by 64 % from 1988 to 2019, Owens and Reardon calculated.

- Faculty alternative performs a job in latest segregation
Why is segregation creeping again up once more?
The expiration of court docket orders that mandated college integration and the enlargement of college alternative insurance policies, together with the speedy progress of constitution faculties, explains all the enhance in segregation from 2000 onward, mentioned Reardon. Over 200 medium-sized and huge districts had been launched from desegregation court docket orders from 1991 to 2009, and racial college segregation in these districts step by step elevated within the years afterward.
Faculty alternative, nevertheless, seems to be the dominant pressure. Greater than half of the rise in segregation within the 2000s may be attributed to the rise of constitution faculties, whose numbers started to extend quickly within the late Nineties. In lots of instances, both white or Black households flocked to completely different constitution faculties, forsaking a much less various scholar physique in conventional public faculties.
The rationale for the rise in segregation within the Nineties earlier than the variety of constitution faculties soared is more durable to know. Owens speculates that different college alternative insurance policies, equivalent to the choice to attend any public college inside a district or the creation of latest magnet faculties, might have performed a job, however she doesn’t have the information to show that. White gentrification of cities within the Nineties may be an element, she mentioned, because the white newcomers favored a small set of colleges or despatched their kids to non-public faculties.
“We would simply be catching a second the place there’s been an inflow of 1 group earlier than the opposite group leaves,” mentioned Owens. “It’s laborious to say how the numbers will look 10 years from now.”
- It’s essential to disentangle demographic shifts from segregation will increase
There’s a preferred narrative that segregation has elevated as a result of Black college students usually tend to attend college with different college students who aren’t white, particularly Hispanic college students. However Reardon and Owens say this evaluation conflates demographic shifts within the U.S. inhabitants with segregation. The share of Hispanic college students in U.S. faculties now approaches 30 % and everyone seems to be attending faculties with extra Hispanic classmates. White college students, who used to symbolize 85 % of the U.S. scholar inhabitants in 1970, now make up lower than half.

The blue line within the graph above exhibits how the classmates of the common Black, Hispanic or Native American scholar have elevated from about 55 % Black, Hispanic and Native American college students within the early Seventies to almost 80 % Black, Hispanic and Native American college students in the present day. That implies that the common scholar who will not be white is attending a college that’s overwhelmingly made up of scholars who aren’t white.
However have a look at how the pink line, which depicts white college students, is following the identical path. The typical white scholar is attending a college that moved from 35 % college students who aren’t white within the Seventies to almost 70 % college students who aren’t white in the present day. “It’s totally pushed by Hispanic college students,” mentioned Owens. “Even the ‘white’ faculties in L.A. are 40 % Hispanic.”
I dug into U.S. Division of Training knowledge to point out how extraordinarily segregated faculties have turn out to be much less widespread. The share of Black college students attending a college that’s 90 % or extra Black fell from 23 % in 2000 to 10 % in 2022. Only one in 10 Black college students attends an all-Black or an almost all-Black college. In the meantime, the share of white college students attending a college that’s 90 % or extra white fell from 44 % to 14 % throughout this similar time interval. That’s 1 in 7. Far fewer Black or white college students are studying in faculties which can be nearly totally made up of scholars of their similar race.

On the similar time, the share of Black college students attending a college the place 90 % of scholars aren’t white grew from 37 % in 2000 to 40 % in 2022. However discover the sharp progress of Hispanic college students throughout this era. They went from 7.6 million (fewer than the variety of Black college students) to greater than 13.9 million (nearly double the variety of Black college students).
- Most segregation falls throughout college district boundaries

This bar chart exhibits how faculties are segregated for 2 causes. One is that folks of various races reside on reverse sides of college district traces. Detroit is an excessive instance. The metropolis faculties are dominated by Black college students. In the meantime, the Detroit suburbs, which function unbiased college methods, are dominated by white college students. Virtually all of the segregation is as a result of folks of various races reside in several districts. In the meantime, within the Charlotte, North Carolina, metropolitan space, over half of the segregation displays the uneven distribution of scholars inside college districts.
Nationally, 60 % of the segregation happens due to the Detroit state of affairs: folks reside throughout administrative borders, Reardon and Owens calculated. Nonetheless, 40 % of present segregation is inside administrative borders that policymakers can management.
- Residential segregation is reducing
Folks usually say there’s little that may be carried out about college segregation till we combine neighborhoods. I used to be stunned to study that residential segregation has been declining over the previous 30 years, in line with Reardon’s and Owens’s evaluation of census tracts. Extra Black and white folks reside in proximity to one another. And but, on the similar time, college segregation is getting worse.
All this issues, Reardon mentioned, as a result of youngsters are studying at completely different charges in additional segregated methods. “We all know that extra built-in faculties present extra equal academic alternatives,” he mentioned. “The issues we’re doing with our college methods are making segregation worse.”
Reardon recommends extra reforms to housing coverage to combine neighborhoods and extra “guard rails” on college alternative methods in order that they can’t be allowed to supply extremely segregated faculties.
This story about segregation in faculties in the present day was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, unbiased information group targeted on inequality and innovation in training. Join Proof Factors and different Hechinger newsletters.