The writer is a contributing columnist, based in Chicago
“Unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together.”
Thus did Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African American justice of the US Supreme Court, condemn the court’s ruling in a landmark 1974 civil rights case, Milliken vs Bradley. The ruling turned back the clock on primary and secondary school integration in America, before it had barely begun.
Now the court is again gearing up for what could prove a momentous ruling on race and education in America, as it considers the fate of “affirmative action” in university admissions. But whatever the ruling, education experts say a far bigger problem remains: US primary and secondary (known as K-12) schools are still highly segregated by race, and the situation is worse today than it was 30 years ago.
I know what a segregated education looks like: there was one black child in the elementary school that I attended in the early 1960s, in a Detroit suburb. My high school yearbooks show page after page of white sports teams, a white marching band, a white student council and a white computer club. I counted six black faces in a school of more than 2,500 students.
In Milliken vs Bradley, the Supreme Court shot down the best remedy anyone could think of: Detroit area high school students like me were to have been bussed between outlying white suburbs and (mostly black) inner city schools. Court battles kept the plan on ice until I graduated, when the Supreme Court threw it out. But I was sure back then that the de facto apartheid of my school years would not survive.
I could not have been more wrong. A 2020 report from UCLA’s Civil Rights Project chronicles the backsliding. When I graduated from high school in 1973, less than two-thirds of black students attended predominantly non-white schools; by 2018, 81 per cent did. Moreover, the percentage of black students in majority white schools almost halved between 1991 and 2018, from 34.5 to 19.1 per cent.
“It’s a shocking state of affairs,” says Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University and named party in seminal 2003 affirmative action cases involving the University of Michigan, of which he was then president. After the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling Brown vs Board of Education, which held that state-sanctioned segregation of US public schools was unconstitutional, “you had two decades of very serious work to try to correct for centuries of severe discrimination”, he told me over the phone. “But since then you’ve had a number of decades of slipping back.”
“The Milliken ruling profoundly set the stage,” says Monte Piliawsky, an expert on race and education at Wayne State University in Detroit, “because it held that de facto racial segregation in schools is not unconstitutional.”
Sherri Doughty, one of the authors of a recent report by the US Government Accountability Office on the resegregation of US public schools, says “the face of segregation has changed a lot” since Brown vs Board. Residential segregation explains a lot of today’s school segregation. “Rich people live in certain neighbourhoods and poor people live in other neighbourhoods, and poor people tend to be people of colour,” she says. And since schools tend to be funded largely from local property taxes, this means that non-white schools receive $23bn less funding than predominantly white ones, according to a brief filed by education experts in the recent affirmative action cases.
The GAO report shows some improvement: the percentage of white kids attending 90 per cent white schools declined from 22 to 16 per cent from 2014/15 to 2020/21. But the lead author of the report, Jackie Nowicki, says when black, brown and other non-white students of similar socio-economic status are grouped together, “you really don’t see much change in the last 50 years”.
Soon I will attend what will doubtless be an almost all-white 50th high school reunion. My generation did too little to change that. Will it take another half century to achieve Justice Marshall’s dream of all children learning together? Maybe — if we are lucky.
