Why Our Schools Are Segregated

We have little hope of remedying school segregation that flows from neighborhood racial isolation if we don’t understand its causes.

Richard Rothstein

ocial and economic disadvantage—not only poverty, but also a host of associated conditions—depresses student performance. Concentrating students with these disadvantages in racially and economically homogenousS schools depresses it even further. Our ability to remedy this situation by integrating schools is hobbled by historical ignorance. Too quickly forgetting 20th-century history, we’ve persuaded ourselves that the residential isolation of low-income black children occurs in practice but is not government-ordained. We think residential segregation is but an accident of economic circumstance, personal preference, and private discrimination. However, residential segregation is actually the result of racially motivated law, public policy, and government- sponsored discrimination. The result of state action, residential segregation reflects an ongoing and blatant constitutional violation that calls for explicit remedy.

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Rothstein_Revised.indd 50 4/9/13 6:59 PM A Question of Disadvantage When a school has a large proportion of students With less access to routine and preventive health care, at risk of failure, the consequences of disadvantage disadvantaged students have greater absenteeism. With are exacerbated. Remediation becomes the norm, less literate parents, they are read to less frequently and teachers have little time to challenge students when young and are exposed to less complex language to overcome personal, family, and community hard- at home. With less adequate housing, they rarely have ships that typically interfere with learning. In schools quiet places to study and may move more frequently, with high student mobility, teachers spend more time changing schools and teachers. repeating lessons for newcomers and have fewer oppor- With fewer opportunities for enriching after-school tunities to adapt instruction to students’ individual and summer activities, their background knowledge strengths and weaknesses. and organizational skills are often less developed. With When classrooms fill with students who come to fewer family resources, their college ambitions are school less ready to learn, teachers must focus more constrained. As these and many other disadvantages on discipline and less on learning. Children in impov- accumulate, children from lower social classes inevi- erished neighborhoods are surrounded by more crime tably have lower average achievement than middle-class and violence and suffer from stress that interferes with children, even with the highest-quality instruction learning. Children with less exposure to mainstream (Rothstein, 2008). society are less familiar with standard English. When few parents have strong educations themselves, schools cannot benefit from parental pressure for a high-quality curriculum. Children have few college-educated role models to emulate and few peers whose families set high academic standards. Discriminatory A Question of Race policy does Across the United States, low-income black children’s isolation has increased. It’s a problem not only of not become poverty but also of race. The share of black students attending schools that are more than 90 percent constitutional minority grew from 34 percent in 1989 to 39 percent in 2007. In 1989, black students typically attended simply because schools in which 43 percent of their fellow students voters were low-income; by 2007, this ﬁgure had risen to 59 percent (Orﬁeld, 2009). approve it. In urban areas, low-income white students are more likely to be integrated into middle-class neighborhoods and are less likely to attend school predominantly with other disadvantaged students. Although immigrant, low-income Hispanic students are also concentrated in schools, by the third generation, their families are more likely to settle in more middle-class neighborhoods. Integrating disadvantaged black students into schools in which more-privileged students predominate can narrow the black–white achievement gap. School integration, both racial and socioeconomic, can com- plement improvements in students’ early childhood care, health, housing, economic security, and informal learning opportunities. But segregated schools with poorly performing students can rarely be turned around while remaining racially isolated. The problems students bring to school are so overwhelming that policy should never assume that even the most skilled and dedicated faculty can overcome them. Although schools can make a

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Rothstein.indd 51 4/3/13 8:12 PM difference, they cannot erase the damage both academics and behavior, benefits purchased apartments in more- and caused by concentrated poverty and of integration for black students are less-affluent areas and randomly racial isolation. unaccompanied by corresponding dete- assigned them to families that were A highly regarded investigation of rioration in white students’ outcomes. eligible for public housing. Children— Chicago school reform (Bryk, Sebring, Ethnographic studies of students nearly three-quarters were black—who Allensworth, Luppescu, & Easton, who participated in racial integration moved into and attended schools in 2010) attempted to distinguish the programs confirm that students of more affluent neighborhoods out- characteristics of schools in which stu- different races benefit from working performed comparable children dents improved from those in which together and are better prepared for who attended schools with higher they stagnated. Schools with well- civic engagement. Interviews with adult proportions of low-income students developed and aligned curriculums, graduates of integrated high schools in (Schwartz, 2010). good teacher–principal collaboration, 1980 found that the black graduates felt A third and more ambitious and concerted efforts to involve parents experiment curiously showed that made greater progress. But such reform residents who moved to lower-poverty programs made little or no difference neighborhoods didn’t improve their in neighborhoods of concentrated academic achievement or obtain poverty, where nearly all students were Even the most better employment. But they did gain residentially mobile, were black, and better physical and mental health had low-income parents with little committed advocates (Ludwig, 2012). formal education and a likelihood of Overall, research supports racial inte- unemployment. The investigators con- of racial diversity gration’s importance in narrowing both cluded, “Our findings about schooling academic and noncognitive achievement in truly disadvantaged communities in schools have gaps. The prudent policy is to move offer a sobering antidote to a heady forgotten, or failed forward to integrate schools. political rhetoric arguing that all schools can be improved” (p. 210). to learn, the history De Jure, Not De Facto In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court The Benefits of Integration of residential racial made school integration more dif- Accumulating evidence confirms the ficult when it prohibited the Louisville, need for school integration. Black segregation. Kentucky, and Seattle, Washington, students’ achievement decreases as school districts from making racial their schoolwide proportion grows balance a factor in assigning students (Hanushek, Kain, & Rivkin, 2009). to schools in cases where applicant Attendance at high-poverty schools more comfortable and confident about numbers exceeded available seats.1 The causes disadvantaged students’ perfor- competing in a predominantly white plurality opinion by Chief Justice John mance to decline (Rumberger, 2007). economy (Wells, Holme, Revilla, & Roberts called student categorization A review of studies evaluating court- Atanda, 2009). by race unconstitutional unless it was ordered desegregation concluded that Experiments add evidence. In one, designed to reverse the effects of explicit “the circumstantial case linking school Chicago public housing residents rules that segregated students by race. segregation to the test score gap is received vouchers to subsidize moves Desegregation efforts are impermissible compelling” (Vigdor & Ludwig, 2008, to private apartments. Whether they if students are racially isolated not p. 208). were offered apartments in racially from government policy but because of Perhaps even more important than isolated urban neighborhoods or in societal discrimination, economic char- narrowing the test score gap are the pos- predominantly white suburbs was a acteristics, or what Roberts termed “any itive behavioral outcomes from school matter of chance. Adolescent children number of innocent private decisions, racial integration: improved graduation who moved to the suburbs fared better including voluntary housing choices.” rates, higher rates of employment, than those who stayed in the city: They Constitutionally forbidden segre- and higher earnings in adulthood, as had lower dropout rates and were more gation is commonly termed de jure, well as avoidance of teen childbearing, likely to attend college (Kaufman & whereas racial isolation independent delinquency, homicide, and incar- Rosenbaum, 1992). of state action is termed de facto. It’s ceration (Guryan 2004; Johnson, 2011; In another experiment, Maryland’s generally accepted today, even by Weiner, Lutz, & Ludwig, 2010). For Montgomery County government sophisticated policymakers, that black

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Rothstein.indd 52 4/3/13 8:12 PM students’ racial isolation is now de facto, mayors and other public officials often especially in northern metropolitan organized homeowners’ associations areas of the United States. Even the dis- and prodded them to enact racial deed senters in the Louisville–Seattle case, restrictions. The Internal Revenue led by Justice Stephen Breyer, agreed Service (IRS) extended tax exemptions with this assumption. Breyer argued not only to churches where such associ- that school districts should be permitted ations were frequently based and whose to address de facto racial homogeneity clergy were their officers, but also to the voluntarily, even if not constitutionally associations themselves. required to do so. But he accepted that, Churches were not alone in benefiting for the most part, Louisville and Seattle from unconstitutional tax exemptions. schools were not segregated by state Robert Hutchins, mostly remembered action and thus not constitutionally now for promoting the liberal arts in required to desegregate. college curriculums, was president and This is a dubious proposition. Cer- chancellor of the tax-exempt University tainly, schools in northern metropolitan of Chicago from 1929 to 1951. He had areas have not been segregated by pol- and the Veterans Administration (VA) the university sponsor associations icies assigning blacks to some schools ﬁnanced the movement of working and to enforce racially restrictive deeds in and whites to others; they’re segregated lower-middle-class whites (including its surrounding neighborhood, and because their neighborhoods are racially those living in public housing) out of he employed the university’s legal homogenous. But neighborhoods didn’t cities, but denied mortgage insurance department to evict black families who get that way from “innocent private to blacks. The FHA and VA prohibited moved nearby in defiance of his policy decisions” or, as the late Justice Potter developers from selling to blacks and (Hirsch, 1983). Stewart once put it, from “unknown required developers to write deed As it was constitutionally required to and perhaps unknowable factors such restrictions that prohibited resale of do, the IRS revoked the tax exemption as in-migration, birth rates, economic homes to what the FHA called an of Bob Jones University in Greenville, changes, or cumulative acts of private “incompatible racial element” (Roth- South Carolina,4 because it prohibited racial fears.”2 stein, 2012; Thomas & Ritzdorf, 1997). interracial dating, but the government In truth, residential segregation’s Although a 1948 Supreme Court never challenged the pervasive use of causes are both knowable and known: ruling3 barred courts from henceforth tax favoritism by universities, churches, 20th-century federal, state, and local enforcing racial deed restrictions, pat- and other organizations to enforce racial policies that were explicitly designed terns of court-enforced suburban seg- segregation. to separate the races and whose effects regation were well-established by then, Where integrated or mostly black endure today. In any meaningful sense, and the restrictions themselves were neighborhoods were too close to white neighborhoods—and, in consequence, deemed lawful for another 30 years. communities or central business dis- schools—have been segregated de jure. The court provided no remedy for black tricts, federal and local officials routed American Apartheid (Massey & Denton, potential purchasers who had been interstate highways through those 1993) describes only a few of these unconstitutionally excluded from white neighborhoods for the explicit purpose many public policies—and the title is suburbs when they were still affordable. of relocating black populations (Mohl, no exaggeration. Bank regulators from the Federal 2002). In most cases, the only options Reserve and other agencies approved for those whose homes were razed An Eye-Opening History Lesson redlining policies by which banks and were public housing high-rises or over- The federal government led the savings institutions refused loans to crowded ghettos (Hirsch, 2000). development of policies contributing families in predominantly black (or State policy also contributed—for to segregation. From its New Deal even changing) neighborhoods and to example, in the highly regulated real inception, federal public housing policy black families who attempted to pur- estate industry. State commissions respected existing “neighborhood chase homes in white suburbs. Indeed, suspend or even revoke real estate composition” by placing projects for the very concept of redlining was first licenses for professional and personal low-income blacks in black ghettos and devised in maps created by the Home infractions, from mishandling escrow those for middle-income whites in white Owners’ Loan Corporation, a New Deal accounts to failing to pay personal neighborhoods. As suburbs grew, the agency (Jackson, 1985). child support. But although real estate Federal Housing Administration (FHA) For existing homes in urban areas, agents openly enforced segregation,

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Rothstein.indd 53 4/3/13 8:14 PM state authorities didn’t punish brokers for racial discrimination; and they rarely do so even today, when racial steering TRENDS of the TIMES Poverty by race: and discriminatory practices remain ■ 39 percent of black children widespread. ■ 34 percent of Hispanic children Local officials played roles as well. In northern cities and suburbs, police and ■ 13 percent of sian children prosecutors conspired with vigilantes ■ 12 percent of hite children and leaders of white mobs to force out black families who succeeded in pur- Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 2011 Current Population Survey. chasing or renting in white neighborhoods. Arrests were almost never made, and prosecutions were even rarer (Rubinowitz & Perry, 2002). blacks in other neighborhoods, and cars driven by blacks into the suburb White homeowners’ resistance to the FHA and VA ensured that devel- (Russell, 1987). Recent reports by the black neighbors was fed by deterio- oping areas were covered by racial deed Seattle Office for Civil Rights charge rating ghetto conditions, supported by restrictions. In 1954, when a black man that black homeowners and renters municipalities’ discriminatory denial of moved to a white neighborhood, his still face discriminatory treatment by adequate public services. In the ghetto, home was bombed— and Kentucky regulated banks and state-licensed real garbage was collected less frequently; put the seller on trial for sedition. In estate agents when these black families neighborhoods were rezoned for mixed general, when black families attempted attempt to move out of predominantly (that is, industrial or even toxic) use; to break out of the ghetto, movers black neighborhoods (City of Seattle, streets remained unpaved; and even received no police protection, and vio- 2012; Davis, 2005). water and power were less often pro- lence drove them back. vided (Kerner Commission, 1968). Seattle, as elsewhere, developed An Obligation to Fulﬁ ll White homeowners came to see these suburbs that were closed to blacks Racial segregation’s persistence is conditions as characteristics of black and with deeds that barred resale to attributable to these policies, some con- residents, not as results of racially moti- them. Restrictions were included in tinuing to this day. Segregation is now vated city policy. formal plat plans recorded with the locked in place by exclusionary zoning city and county. Enforcement was laws in suburbs where black families State-Sponsored Segregation strict. In 1948, the Seattle Real Estate once could have afforded to move in the These federal, state, and local actions Board expelled a broker for the rare absence of ofﬁ cial segregation but can combined to segregate our metropolitan act of selling to a black purchaser in a afford to do so no longer, given appre- areas and have been documented, white neighborhood; the state licensing ciated property values. to varying degrees, in virtually every agency did not object. In 1957, a state Had the Louisville and Seattle dis- northern city. Examples abound in law prohibited racial discrimination in tricts documented how their school seg- Louisville and Seattle as well. FHA-insured housing, but the Wash- regation resulted from state-sponsored In Louisville, a 1960s urban renewal ington Supreme Court overturned residential segregation, the Supreme project relocated 885 black families the law and the U.S. Supreme Court Court majority might still have barred from near downtown to a neighbor hood declined to review it (Taylor, 1994). desegregation, but at least Justice Breyer that planners designated for black resi- In 1963, the Seattle City Council might have made a stronger case in his dence. In fact, the neighbor hood had adopted a fair housing law, but a dissent. As it is, even the most com- been opened to black residence only in success ful campaign to repeal it was mitted advocates of racial diversity 1937, after a catastrophic flood induced accompanied by violent attacks against in schools have forgotten, or failed to whites to leave. During World War II, blacks who had purchased homes learn, the history of residential racial the federal government placed housing outside Seattle’s ghetto. Discriminatory segregation, and so rely on weaker in that barely habitable neighbor hood policy does not become constitutional arguments. for black workers who came to Louis- simply because voters approve it. Reacquainting ourselves with that ville from rural areas to work in military When black basketball star Bill history is a step toward confronting supply plants (Blum, 2006). Russell moved to an affluent Seattle it. When knowledge of that history Federally regulated banks in suburb in 1973, police routinely becomes commonplace, we will con- Louisville didn’t approve loans for harassed him by following him and any clude that Louisville, Seattle, and other

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Rothstein.indd 54 4/3/13 8:12 PM racially segregated school districts and dropout rates. American Economic Review, housing: Revisiting the federal role. metropolitan areas not only have per- 94(4), 919–943. Poverty and Race, 21(6), 1–2, 13–16. mission, but also a constitutional obli- Hanushek, E. A., Kain, J. F., & Rivkin, Retrieved from http://prrac.org/ S. G. (2009). New evidence about Brown newsletters/novdec2012.pdf gation, to integrate. v. Board of Education: The complex Rubinowitz, L. S., & Perry, I. (2002). That obligation cannot be fulfilled effects of school racial composition on Crimes without punishment: White by school districts alone. Many ghettos achievement. Journal of Labor Economics, neighbors’ resistance to black entry. are now so geographically isolated from 27(3), 349–383. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, white suburbs that voluntary choice, Hirsch, A. R. (1983). Making the second 92(2), 335–428. ghetto: Race and housing in Chicago, 1940– Rumberger, R. W. (2007). Parsing the data magnet schools, or fiddling with school 1960. Chicago: University of Chicago on student achievement in high-poverty attendance zones can no longer enable Press. schools. North Carolina Law Review, 85, many low-income black children to Hirsch, A. R. (2000). Choosing segregation. 1293–1314. attend predominantly middle-class Federal housing policy between Shelley Russell, K. (1987, June 14). Growing up schools. and Brown. In J. F. Bauman, R. Biles, & with privilege and prejudice. New York K. M. Szylvian (Eds.), From tenements Times Magazine. Retrieved from www Narrowing the achievement gap will to the Taylor homes: In search of an urban .nytimes.com/1987/06/14/magazine/ require housing desegregation, which housing policy in twentieth century America growing-up-with-privilege-and-prejudice history also teaches cannot be a vol- (pp. 206–225). University Park: Pennsyl- .html untary matter but is a constitutional vania State University Press. Schwartz, H. (2010). Housing policy is school necessity—that is, voiding exclusionary Jackson, K. T. (1985). Crabgrass frontier. policy: Economically integrative housing New York: Oxford University Press. promotes academic success in Montgomery zoning laws, placing low- and moderate- Johnson, R. C. (2011). Long-run impacts County, Maryland. New York: Century income housing in predominantly white of school desegregation and school quality Foundation. Retrieved from http://tcf.org/ suburbs, and ending federal subsidies on adult attainments (Working Paper assets/downloads/tcf-Schwartz.pdf for communities that fail to reverse No. 16664). Washington, DC: National Taylor, Q. (1994). The forging of a black com- policies that led to racial exclusion. Bureau of Economic Research. munity: Seattle’s central district from 1870 Relearning our racial history, Kaufman, J. E., & Rosenbaum, J. E. (1992). through the civil rights era. Seattle: Uni- The education and employment of low- versity of Washington Press. however, should be the first step. L income black youth in white suburbs. Thomas, J. M., & Ritzdorf, M. (Eds.). Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, (1997). Urban planning and the African 1Parents Involved in Community Schools 14(3), 229–240. American community: In the shadows. v. Seattle School District No. 1, 551 U.S. Kerner Commission. (1968). Report of the Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. 701 (2007). National Advisory Commission on Civil Vigdor, J. L., & Ludwig, J. (2008). Seg- 2Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 Disorders. Washington, DC: U.S. Gov- regation and the test score gap. In K. (1974). ernment Printing Office. Magnuson & J. Waldfogel (Eds.), Steady 3Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948). Ludwig, J. (2012). Guest editor’s intro- gains and stalled progress: Inequality and the 4Bob Jones University v. United States, duction. Cityscape: A Journal of Policy black-white test score gap (pp. 181–211). 461 U.S. 574 (1983). Development and Research, 14(2), 1–28. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. References Retrieved from www.huduser.org/ Weiner, D. A., Lutz, B. F., & Ludwig, J. Blum, S. H. (2006). Race, housing, and the portal/periodicals/cityscpe/vol14num2/ (2010). The effects of school desegregation making of twentieth-century Louisville, Ken- Cityscape_July2012_guest_introduction on crime (Working Paper No. 15380). tucky. Doctoral dissertation, University of .pdf Washington, DC: National Bureau of Eco- Kentucky, Lexington. Massey, D. S., & Denton, N. A. (1993). nomic Research (August 16 revision of Bryk, A. S., Sebring, P. B., Allensworth, E., American apartheid: Segregation and the September 2009). Luppescu, S., & Easton, J. O. (2010). making of the underclass. Cambridge, MA: Wells, A. S, Holme, J. J., Revilla, A. T., & Organizing schools for improvement: Lessons Harvard University Press. Atanda, A. K. (2009). Both sides now: The from Chicago. Chicago: University of Mohl, R. A. (2002). The interstates and the story of school desegregation’s graduates. Chicago Press. cities: Highways, housing, and the freeway Berkeley: University of California Press. City of Seattle. (2012, April 25). City of revolt. Urban expressways and the central Seattle: 2011 Fair housing testing. Seattle, cities in postwar America. Washington, Copyright © 2013 Richard Rothstein WA: Seattle Office for Civil Rights. DC: Poverty and Race Research Action Retrieved from www.seattle.gov/civil Council. Retrieved from www.prrac.org/ rights/Documents/2011FairHousing pdf/mohl.pdf TestingReportfinal.pdf Orfield, G. (2009). Reviving the goal of an integrated society: A 21st century challenge. Richard Rothstein ([email protected]) Davis, K. (2005). Housing segregation in is research associate at the Economic Seattle. Seattle, WA: Seattle Office for Los Angeles, CA: Civil Rights Project/ Proyecto Derechos Civiles. Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., Civil Rights. Retrieved from www.seattle and senior fellow of the Chief Justice .gov/civilrights/documents/housing_seg_ Rothstein, R. (2008). Whose problem is Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social in_seattle-2005.pdf poverty? Educational Leadership, 65(7), Policy at the University of California Guryan, J. (2004). Desegregation and black 8–13. Rothstein, R. (2012). Race and public (Berkeley) School of Law.

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