Socially and economically disadvantaged children perform, on average, at lower levels of achievement than advantaged children. Disadvantaged children’s obstacles to achievement are exacerbated when these children are concentrated in racially and economically homogeneous and isolated schools. Meaningful narrowing of the achievement gap will not be possible without breaking down these barriers and integrating African American children into middle-class schools.
Otherwise informed opinion today accepts that school segregation is “de facto” because schools are located in racially homogenous neighborhoods, and residential segregation today is also mostly “de facto,” a result of personal choices, financial means, or demographic changes. Racial isolation is not, this contemporary consensus concludes, a product of state action and thus not a constitutional violation. Partly from this conviction, there is little support for aggressive policies, including race-conscious ones, to integrate metropolitan areas, a necessary precondition for meaningful school integration.
The Supreme Court’s view, expressed most recently in the Louisville-Seattle school integration case (“Parents Involved,” 2007), that there is no constitutionally mandated remedy for existing (“de facto”) segregation is also widely accepted, and was embraced not only by the plurality but by concurring and dissenting opinions in that case as well.
But “de facto” is a flawed description. Most Americans have forgotten that residential racial segregation, North and South, was created and perpetuated by, and continues to exist today because of racially motivated and racially explicit federal, state, and local banking regulation, mortgage guarantee, public housing, law enforcement, planning and zoning, highway and school construction, urban renewal and other policies that succeeded in their explicit purpose of creating racially segregated metropolises. The racial segregation of major urban areas and their schools is today at historically high levels; as the product of public policy, it offends the Constitution. Familiarizing Americans with the history of state-sponsored segregation will be necessary before support will be possible for policies to undo it.
Richard Rothstein is a Research Associate of the Economic Policy Institute and Senior Fellow at the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy, University of California (Berkeley) School of Law. Contact him at rrothstein@epi.org or rrothstein@law.berkeley.edu
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