This document summarizes the history of school desegregation efforts in the United States from the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision declaring racial segregation unconstitutional to more recent voluntary integration plans. It discusses key Supreme Court rulings, the resegregation of schools, and strategies that school districts have used to promote racially integrated schools within the legal guidelines established by the Supreme Court, including considering neighborhood demographics rather than individual student race.

1. john a. powell
Executive Director, The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race &
Ethnicity and Williams Chair in Civil Rights & Civil Liberties, Moritz
College of Law
A Presentation for the Ohio State Board of Education
June 8, 2009

3.  In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme
Court announced that segregation on the
basis of race was unconstitutional, and that
‗separate educational facilities are inherently
unequal.‘ 347 U.S. 495 (1954).

4.  Although an enormous moral victory, the
Brown decision did not dismantle segregative
practices nor produce an integrated society.
 Instead, the decision provoked massive
resistance, and a full decade passed with
virtually no progress in desegregating
schools.
The Crisis in Little Rock, 1958

5.  The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
empowered the Department of Justice to
initiate desegregation lawsuits independent
of private plaintiffs.
 Subsequently, the Supreme Court issued a
number of important decisions that lent
support to desegregation efforts.

6.  In Green v. County School Board (1968), the
Court defined what desegregation
required, the elimination of segregation ‗root
and branch.‘
 In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg
(1971), the Court ruled that lower courts
could order busing to achieve desegregated
student assignments.

7.  In Keyes v. School Dist. No. 1 (1973), the
Court extended school desegregation
obligations to systems outside of the South
that had employed discriminatory policies.
 Furthermore, this is true whether school
districts or officials contributed either in the
creation or ―maintenance‖ of segregated
schooling. Inaction as well as action could be
a basis for liability.

8.  In Penick v. Columbus Board of Education
(1977), judge Robert Duncan ruled that the
Columbus Board of Education knowingly kept
white and black students apart by creating school
boundaries that sent black students to
predominantly black schools and white students
to predominantly white schools, and had failed to
use its authority to alleviate existing racial
imbalances.
 The United States Supreme Court affirmed.
Distinguished Jurist
Robert M. Duncan

9.  By the mid-1970s, the Court began to slowly
withdraw its support for school
desegregation.
 In Miliken v. Bradley (1974), the Court ruled
that lower courts could not order an ‗inter-
district‘ remedy that encompassed suburban
districts without first showing that the
suburban district was liable.

10.  The effect of the decision was to sanction
white flight and jurisdictional fragmentation
to escape the Brown mandate.
 Between 1950 and 1990, the number of
municipalities in major metropolitan areas
grew from 193 to 9,600. During the 1990s
alone, the suburban population grew 17.7%
compared to 9% for cities.

11.  The 1990s ushered in another significant
shift Between 1991 and 1995 (see Jenkins),
the Supreme Court invited school districts to
bring proceedings to terminate desegregation
obligations.
 Even though severe racial disparities and
racial isolation remained, this marked the
beginning of the end of court supervision and
the return local control of schools.

13.  U.S. public schools are now more than a decade
into rapid resegregation:
◦ Almost 1 in 6 black and Latino students are hyper-
segregated, and attend schools in which the student
body is 99-100% minority.
◦ Nearly 40% of black and Latino students attend
‗intensely segregated schools,‘ in which 90-100% of the
students are minority.
◦ Whites are the most isolated group of students. The
typical white student attends a school that is 80%
white, which is much higher than their share of overall
public school enrollment.

14.  Similar to the trends in the nation, Columbus
witnessed a sharp out migration of white
population to the suburbs in 1970‘s as a result of
court-ordered busing.
 The urban core remains heavily minority and the
extreme northern, northwestern, and
southerwestern surbuban areas remains heavily
white.
 There exists a transition zone between highly
African-American dominated and White
dominated public elementary schools.

15. School Dissimilarity Index 1970, 1990, 2000
(African American - White Segregation)
90.0
82.6
80.0
81.6 69.0
70.0
66.8
60.0
50.0
53.4
40.0
30.0
20.0
23.2
10.0
1970 1990 2000
All Districts in Columbus Region Columbus Public School District

18.  The segregation of students is actually more
severe than residential segregation patterns
because of racial concentration.
 Since 1970 African Americans have become
less concentrated in Franklin County
 But few African Americans have moved
beyond the boundaries of the Columbus
Public Schools since 1970

19. N
African American Population
W E
S in Franklin County by Census Tract 1970
Prepared by:
Kirwan Institute for the
Study of Race & Ethnicity
Date: 10/13/05
Source: Census, NCDB
Legend:
Columbus Public
School District
Highways
% African American
0 - 5%
5 - 10%
10 to 25%
25 to 50%
50 to 100%

20. N
African American Population
W E
S in Franklin County by Census Tract 1980
Prepared by:
Kirwan Institute for the
Study of Race & Ethnicity
Date: 10/13/05
Source: Census, NCDB
Legend:
Columbus Public
School District
Highways
% African American
0 - 5%
5 - 10%
10 to 25%
25 to 50%
50 to 100%

21. N
African American Population
W E
S in Franklin County by Census Tract 2000
Prepared by:
Kirwan Institute for the
Study of Race & Ethnicity
Date: 10/13/05
Source: Census, NCDB
Legend:
Columbus Public
School District
Highways
% African American
0 - 5%
5 - 10%
10 to 25%
25 to 50%
50 to 100%

23.  After decades of integration efforts and hard
won gains, many districts concerned that the
reversion to neighborhood schools and local
control would result in rapid resegregation
implemented voluntary integration plans.
 This refers to integration efforts and
strategies that a school system might employ,
absent a legal obligation to do so.

24.  School districts around the country, from
Boston to Berkeley, implemented voluntary
integration plans.
 These plans included redrawing attendance
zones, student transfers, magnet school
programs to retain diverse schools amidst a
backdrop of residential segregation.

25.  Seattle implemented a choice plan that would assign
students to oversubscribed schools on the basis of a
series of tiebreakers.
1. sibling attendance.
2. Racial imbalance – 15% plus/minus from racial makeup of school
system as a whole.
3. School distance.
 After 25 years of court supervised desegregation, Louisville
implemented a managed choice plan that includes broad racial
guidelines which requires each school to seek black enrollment
of at least 15% and no more than 50%.
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26.  Parents of non-minority students sued the
Seattle and Jefferson County school
districts, claiming that the student assignment
plans denied their children the equal protection
of law under the 14th Amendment to the US
Constitution.
 In 2007, the Supreme Court sided with the
plaintiffs and declared, in a 4-1-4 decision, that
the Seattle and Louisville school districts used
impermissible racial classifications in student
assignment in violation of the Constitution.

27.  The Court found that the plans at issue were
not narrowly tailored. The use of the racial
tiebreaker within a particular +/- range was
Constitutional infirm.
 However, the Court also allowed for the use
of race in some circumstances and affirmed
maintaining diverse schools—as well as the
prevention of racially isolated schools—as
compelling state interests.

28. Justice Kennedy‘s opinion is controlling as the fifth vote.
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29. J. Kennedy, Concurring
That the school districts consider these plans to
be necessary should remind us that our highest
aspirations are yet unfulfilled. School districts
can seek to reach Brown‘s objective of equal
educational opportunity. But the solutions
mandated by these school districts must
themselves be lawful.
In my view, the state-mandated racial classifications at
issue, official labels proclaiming the race of all persons
in a broad class of citizens – elementary school students
in one case, high school students in another – are
unconstitutional as the cases now come to us.

30. ―If school authorities are concerned that the student-
body compositions of certain schools interfere with the
objective of offering an equal educational opportunity
to all of their students, they are free to devise race-
conscious measures to address the problem in a
general way without treating each student in a different
fashion soley on the basis of systematic, individual
typing by race.
School boards may pursue the goal of bringing together students of
diverse backgrounds and races through other means, including strategic
site selection of new schools; drawing attendance zones with general
recognition of the demographics of the neighborhoods; allocating
resources for special programs; recruiting students and faculty in a
targeted fashion; and tracking enrollments, performance, and other
statistics by race. These mechanisms are race-conscious but do not lead
to different treatment based on a classifications that tells each student he
or she is to be defined by race.
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31.  School districts are free to pursue
socioeconomic integration, using indicators
such as income, wealth, parental educational
attainment.
 Districts can also be ―race conscious,‖
according to Kennedy, when they drew school
boundaries, chose sites for new schools and
directed money to particular programs. But
they are limited to taking into account the
racial composition of a neighborhood rather
than the race of an individual student.

32.  Opportunity mapping of educational opportunity is a
multi-factor approach that looks at many indicators
which correlate with educational performance.
 The idea behind this strategy is to identify
neighborhoods which are the most disadvantageous
environments for educational success, looking at a
number of factors producing cumulative disadvantage
for students residing in these neighborhoods.
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33.  Some possible indicators:
◦ Per-pupil Expenditures
◦ Parental educational level
◦ Student Poverty Rate/Free and Reduced Lunch
◦ Median Household Income
◦ Test Scores for Neighborhood Schools
◦ Teacher Quality (Experience, Qualifications, etc)
 To map educational opportunity in the Seattle
and Louisville districts, our analysis focused
on factors correlated with students‘ academic
performance and achievement.

34.  While concentrated neighborhood poverty is
often correlated with race, race is not reducible
to income differentials, and therefore a multi-
factor analysis better captures a significant
number of students of color, rather than using
poverty rates alone.
 In fact, the study results were striking: in
Louisville, only 56% of families in high poverty
neighborhoods were African American, whereas
nearly 76% of the families residing in low
educational opportunity areas were African
American.

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41.  The Jefferson County School District adopted
a modified version of our recommendation.
◦ They divided the region into two geographic areas,
with the diversity guideline that each school within
the cluster have no less than 15% and no more than
50% of its student population from schools in
Geographic area A.
◦ The indicators they chose to create these
geographic zones are:
 Median household income
 Racial composition of the resides area
 Average educational attainment of the adults in the
resides area.

42.  The Berkeley, California, school district
implemented a similar plan. It looked at:
◦ Average neighborhood household income
◦ Parental educational level of adults at the
neighborhood level
◦ Racial composition of the neighborhood
 This plan was recently upheld in the
California court of appeals. The court held
that using demographic information at the
neighborhood level, including racial data,
does not classify students on the basis of
race nor discriminate on the basis of race.

44.  The procedures implemented by the Ohio
State Board of Education resolution adopted
on June 12, 1978, to monitor and assess the
racial balance within elementary and
secondary schools is entirely legal and would
provide critical information on the degree of
diversity in Ohio schools.

45.  Siting schools in areas that would naturally draw
a diverse student body was another race-
conscious suggestion in Kennedy‘s opinion that
the State of Ohio could use to achieve integrative
outcomes.
 Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, requires
its school board to consider the socioeconomic
diversity of nearby housing and the availability of
public transit lines decisions about where to
build schools. This criteria could conceivable
include consideration of neighborhood racial
compositions.

46.  Interdistrict magnet schools are one of the
remedies that Connecticut adopted in response
to a state Supreme Court ruling that the state
desegregate schools in the Hartford region.
Students are chosen from a lottery of applicants
from both Hartford and suburban districts with
preference given to siblings of students already
attending the school.
 The Board could recommend the implementation
of inter-district transfers or the development of
inter-district magnet schools as a means of
alleviating racial isolation within Ohio schools
and increasing educational performance.

47.  St. Louis operates a city-suburban transfer
program, originally implemented in the early 1980s
under court order and continued under voluntary
terms since 1999. Recently, the participating districts
extended the program through at least 2013-14.
 At its peak, nearly half of St. Louis children were
participating in one of the interdistrict programs
(Heaney and Uchitelle, 2004). St. Louis suburban
districts were required to participate and to accept
enough St. Louis students to meet targets for
minority percentage. The state initially bore the costs
of the program (such as transportation, staff to help
students adjust) but since 1999, the programs have
been funded through a voter-approved tax increase.

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