Until the last quarter of the 20th century racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. Today's residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but is…

Today, our schools are more racially segregated than at any time in the last 40 years, mainly because the neighborhoods in which they are located are themselves racially segregated. Yet, the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 2007 Parents Involved ruling, prohibited school districts from implementing even modest race-conscious desegregation plans. If…

When the unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was killed by a white Ferguson police officer in August, researcher Richard Rothstein put his other projects aside to investigate a question that many otherwise well-informed people were asking--Why did this St. Louis suburb so closely resemble the stereotype of an urban ghetto, with pervasive poverty…

School reform alone cannot substantially improve the performance of the poorest African American students. This performance problem must be addressed primarily by improving the social and economic conditions that bring too many children to school unprepared to take advantage of what schools have to offer. Integrating disadvantaged black students…

May 17 is the 60th anniversary of "Brown v. Board of Education," the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 decision that prohibited Southern states from segregating schools by race. The "Brown" decision annihilated the "separate but equal" rule, previously sanctioned by the Supreme Court in 1896, that permitted states and school…

Despite the growing ideological divisions, there has been a surprising political convergence on some issues related to urban policy, social services, and housing. From the spread of charter schools and school choice to the expansion of home ownership through financial deregulation, it is apparent that liberals and conservatives agree. Yet these…