May 17, 2024 marks the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that ruled segregated schools were "inherently unequal." At the time, North Carolina was one of 17 states that enforced de jure segregation, that is, segregation by law. The state of North Carolina and the school districts within…

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education overturned the "separate but equal" principle promulgated in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson. Yet, almost 70 years after Brown, schools continue to be segregated, and the structure of the public education system has fostered inequities across the nation. Although…

According to a report by the UCLA Civil Rights Project (2017), New Jersey is the sixth most segregated state for Black students and the seventh most for Latino students. Black and Latino students in New Jersey also attend schools with large percentages of low-income students. Volumes of research on school segregation show that students attending…

Sixty-five years after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, the federal and judicial role in school desegregation has declined. In a more difficult political and legal environment, it has fallen on school districts to develop and implement voluntary integration plans through diversity-minded student assignment…

Per the Brown V. Board decision (1954), segregation in the American educational system is "unconstitutional", "has no place", and is "inherently unequal". Although American schools have been de jure desegregated for decades, issues of White flight, segregation academies, and poor academic preparation in public schools…

The purpose of this "Equity by Design" brief is to provide information to parents, community members, and school district leaders and teachers about the relationship between housing policy and school policy. Specifically, this brief provides a succinct history of U.S. housing policy, discusses some current educational policies that…

This article examines the emergence of Mexican American school segregation from 1915 to 1935 in Kansas, the state that gave rise to "Brown v. Board of Education" in 1954. Even though Mexicans were not referenced in Kansas's school segregation laws, they were seen and treated as a racially distinct group. White parents and civic…

Background/Context: "Milliken v. Bradley" (1974) ("Milliken I") is a pivotal Supreme Court case that halted a metropolitan school desegregation remedy between Detroit and 53 surrounding suburban school districts. In a 5-4 Supreme Court decision, the "Milliken" ruling was a significant retraction from the landmark…

This article reconstructs the story behind "Freeman v. Pitts" (1992), one of the main US Supreme Court cases that made it easier for school districts to terminate court desegregation orders and that, in turn, helped to propel a widely documented trend: the resegregation of southern schools. The case in part hinged on the question of…

This study uses a North Carolina administrative data set to analyze racial segregation and student achievement in Wake County during race-based and income-based school assignment plans. We find a modest increase in the level of racial segregation in Wake schools during the income-based plan, but compared with other large districts in the state,…

Few policies have affected American society as deeply as those related to the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision, "Brown v. Board of Education." Now, 60 years later, segregation persists along race and class divisions. This case study analysis of a merger that took place between 2010 and 2013 in Memphis and Shelby County,…

Demographics in the U.S. have changed dramatically over the last three decades. Indiana's demographics are changing, too--albeit less dramatically. To explore how demographic shifts are changing the composition of Indiana's schools, the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy (CEEP) uses Common Core of Data (CCD) school enrollment data from the…

In this study, I employ geospatial techniques to assess the impact of school attendance zone "gerrymandering" on the racial/ethnic segregation of schools, using a large national sample of 15,290 attendance zones in 663 districts. I estimate the effect of gerrymandering on school diversity and school district segregation by comparing the…

Virginia has a long and complicated history with school desegregation efforts. It is a state that can lay claim both to advancing the goals of "Brown v. Board of Education" and to impeding them. Over the years, this history has helped shape contemporary patterns of school segregation across Virginia and in her major metropolitan areas.…

The South was the central focus of the "Brown v. Board of Education" decision from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954. The landmark ruling held that laws mandating segregation in the school systems of the eleven states of the Old Confederacy, along with D.C. and six other states, violated the U.S. Constitution. Intense opposition met the…