"Equality of Educational Opportunity," also known as the Coleman Report, sought answers to two burning questions: (1) How extensive is racial segregation within U.S. schools?; and (2) How adversely does that segregation affect educational opportunities for black students? In answering the first question, James S. Coleman and his…

Purpose: School administrators and policy makers live in a complex, changing policy universe in which there are many competing demands and political pressures. Rarely is there much time to think about sensitive issues of long duration that are not part of the immediate demands they face. This article is about such an issue, a question that will…

Purpose: This article examines factors that affect school board policy making about student diversity within two southern urban-suburban school districts experiencing changing demographics: Jefferson County Public Schools and the Wake County Public School System. Both districts have a history of voluntary integration efforts, and research shows…

This article reviews the impacts of the civil rights policies framed in the 1960s and the anti-civil rights political and legal movements that reversed them. It documents rising segregation by race and poverty. The policy reversals and transformation of U.S. demography require a new civil rights strategy. Vast immigrations, the sinking White…

Southern California is facing a demographic transformation that will become characteristic of the nation as a whole in coming decades. In this research, we present a historical review of the region's attempt to address school inequity, recent enrollment and segregation trends, and an investigation of whether segregation still matters. Our results…

Background/Context: At the close of the first decade of the 21st century, the intersection of race, geography and opportunity is increasingly referred to as spatial racism. School quality and resources, municipal services, employment opportunities, accessibility of transportation, exposure to pollution, and tax rates all vary dramatically across a…

Fifty years after the U.S. Supreme Court held in "Brown v. Board of Education" of Topeka, Kansas, that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional the children in America's urban school districts attend schools that predominantly are racial-isolated. In Minneapolis, the student profile is in stark contrast with the racial…