Are most charter schools more racially segregated than traditional public schools (TPS)? How do local circumstances affect the degree to which charter schools are more racially segregated or diverse than TPSs? As the charter school movement in Michigan and nationwide gains popularity, these questions have become important policy issues. In order…

The once all black Howard High School in Wilmington, Delaware, has had a long and interesting past. For more than a century, the high school attempted to maintain a strong academic core amidst pressure from the white community to become a vocational or "industrial" school, following the Tuskegee model. In this article, the author…

This study details the enactment of attendance laws for black pupils in Missouri and describes their effect by citing examples from two counties: St. Louis County and Polk County. The study is based on a review of primary sources yielding quantitative and qualitative data reported during the first 40 years of the attendance laws. A study of…

The long road of slavery from generation to generation has left a legacy in the mind of African American students that has impacted their achievements in schools. In this project, the struggle of African American students in the public school education will be analyzed from the historical standpoint of view and its impact on their achievements.…

In the face of mounting evidence that schools are losing alarming numbers of young black men, a small band of educators gathered recently in Brookline, Massachusetts, to bolster one response to the crisis: creating public schools designed to serve African-American males. Haunted by the specter of a bleak future for millions of young men--and aware…

May 17, 2004 marked the 50th anniversary of the most significant school segregation case: "Brown v. Board of Education" (1954). While the Brown decision eliminated the legal theory of "separate but equal," the success of the "Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District et al". (1946) case helped boost public sentiment against segregation, setting…

A third of a century ago the schools of the South became the most integrated in the nation, a stunning reversal of a long history of educational apartheid written into the state laws and constitutions of the eleven states of the Confederacy and the six Border states, stretching from Oklahoma to Delaware, all of which had legally imposed de jure…

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, which theoretically ended school segregation in America. But many schools are as segregated today as they were before the ruling, and Black children throughout the United States are performing at the bottom of the American educational system. The nation's capital, Washington,…

The "Brown v. Board of Education" decision remains one of the most important legal decisions in history. Although there were local schemes used to avoid desegregating public schools after the decision, black students experienced declining segregation from the 1950s to the late 1980s. During the 1990s, however, a series of Supreme Court decisions…

The Supreme Court's opinion in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case legally ended decades of racial segregation in America's public schools. Originally named after Oliver Brown, the first of many plaintiffs listed in the lower court case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS, the landmark decision actually resolved five separate…

Recent research on "Brown v. Board of Education" has emphasized continuing disparities in the education of White and African American students. This research has used the failure of desegregation to account for persisting gaps in White and Black school funding, teacher qualifications, and student achievement. But the current focus on the…

It's a little-known fact, but, 50 years ago, the junior high and high schools of Topeka, Kan., were integrated--though in name only. Fear was the order of the day at the high school, where an African American assistant superintendent by the name of Harrison Caldwell roamed the halls as the "White folks' enforcer," ensuring that African…

If one was an African-American student in a large Northern city 50 years ago, his public school, very likely, would have been segregated--even in New England. Only one year earlier, in "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas," the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that legally sanctioned school segregation violated the 14th Amendment…

This report is about the changing patterns of segregation in American public schools through the 2003-2004 school year. It begins by examining the transformation of racial composition in the nation's schools, the dynamic patterns of segregation and desegregation of all racial groups in regions, states, and districts by using data from 1968 until…

This essay describes significant legal and policy system changes in America's 50-year crusade to curtail or eliminate racially segregated public school. In hindsight, a more forceful initial policy system stance regarding judicial enforcement might well have resulted in greater desegregation success. However, after 5 decades of judicial and…