In this historical examination, Amato Nocera, Kyle P. Steele, and John Hensley argue that the development of Black rural high schools in the decades leading up to the "Brown v. Board of Education" decision represented the dynamic between standardization, white supremacy, and Black self-definition that has shaped US education reform.…

In this research brief, we describe and decompose school segregation by race and ethnicity in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, in which we include: the District of Columbia; Alexandria, Arlington, and Fairfax County in Virginia; and Montgomery County and Prince George's County in Maryland. We find only modest segregation within all but one…

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…

Mexican Americans have a long history in the struggle to end school segregation and achieve educational equality. Rubén Donato and Jarrod Hanson trace that history through a series of court cases that show how their fight for desegregation both intersects with and differs from the more well-known struggle of Black Americans. In some cases, Mexican…

Understanding how and why rising racial and economic segregation impacts achievement gaps is critical to closing them. Analyzing data from every school district in the U.S., researchers sean reardon, Erin Fahle, Heewon Jang, and Ericka Weathers evaluate how growing racial segregation interacts with unequal economic opportunities and contributes to…

Decades of curriculum research have uncovered a persistent trend: white people are depicted as dominating the history of the United States, whereas communities of color and their experiences are omitted or misrepresented in social studies textbooks and curriculum standards. The message the resulting curriculum sends to children is that the United…

In the wake of political and legal challenges facing race-based integration, districts have turned to socioeconomic integration initiatives in an attempt to achieve greater racial balance across schools. Empirically, the extent to which these initiatives generate such balance is an open question. In this article, we leverage the school assignment…

The "Brown v. Board of Education" (1954) decision was a significant change in social justice and human rights. There is ongoing debate about public education not as a private commodity but as a public good that must be made available on equal terms. Recently, schools are entering an era of second-generation segregation. Poor outcomes,…

Since the Supreme Court's 2007 "Parents Involved" decision, school districts have been pursuing integration in more legally and politically charged environments. The retreat of the federal government in the racial integration of schools is well documented, but less understood is what local school districts are doing to fill that void.…

There is not much debate regarding the "Brown" decision and the significance of the foundation it provided for access to equal educational opportunity and the school funding litigation movement; however, it is important to recognize that the inception of "Brown" can be traced back to a small rural town in South Carolina. Three…

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…

Just a few months after the Supreme Court decided in "Brown v. Board of Education" that segregation in public schools was "inherently unequal" and unconstitutional, a principal from a New York City suburb invited students from several southern schools to see an integrated school in action. Principal Willis Thomson of New…

This dissertation is composed of three papers examining the predictors and consequences of increasing school segregation following widespread release from court ordered desegregation orders. Paper one investigates factors shaping districts' choices to pursue release from desegregation orders. This serves to provide context for papers two and…

In 1969, four years after passage of the Voting Rights Act, African Americans in Greene County, Alabama, reclaimed control of local government, becoming the first community in the South to do so since Reconstruction. A half century later, however, Greene County remains an impoverished and largely segregated area with poor educational outcomes,…

"Kappan"'s editor talks with the distinguished historian Vanessa Siddle Walker about the hidden -- and lost -- tradition of political advocacy by Black educational leaders in the segregated South. To promote equity and excellence for all students, she argues, today's educators will need to recover the sorts of extensive and…