-
Chapter 3. Public Policy Impacts on School Desegregation, 1970–2000
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
C Ch ha ap pt te er r 3 3 Public Policy Impacts on School Desegregation, 1970–20001 JOHN R. LOGAN, DEIRDRE OAKLEY, AND JACOB STOWELL Public schools have struggled with their response to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. More than 700 separate court cases involving several thousand school districts have dealt with the requirement to desegregate. Yet court decisions in the 1990s paved the way for releasing districts from desegregation orders in many cases even if whites and minorities were again becoming more separate . School districts that voluntarily sought to retain desegregation plans became subject to lawsuits from groups that opposed those plans (as in the famous case of Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina). School researchers from Coleman (Coleman, Kelly, and Moore, 1975) to the present have judged that mandated desegregation is effective in those school districts where sufficient force is brought to bear on school authorities. The evidence from individual districts seems strong indeed. Welch and Light (1987) identified nearly 50 major districts where desegregation orders were implemented during 1968–1984, and where the Index of Dissimilarity between white and minority students declined by as much as 75 points.2 But the corollary is that desegregation policies would wither away without external pressure. This is the perspective reflected in Orfield and Yun’s (2001) report on the effects of “resegregation decisions” — a series of court decisions and changes in the political climate in the 1990s that allowed many districts to be freed from desegregation orders. We take a different position, suggesting: 1) that the adoption of desegregation policies diffused widely after 1970 to encompass parts of the country where there was never much risk of court action, and 2) that because the policy of desegregation was so strongly legitimized in the decades after the Brown decision, court mandates had already lost their relevance when they were being withdrawn in the 1990s. Certainly desegregation occurred in districts where it was not required by court or federal enforcement actions. Rossell and Armor (1996) report that many desegregation plans were voluntary, though perhaps often defensive, and in the long term they were about as effective as mandatory plans. We believe that the combination of Supreme Court decisions, highly visible public battles over their implementation, and the commitment of the federal government to enforce court actions created a national climate in which desegregation orders could be effective. Equally important, they may have created conditions for desegregation even in the absence of court or federal mandates. At the same time, because courts and other agencies made the policy decision to reject inter-district remedies, metropolitan-level segregation, including separation both within and between school districts, declined much less over these three decades. White flight from districts with larger black populations has reduced the inter-racial contact generated by within-district desegregation. Desegregation within districts has left large disparities in poverty concentration for black and white students across districts in the same metropolitan region. In fact, a large share of overall segregation, possibly more than half, is attributable to racial disparities between districts (Rivkin, 1994; Clotfelter, 1999; Reardon, Yun and Eitle, 2000). Accounting for segregation between districts is critical for assessments of the effectiveness of desegregation policies, because desegregation cannot 34 John R. Logan, Deirdre Oakley, and Jacob Stowell increase interracial contact if it motivates white families to abandon racially mixed school districts. Many analysts from the 1960s to the present have viewed white flight as the Achilles heel of desegregation plans. SCHOOL ENROLLMENT DATA SOURCES School enrollment data for this study were culled from two sources. School enrollment data from the late 1960s are drawn from the Franklin Wilson and Karl Taeuber Desegregation Study data file, from which findings were published in Wilson (1985). These data were originally obtained from the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Between 1968 and 1976, OCR produced a data file containing school enrollment by race and segregation indices for a large sample of the nation’s school districts . For those districts that were not surveyed in 1968, we substitute data from either of the two subsequent years (1969–70; 1970–71). For more recent years we rely on the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core Data. For convenience in the following text and tables, “1970” refers to one of the years in the 1968–70 period , “1990” refers to the 1989–90 school year...