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Collection Civil Rights History Project

School segregation and integration.

The massive effort to desegregate public schools across the United States was a major goal of the Civil Rights Movement. Since the 1930s, lawyers from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had strategized to bring local lawsuits to court, arguing that separate was not equal and that every child, regardless of race, deserved a first-class education. These lawsuits were combined into the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case that outlawed segregation in schools in 1954. But the vast majority of segregated schools were not integrated until many years later. Many interviewees of the Civil Rights History Project recount a long, painful struggle that scarred many students, teachers, and parents.

Three years before Brown v. Board in November 1951, students in a civics class at the segregated black Adkin High School in Kinston, North Carolina, discussed what features an ideal school should have for a class assignment. When they realized that the local white high school indeed had everything they had imagined, the seeds were planted for a student-led protest. Without the assistance from any adults, these students confronted the local school board about the blatant inequality of local schools. When the board ignored their request for more funding, the students met by themselves to plan what to do next. In a group interview with these former students , John Dudley remembers, “So, that week, leading to Monday, we strategized. And we had everybody on board, 720 students. We told them not to tell your parents or your teacher what’s going on. And do you believe to this day, 2013, nobody has ever told me that an adult knew what was going on. Kids.” They decided on a coded phrase that was read during morning announcements. Every student in the school walked out, picked up placards that had been made in advance, and marched downtown to protest. The students refused to go back to school for a week, and eighteen months later, Adkin High School was renovated and given a brand-new gymnasium. It would remain segregated until 1970, however.

Desegregation was not always a battle in every community in the South. Lawrence Guyot , who later became a leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, grew up in Pass Christian, a city on the Mississippi Gulf Coast that was influenced by the strong labor unions in the shipyard industry and the Catholic Church. He explains how the Catholic schools were desegregated there: “The Catholic Church in 1957 or '58 made a decision that they were going to desegregate the schools. They did it this way. The announcement was we have two programs. We have excommunication and we have integration. Make your choice by Friday. Now there was violence going on in Louisiana. Nothing happened on the Gulf Coast. I learned firsthand that institutions can really have an impact on social policy.”

In an interview about his mother, civil rights activist Gayle Jenkins, Willie “Chuck” Jenkins describes how she demanded that he would be the plaintiff in a school desegregation suit, Jenkins v. Bogalusa School Board in Louisiana. He became the first African American student to attend the white Bogalusa Junior High School in 1967 and remembers how he had one foot in each world, but was increasingly alienated from both: “And I caught a lot of slack, like, from the black community, because they used to say, ‘Oh, you think you’re something because you’re going to the white school.’ They didn’t know I was catching holy hell at the white school. I had no friends, you know. So, it was just always a conflict.” But in the end, he thinks it was worth it. He states, “But it was hard, but you know what? If I had it to do all over again, I would do it exactly the same way. Because it was a cause that was well worth the outcome, even though I feel like people in Bogalusa are still not as accepting as they could be.” The high school continued to have a separate white prom and a black prom until very recently. But his mother, Gayle Jenkins, would serve on the Bogalusa School Board for twenty-seven years.

Julia Matilda Burns describes her experiences as a teacher, parent, and school board member in Holmes County, Mississippi. Her husband was an active civil rights worker and her job as a teacher was threatened when she associated with members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). When her son and other African American children attempted to integrate a school in Tchula in 1965, it was burned down twice. The local white community started their own private white academy, a common plan to evade integration across the South. She continued to teach in a public school and discusses the difficulties rural African American children and young adults face in getting an equal education today.

While Brown v. Board of Education and many other legal cases broke down the official barriers for African Americans to gain an equal education, achieving this ideal has never been easy or simple. The debate continues today among policy makers, educators, and parents about how to close the achievement gap between minority and white children. Ruby Sales , a former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) member who later became the founder and director of the nonprofit organization Spirt House, points out that few people look to the past for answers to our current problems in education: “…We have been dealing with the counter-culture of education, and what might we learn from that counter-culture during segregation that would enable black students not to be victims in public schools today. And one of the things that disturbed me so tremendously – and this is about narrative again: these southern black teachers created outstanding students and leaders. And many of them still exist. And no one has bothered to ask them, “How did you do it? What might we learn from you? What were your strategies? How did you deal with complicated situations? How did you invigorate young people to believe that they could make a difference even when the white world said that they couldn’t?”

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Brown v. Board of Education

By: History.com Editors

Updated: February 27, 2024 | Original: October 27, 2009

Mother and Daughter at U.S. Supreme CourtNettie Hunt and her daughter Nickie sit on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court. Nettie explains to her daughter the meaning of the high court's ruling in the Brown Vs. Board of Education case that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. Brown v. Board of Education was one of the cornerstones of the civil rights movement, and helped establish the precedent that “separate-but-equal” education and other services were not, in fact, equal at all.

Separate But Equal Doctrine

In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were legal, so long as the facilities for Black people and whites were equal.

The ruling constitutionally sanctioned laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools and other public facilities as whites—known as “Jim Crow” laws —and established the “separate but equal” doctrine that would stand for the next six decades.

But by the early 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP ) was working hard to challenge segregation laws in public schools, and had filed lawsuits on behalf of plaintiffs in states such as South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware.

In the case that would become most famous, a plaintiff named Oliver Brown filed a class-action suit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1951, after his daughter, Linda Brown , was denied entrance to Topeka’s all-white elementary schools.

In his lawsuit, Brown claimed that schools for Black children were not equal to the white schools, and that segregation violated the so-called “equal protection clause” of the 14th Amendment , which holds that no state can “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The case went before the U.S. District Court in Kansas, which agreed that public school segregation had a “detrimental effect upon the colored children” and contributed to “a sense of inferiority,” but still upheld the “separate but equal” doctrine.

Brown v. Board of Education Verdict

When Brown’s case and four other cases related to school segregation first came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court combined them into a single case under the name Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka .

Thurgood Marshall , the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, served as chief attorney for the plaintiffs. (Thirteen years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson would appoint Marshall as the first Black Supreme Court justice.)

At first, the justices were divided on how to rule on school segregation, with Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson holding the opinion that the Plessy verdict should stand. But in September 1953, before Brown v. Board of Education was to be heard, Vinson died, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower replaced him with Earl Warren , then governor of California .

Displaying considerable political skill and determination, the new chief justice succeeded in engineering a unanimous verdict against school segregation the following year.

In the decision, issued on May 17, 1954, Warren wrote that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” as segregated schools are “inherently unequal.” As a result, the Court ruled that the plaintiffs were being “deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.”

Little Rock Nine

In its verdict, the Supreme Court did not specify how exactly schools should be integrated, but asked for further arguments about it.

In May 1955, the Court issued a second opinion in the case (known as Brown v. Board of Education II ), which remanded future desegregation cases to lower federal courts and directed district courts and school boards to proceed with desegregation “with all deliberate speed.”

Though well intentioned, the Court’s actions effectively opened the door to local judicial and political evasion of desegregation. While Kansas and some other states acted in accordance with the verdict, many school and local officials in the South defied it.

In one major example, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas called out the state National Guard to prevent Black students from attending high school in Little Rock in 1957. After a tense standoff, President Eisenhower deployed federal troops, and nine students—known as the “ Little Rock Nine ”— were able to enter Central High School under armed guard.

Impact of Brown v. Board of Education

Though the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board didn’t achieve school desegregation on its own, the ruling (and the steadfast resistance to it across the South) fueled the nascent civil rights movement in the United States.

In 1955, a year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Her arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and would lead to other boycotts, sit-ins and demonstrations (many of them led by Martin Luther King Jr .), in a movement that would eventually lead to the toppling of Jim Crow laws across the South.

Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 , backed by enforcement by the Justice Department, began the process of desegregation in earnest. This landmark piece of civil rights legislation was followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 .

Runyon v. McCrary Extends Policy to Private Schools

In 1976, the Supreme Court issued another landmark decision in Runyon v. McCrary , ruling that even private, nonsectarian schools that denied admission to students on the basis of race violated federal civil rights laws.

By overturning the “separate but equal” doctrine, the Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education had set the legal precedent that would be used to overturn laws enforcing segregation in other public facilities. But despite its undoubted impact, the historic verdict fell short of achieving its primary mission of integrating the nation’s public schools.

Today, more than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education , the debate continues over how to combat racial inequalities in the nation’s school system, largely based on residential patterns and differences in resources between schools in wealthier and economically disadvantaged districts across the country.

HISTORY Vault: Black History

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History – Brown v. Board of Education Re-enactment, United States Courts . Brown v. Board of Education, The Civil Rights Movement: Volume I (Salem Press). Cass Sunstein, “Did Brown Matter?” The New Yorker , May 3, 2004. Brown v. Board of Education, PBS.org . Richard Rothstein, Brown v. Board at 60, Economic Policy Institute , April 17, 2014.

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Home — Essay Samples — Education — Academic Concerns — Segregation in Schools

Essays on Segregation in Schools

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Brown Vs. Board of Education: a Turning Point in American History

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As the nation prepares to mark the 70th anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education , a new report from researchers at Stanford and USC shows that racial and economic segregation among schools has grown steadily in large school districts over the past three decades — an increase that appears to be driven in part by policies favoring school choice over integration.

Analyzing data from U.S. public schools going back to 1967, the researchers found that segregation between white and Black students has increased by 64 percent since 1988 in the 100 largest districts, and segregation by economic status has increased by about 50 percent since 1991.

The report also provides new evidence about the forces driving recent trends in school segregation, showing that the expansion of charter schools has played a major role.

The findings were released on May 6 with the launch of the Segregation Explorer , a new interactive website from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University. The website provides searchable data on racial and economic school segregation in U.S. states, counties, metropolitan areas, and school districts from 1991 to 2022.

“School segregation levels are not at pre- Brown levels, but they are high and have been rising steadily since the late 1980s,” said Sean Reardon , the Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education at Stanford Graduate School of Education and faculty director of the Educational Opportunity Project. “In most large districts, school segregation has increased while residential segregation and racial economic inequality have declined, and our findings indicate that policy choices – not demographic changes – are driving the increase.”

“There’s a tendency to attribute segregation in schools to segregation in neighborhoods,” said Ann Owens , a professor of sociology and public policy at USC. “But we’re finding that the story is more complicated than that.”

Assessing the rise

In the Brown v. Board decision issued on May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racially segregated public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and established that “separate but equal” schools were not only inherently unequal but unconstitutional. The ruling paved the way for future decisions that led to rapid school desegregation in many school districts in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Though segregation in most school districts is much lower than it was 60 years ago, the researchers found that over the past three decades, both racial and economic segregation in large districts increased. Much of the increase in economic segregation since 1991, measured by segregation between students eligible and ineligible for free lunch, occurred in the last 15 years.

White-Hispanic and white-Asian segregation, while lower on average than white-Black segregation, have both more than doubled in large school districts since the 1980s.

Racial-economic segregation – specifically the difference in the proportion of free-lunch-eligible students between the average white and Black or Hispanic student’s schools – has increased by 70 percent since 1991.

School segregation is strongly associated with achievement gaps between racial and ethnic groups, especially the rate at which achievement gaps widen during school, the researchers said.

“Segregation appears to shape educational outcomes because it concentrates Black and Hispanic students in higher-poverty schools, which results in unequal learning opportunities,” said Reardon, who is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and a faculty affiliate of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning .

Policies shaping recent trends

The recent rise in school segregation appears to be the direct result of educational policy and legal decisions, the researchers said.

Both residential segregation and racial disparities in income declined between 1990 and 2020 in most large school districts. “Had nothing else changed, that trend would have led to lower school segregation,” said Owens.

But since 1991, roughly two-thirds of districts that were under court-ordered desegregation have been released from court oversight. Meanwhile, since 1998, the charter sector – a form of expanded school choice – has grown.

Expanding school choice could influence segregation levels in different ways: If families sought schools that were more diverse than the ones available in their neighborhood, it could reduce segregation. But the researchers found that in districts where the charter sector expanded most rapidly in the 2000s and 2010s, segregation grew the most.

The researchers’ analysis also quantified the extent to which the release from court orders accounted for the rise in school segregation. They found that, together, the release from court oversight and the expansion of choice accounted entirely for the rise in school segregation from 2000 to 2019.

The researchers noted enrollment policies that school districts can implement to mitigate segregation, such as voluntary integration programs, socioeconomic-based student assignment policies, and school choice policies that affirmatively promote integration.

“School segregation levels are high, troubling, and rising in large districts,” said Reardon. “These findings should sound an alarm for educators and policymakers.”

Additional collaborators on the project include Demetra Kalogrides, Thalia Tom, and Heewon Jang. This research, including the development of the Segregation Explorer data and website, was supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

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The Struggle Against Segregated Education

Outfit worn by Carlotta Walls to Little Rock Central High School, 1957.

The road to desegregated education in the United States was a long and difficult one, and stands as a testament to the remarkable power, tenacity, and moral clarity of great African American trailblazers who refused to settle for the inherent injustice of “separate but equal.”

Following the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, Black Americans fought to realize their rights as guaranteed by the so-called Reconstruction Amendments. These three constitutional amendments—the 13th, 14th, and 15th—abolished slavery (except as a punishment for crime); established the principles of “birthright citizenship” and “equal justice under the law”; and ensured a citizen’s right to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” As many states sought to re-establish “white supremacy” in the 1870s, African Americans were disenfranchised and stripped of their newly won civil rights. They often sought justice in the court system, sometimes taking their cases all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Issued on May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Plessy v. Ferguson case created the “separate but equal” doctrine, declaring that racial segregation was constitutional and did not violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. This landmark decision provided the constitutional basis for legalizing racial segregation. In what became known as the Jim Crow era, a collection of state and local statutes quickly followed, the impact of which was painfully felt in every aspect of African American life, including by Black children in the classroom.

Plessy v. Ferguson allowed Black children to be segregated into overcrowded and unsafe school buildings that were often inaccessible by public transportation, forcing students to walk long distances year-round. Classrooms were poorly resourced, without enough desks for every child, and the few books students had were tattered hand-me-downs from white schools. Black teachers were paid only a fraction of the salary of their white counterparts.

African Americans across the country understood the profound impact of segregated and inferior educational practices on Black students. Led by the NAACP’s Charles Hamilton Houston, the NAACP began mounting a legal challenge to “separate but equal” in the 1940s. Known as the “man who killed Jim Crow,” Houston trained several attorneys, including Thurgood Marshall, to serve as counsel for African Americans fighting many areas where segregation was practiced, including education, transportation, and housing.

Offering Education, 2003 bronze sculpture by Elizabeth Catlett. Gift from the Unit Owners Association of the Offices at Terrell Place, a Condominium, Beacon Capital Partners, LLC and AARP. Conservation for these sculptures received Federal support from the Collections Care Initiative Fund, administered by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative and the National Collections Program. © 2020 Catlett Mora Family Trust/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

In 1951, the NAACP identified a promising educational case and plaintiff in Oliver Brown, whose daughter was refused enrollment at the elementary school closest to their home in Topeka, Kansas, and instead was forced to ride a bus to a segregated Black school further away.

The Browns joined together with other Black families in Topeka and filed a class-action lawsuit against the Topeka Board of Education, alleging that its segregation policy was unconstitutional. When a federal court ruled against the families on the basis of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Browns—now represented by NAACP chief counsel Marshall—appealed directly to the Supreme Court.

In the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case of 1954, Marshall, Houston, and other prominent Black attorneys argued that segregation was inherently unequal and unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. They also built their case around the groundbreaking work of a husband-and-wife team of psychologists, Drs. Kenneth B. and Mamie Clark.

The Clarks, who each received their bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Howard University, were the first African Americans to obtain doctoral degrees in psychology from Columbia University. In 1946, they opened the Northside Center for Child Development, the first full-time child guidance center offering psychological and casework services to families in Harlem. There they also continued Mamie’s studies on self-identification in Black children, the subject of her master’s thesis, and began conducting experiments to examine the psychological effects of segregation on Black children.

In the Clarks’ now famous experiments, children were presented with two Black dolls and two white dolls and asked to identify which dolls looked like them and which were “good” or “bad.” The studies revealed that Black children preferred the white dolls, identifying them as “nice” while identifying the Black dolls as “bad.”

School Boycott, “No More Segregated Education”, print of 1964 photograph by Frank Espada.

The findings of the Clarks’ studies played a major role in the NAACP’s arguments in Brown v. Board. The Clarks were called as expert witnesses and testified that segregation damaged the psychological development of African American children and caused them to internalize racism.

Swayed by the Clarks’ research and the arguments advanced by Marshall and the Browns’ other attorneys, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and ordered that school segregation should be dismantled “with all deliberate speed.”

As for the courageous men and women at the center of this case, Charles Hamilton Houston passed away before the Brown v. Board case was decided. His words, however, spurred on the efforts of the legal team: “We must remain on the alert and push the struggle farther with all our might.” Later, Thurgood Marshall became the first African American Supreme Court Justice.

Kenneth and Mamie Clark continued to make significant contributions to the field of psychology and to the social justice movement of their time. Their research would later influence the scholarship of the late Dr. Audrey Smedley, a trailblazing social anthropologist—and one of the Museum’s earliest Charter Members. Dr. Smedley’s pioneering book, Race in North America: Origins and Evolution of a Worldview, traces popularized concepts of race for more than 300 years to show that race is not a product of science, as the Plessy court believed, but in fact a social construct.

The long reach of the social construct identified by Dr. Smedley remains visible in the systemic issues that plague education to this day. While the Brown case established the legal requirement for desegregating schools, that goal remains out of reach in many communities. In 1968, about 77 percent of Black students and 55 percent of Latino students attended public schools that were more than half minority. In 2010, more than 40 years later, 74 percent of Black students and 80 percent of Latino students continue to attend public schools dominated by minority populations. The legal mandate of Brown v. Board may be clear but factors such as income inequality and discriminatory housing patterns continue to perpetuate not only de facto educational segregation, but continuing disparities in the quality of education offered to children.

Baby dolls used by Northside Center for Child Development, 1968.

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The National Museum of African American History and Culture shares these and other stories of the heroes who helped overturn legalized segregation in our effort to advance social justice and racial equity. The groundbreaking work of the Clarks and other Civil Rights leaders informs many of the Museum’s powerful resources, including our acclaimed Talking About Race initiative. In our collections you can view some of the Black and white dolls the Clarks used in their experiments at the Northside Center for Child Development in the 1960s, similar to those presented in the 1954 Brown v. Board arguments. On the Museum’s first floor, you also can see Elizabeth Catlett’s 2003 bronze statue Offering Education, created to honor African American educator and activist Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954), who championed desegregation, African American civil rights, and women’s suffrage in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And in the Museum’s Segregation Gallery, you can view the outfit worn by Carlotta Walls LaNier during the "Little Rock Crisis" of 1957 at Little Rock Central High School. 

To learn more about the struggle against segregated education—or if you are interested in exploring other powerful but lesser-known stories in African American history—please visit our online Searchable Museum today. This groundbreaking—and 2022 CIO 100 Award-winning—initiative by the Museum brings innovative, immersive digital experiences and evocative content directly into the homes of Members like you. 

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How student outcomes were impacted by the desegregation of schools

The Supreme Court decision that overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine in Brown v. Board of Education had a great impact on schools across much of the United States. Even though not every school received the same integration orders, and some did not receive any at all, the desegregation of schools had significant effects on Black students’ outcomes. Those effects, it turns out, varied by region.

Previous studies have attempted to investigate the effect that court-ordered desegregation had on Black students. Yet such studies were often flawed. They were unable to identify when students were exposed to desegregation orders, where the students lived while they attended school, and how the timing of their exposure to integration affected their long-term outcomes. A recent NBER working paper uses a new methodology to address these flaws and provide a better picture of the effects of court-ordered desegregation.

The initial data in this study comprise a set of districts that, in 1968, had at least 15,000 students with 10–90 percent being Black. This created a national sample of 187 medium-to-large districts with racially diverse student populations. The researchers matched each district with its date-of-desegregation order implementation by using data from a 1987 desegregation study as well as from ProPublica and the American Communities Project —each of which contained information on districts’ desegregation plans and court orders. Districts that were in the initial sample but never were under a desegregation order were used, at times, for control purposes. The researchers linked large census and ACS samples to personal identifiers called protected identity keys to determine information about their sample respondents’ counties of birth. All this resulted in 5.1 million individuals, born between 1945 and 1985, who identified as non-Hispanic White or Black. After accounting for repeats and excluding individuals younger than twenty-four or older than fifty-four, the researchers created a new data set to include, for each individual, their birth year, American Community Survey response year, county of birth, race, and sex.

With this sample, they could look at what age students were when they were exposed to court-ordered desegregation, so the researchers could dig more deeply into the amount of exposure students had to court-ordered desegregation. The researchers focused on the indicators of human capital, such as the level of education attained, and indicators of economic self-sufficiency, such as employment and income.

For Black students in the South, analysts found a 15 percent increase in likelihood to complete high school and an increase in one full year of schooling for Black students who spent the most time in desegregated schools. These findings are similar for indicators of economic self-sufficiency, and the effects on economic self-sufficiency impact even more Southern Black students. The researchers hypothesize that the strong effects of desegregation on Black student outcomes in the South may be due to the drastic change that desegregation orders brought to the region.

Although this study is historically focused, it carries important modern-day implications. School segregation is still an issue of public concern in the twenty-first century—79 percent of White students in public schools attend schools where 50 percent of the students are of their same race . In San Francisco, a recent study found that students attending schools that are indirectly segregated based on attendance zones are more likely to take part in risky behaviors. It is clear that more diversified schools have a positive impact on minority students, and it is clear that there is progress to be made. Diverse-by-design charters and other school-choice initiatives may help to break the binds of school zones and help to create opportunities for all students; it is also important to learn from past practices and mistakes to move forward.

SOURCE: Garrett Anstreicher, Jason Fletcher, and Owen Thompson, “ The Long Run Impacts of Court-Ordered Desegregation ,” NBER Working Papers (April 2022).

Julia Wolf, is a former research intern at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, is currently working toward her master's degree in Education Policy at American University. Before coming to Fordham, she worked remotely for AU as a program assistant, on a local political campaign, and as a research assistant for an AU research-practice partnership. Julia graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from the University of…

Republicans’ missing policy issue: Education

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PHOTOS: Where The Kids Across Town Grow Up With Very Different Schools

Lindsay Johnson, photographed for NPR, 22 January 2020, in Washington DC.

NPR sent photographers to locations across the country to document the stark differences between school districts right next to each other. This is what they saw. Preston Gannaway/Talia Herman/Alex Matzke/Elissa Nadworny/Jesse Neider/Photo collage by LA Johnson/NPR hide caption

NPR sent photographers to locations across the country to document the stark differences between school districts right next to each other. This is what they saw.

On one side of the line — fresh paint and computer labs.

Across that line? Old textbooks, broken chairs and, above all, many more students of color.

Decades after Brown v. Board supposedly ended segregated schooling, these boundaries show a country where education remains deeply divided and unequal.

"You know it as soon as you look at the school. You know it the minute you walk into a classroom," says Rebecca Sibilia, the founder and CEO of EdBuild. Her organization has a new report on the pervasive inequality in U.S. schools . "There are kids who see this every day, and they understand."

Across the country, racist housing policies created segregated neighborhoods. And because many s chools in the U.S. are funded locally, through property taxes or other funds, school districts with wealthier residents are able to funnel money to their schools. Neighboring school districts miss out.

Explore the history

Forty-five years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in Milliken v. Bradley that school districts don't have to integrate across district lines. Read more about that case here.

Additional money from state and the federal governments is meant to close these local funding gaps, but it's seldom enough.

Decades after Brown , housing segregation combined with this funding model have entrenched what EdBuild calls "racially isolated" school systems. In nearly 1,000 communities, according to EdBuild, one school district directly abuts a district that differs dramatically by racial makeup and spending per student.

Almost 9 million students attend these underfunded, racially isolated districts.

NPR sent photographers to several of them across the country to document the stark differences across these borders.

This is what they saw.

Stark differences, in black and white

Jefferson county schools / mountain brook city school district, outside birmingham, ala..

Side by side, but worlds apart in Alabama: Mountain Brook High School (left) and Fultondale High School in Jefferson County Wes Frazer for NPR hide caption

Photographer Wes Frazer lives in Birmingham, Ala. He took photos of Jefferson County Schools and Mountain Brook City Schools in black and white, he says, "because I wanted the viewer to study the photos to really see the differences in the schools."

Given a head start: Football fields at Mountain Brook High School (left) and Pinson Valley High School in the Jefferson County School District Wes Frazer for NPR hide caption

Given a head start: Football fields at Mountain Brook High School (left) and Pinson Valley High School in the Jefferson County School District

Though the state of Alabama allocates more money — almost $1,000 more per student — to schools in Jefferson County, it's not enough to make up the difference in funding between the two districts. That difference largely comes from local revenue. Mountain Brook — a district of just 4% nonwhite students — raises more money locally, about $10,000 per pupil. "They have far more flexibility to generate additional tax dollars," says Jefferson County Superintendent Craig Pouncey.

An island of wealth surrounded by the city of Oakland

Oakland unified school district / piedmont city unified school district, northern california.

In California's Bay Area, economic and racial segregation separate families — and schools. Oakland Unified, a district of hundreds of schools, surrounds Piedmont City Unified Schools.

Across the country, about 180 districts are surrounded by other districts , says Sibilia of EdBuild.

In Oakland, the district has a free vision clinic, and some schools have washers and dryers so that students can launder their clothes. Yet Oakland schools have less to spend, per pupil, than nearby Piedmont.

Scenes from Piedmont, Calif.: Salar Jalinous (center) is heading into his senior year at Piedmont High School. He says he has benefited from his school: "They have a lot of resources to prepare the students really well for college." Talia Herman for NPR hide caption

That's because Piedmont raises additional funds — primarily through parcel taxes , but also with help from their education foundation and community support groups, according to Piedmont's superintendent, Randall Booker.

Scenes from Oakland: Ne'Jahra Soriano, 16, recently left the Oakland schools for nearby Emery High School, which she says has more resources. Talia Herman for NPR hide caption

Oakland schools — like those in many other urban districts — need more resources to serve the needs of the community, says John Sasaki, a spokesman for the school district.

"A child has no control over where they're born or raised," he says. "Under no circumstances should the ZIP code in which they're raised dictate that they have less funding in their schools."

In Connecticut, one district "eclipsed" by its neighbor

New britain school district / berlin school district, hartford, conn..

Graduation Day: The Classes of 2019 from New Britain High School (left) and Berlin High School had different high school experiences. Jesse Neider for NPR hide caption

New Britain, a city in the center of Connecticut, is one of the state's Alliance Districts. That means that, along with 32 of the state's other "lowest-performing" districts, New Britain gets more money for students, staff and community programs.

"But even with that additional state aid," says Sibilia, "they're completely eclipsed by the wealth of their neighbors."

Scenes from New Britain High School: One of Connecticut's "lowest-performing" districts, New Britain gets more money for students, staff and community programs. Jesse Neider for NPR hide caption

Scenes from Berlin High School: Less than 15 minutes away, by car, from New Britain, the district still has over $5,000 more to spend per student. Jesse Neider for NPR hide caption

"There is just as much ability and talent in our urban schools as there is in more affluent school districts," says New Britain Superintendent Nancy Sarra. "However, in order to provide students like ours with an educational opportunity equal to their neighbors, we need to make the system fairer in how our public schools are funded."

Berlin School District — less than 15 minutes away, by car — still has over $5,000 more to spend than New Britain schools, per student in the district.

The California coastline, marked by inequality

Gonzales unified school district / carmel unified school district, carmel, calif..

The median home price in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif., is more than $1 million. Residents in Carmel raise over $21,000 per student in the district from local revenue including property taxes. One of the districts along its border — Gonzales Unified — gets just $4,399 per student from local money.

"Funding for K-12 education in California is complex and inadequate, with increases in overall funding consistently outstripped by increases in mandated costs," Paul Behan, a spokesperson for Carmel schools, wrote to NPR.

Photographer Preston Gannaway took her camera out to capture the vastly different landscapes that serve as a backdrop to life in Carmel Unified schools and, its neighbor, Gonzales Unified. Carmel, a high-end tourist destination known for its sprawling coastline, is surrounded by school districts with far less funding per pupil.

Contrasts in Gonzales (left) and Carmel: Carmel, a high-end tourist destination known for its sprawling coastline, is surrounded by school districts with far less funding per pupil. Preston Gannaway for NPR hide caption

Housing segregation begets school segregation

Hempstead union free school district / garden city union free school district, long island, n.y..

Differences in Long Island: "You know immediately when you've left Garden City (right) and you're in Hempstead," Elaine Gross, who leads a local nonprofit. Elissa Nadworny/NPR hide caption

On Long Island, Elaine Gross, who leads a local nonprofit called Erase Racism , says that to see the differences in these two communities, just drive between them.

"You know immediately when you've left Garden City and you're in Hempstead," Gross explains. In Garden City, the streets are well-paved and shaded with trees. And, the schools get more money for their students, thanks to local funds. While the state of New York allocates more money per student in Hempstead, it's not enough to make up the difference in local revenue that helps pay for schools in Garden City.

Milliken illustrated: While the state of New York allocates more money per student in Hempstead (left), it's not enough to make up the difference in local revenue that helps pay for schools in Garden City (right). Elissa Nadworny/NPR hide caption

"What Long Island shows us is how Milliken has been used to reinforce all of these negative and detrimental policies of the past," explains Sibilia. "What I'm talking about here specifically is housing segregation."

In Milliken v. Bradley , the U.S. Supreme Court held that desegregation plans do not have to include neighboring districts.

A racial divide between two rural districts

Schuyler community schools / david city public schools, david city, nebraska.

Scenes from and around David City (clockwise from top left): Students in the David City summer learning program link arms during a game; a sign seen from the highway; brothers Roger and James Yates work on an assignment; a young girl fishes at the David City Golf Club; and the entryway to David City Elementary. Alex Matzke for NPR hide caption

In Nebraska, 90 minutes from Omaha, residents in David City and Schuyler have close median household incomes and their schools have similar poverty rates. But the schools in Schuyler and David City differ in one big way: In Schuyler, 87% of students are nonwhite, and in David City, just 11% are nonwhite.

Scenes from Schuyler, Neb. (clockwise): Dan Hoesing, the superintendent in Schuyler; shops downtown; a colorful classroom at Schuyler High School; the local African Store; a student's hands covered with henna designs after graduation; a student works hard on a project during summer school; and Schuyler Elementary School. Alex Matzke for NPR hide caption

The divide hasn't always been so stark.

"Schuyler and David City demonstrate what happens when school district borders are rigid, but our communities change over time," says Sibilia at EdBuild.

Editor's note: This story was published prematurely due to a production error on July 25. It has been finalized and re-published.

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Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City

How one school became a battleground over which children benefit from a separate and unequal system.

Najya Hannah-Jones. Credit... Henry Leutwyler for The New York Times

Supported by

By Nikole Hannah-Jones

June 9, 2016

I n the spring of 2014, when our daughter, Najya, was turning 4, my husband and I found ourselves facing our toughest decision since becoming parents. We live in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a low-income, heavily black, rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of brownstones in central Brooklyn. The nearby public schools are named after people intended to evoke black uplift, like Marcus Garvey, a prominent black nationalist in the 1920s, and Carter G. Woodson, the father of Black History Month, but the schools are a disturbing reflection of New York City’s stark racial and socioeconomic divisions. In one of the most diverse cities in the world, the children who attend these schools learn in classrooms where all of their classmates — and I mean, in most cases, every single one — are black and Latino, and nearly every student is poor. Not surprisingly, the test scores of most of Bed-Stuy’s schools reflect the marginalization of their students.

I didn’t know any of our middle-class neighbors, black or white, who sent their children to one of these schools. They had managed to secure seats in the more diverse and economically advantaged magnet schools or gifted-and-talented programs outside our area, or opted to pay hefty tuition to progressive but largely white private institutions. I knew this because from the moment we arrived in New York with our 1-year-old, we had many conversations about where we would, should and definitely should not send our daughter to school when the time came.

My husband, Faraji, and I wanted to send our daughter to public school. Faraji, the oldest child in a military family, went to public schools that served Army bases both in America and abroad. As a result, he had a highly unusual experience for a black American child: He never attended a segregated public school a day of his life. He can now walk into any room and instantly start a conversation with the people there, whether they are young mothers gathered at a housing-project tenants’ meeting or executives eating from small plates at a ritzy cocktail reception.

I grew up in Waterloo, Iowa, on the wrong side of the river that divided white from black, opportunity from struggle, and started my education in a low-income school that my mother says was distressingly chaotic. I don’t recall it being bad, but I do remember just one white child in my first-grade class, though there may have been more. That summer, my mom and dad enrolled my older sister and me in the school district’s voluntary desegregation program, which allowed some black kids to leave their neighborhood schools for whiter, more well off ones on the west side of town. This was 1982, nearly three decades after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate schools for black and white children were unconstitutional, and near the height of desegregation in this country. My parents chose one of the whitest, richest schools, thinking it would provide the best opportunities for us. Starting in second grade, I rode the bus an hour each morning across town to the “best” public school my town had to offer, Kingsley Elementary, where I was among the tiny number of working-class children and the even tinier number of black children. We did not walk to school or get dropped off by our parents on their way to work. We showed up in a yellow bus, visitors in someone else’s neighborhood, and were whisked back across the bridge each day as soon as the bell rang.

I remember those years as emotionally and socially fraught, but also as academically stimulating and world-expanding. Aside from the rigorous classes and quality instruction I received, this was the first time I’d shared dinners in the homes of kids whose parents were doctors and lawyers and scientists. My mom was a probation officer, and my dad drove a bus, and most of my family members on both sides worked in factories or meatpacking plants or did other manual labor. I understood, even then, in a way both intuitive and defensive, that my school friends’ parents weren’t better than my neighborhood friends’ parents, who worked hard every day at hourly jobs. But this exposure helped me imagine possibilities, a course for myself that I had not considered before.

It’s hard to say where any one person would have ended up if a single circumstance were different; our life trajectories are shaped by so many external and internal factors. But I have no doubt my parents’ decision to pull me out of my segregated neighborhood school made the possibility of my getting from there to here — staff writer for The New York Times Magazine — more likely.

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Making American schools less segregated

Harvard Staff Writer

Study suggests vast majority of parents favor integration, but many make choices for their children that make things worse

In recent decades American schools have been becoming more segregated. What can be done about it? A recent report by researchers at the Graduate School of Education (GSE) found that most parents support the idea of racially and economically integrated schools for their children, but parents who have a wider range of choice tend to make decisions that leave more segregated schools in their wake. Published by Making Caring Common , a project of the Ed School, the report was written by Ph.D. student Eric Torres and Richard Weissbourd , senior lecturer on education. The Gazette talked to Weissbourd and Torres about their report , and how parents and school districts could do more to help further school integration.

Eric Torres and Richard Weissbourd

GAZETTE: You conducted a national survey of more than 2,500 American parents about school integration and found good news and bad news. What findings struck you most?

TORRES: The good news is that a lot of parents across different demographic groups are saying they want integrated schools for their children; they say they want integration in principle. But that obviously leads into some of the bad news, which is that they aren’t prioritizing integration in the values they look for in a school. While things like academic achievement or a school’s academic performance, safety, and enrichment activities tend to rank pretty high, the levels of integration of a school tend to be lower on their list of priorities.

WEISSBOURD: I was struck by the breadth of support for integration. It’s across demographic groups, political affiliation; it’s across Republicans and Democrats and across race and ethnicities. The breadth of the support was greater than I imagined, but the depth of the support was less than I imagined it would be. What is concerning to me is that people do want integration, but they rank it low compared to other factors, including enrichment activities, transportation, discipline, and a whole set of other things.

GAZETTE: Why do parents prioritize other factors rather than school integration?

WEISSBOURD: One of the things we want to emphasize is that these are very hard decisions. Most parents we talked to are well-meaning and really want to send their kids to integrated schools, but there are several things that get in the way. One is that sometimes in the district there are not good choices for them. Another thing that gets in the way is misinformation. White, advantaged parents hear about schools within their bubble, and that bubble may have misinformation. They tend not to talk to parents who are different from them. They sometimes rely on websites that have average scores on standardized tests, which are not good indicators of school quality. Parents also appear to be prone to different biases. For example, many white, advantaged parents appear to make a judgment about a school’s quality based on the number of other white, advantaged parents who are at that school. They’re reluctant to have their kids be a minority in the school, but somebody has to be a minority. This is a puzzle with lots of pieces, and what we’re trying to figure out is why, if parents say they want integration, schools are becoming more segregated.

Ph.D. student Eric Torres said parents often don’t prioritize integration when looking at schools for their children.

GAZETTE: Let’s talk about how segregated American schools are. What schools do most white students go to? What schools do most Black and Latino kids go to?

TORRES: We cite numbers in our report that are trying to depict school segregation in the country. It’s complicated, in part, because there are two ways of looking at it. One is that you can think about segregation in terms of how evenly distributed members of a given demographic group are in a district. Another way is to think about how isolated those students are. For example, if a district has 10 percent of low-income students, and all of the schools also have 10 percent of low-income students, you might think that it’s actually quite even and so it’s well-integrated. On the other hand, if you’re thinking in terms of isolation, you might say each of those individual schools only has 10 percent of low-income students and those students are quite isolated, and therefore, it’s highly segregated.

What we can say is that the average Black and Latino student in the United States attends a school in which 60 percent of the students are from low-income backgrounds. Forty percent of Black and Latino students attend hyper-segregated schools, with 90 to 100 percent of Black and Latino peers. White students, meanwhile, are more likely to be surrounded by white and affluent peers, and are the least likely to attend schools with children from other racial groups. This is the big picture, but there’s a ton of variation by districts and by regions, all of which is also affected by the changing demographics of the nation.

WEISSBOURD: There are many cities that are very segregated, with high percentages of Black and Latino students. That is common in urban areas, but in rural areas, there is a different trend. In rural areas, where there has been immigration, schools are becoming more integrated.

GAZETTE: Some people may still think that school integration benefits mostly Black and Latino kids and not white kids. Who benefits from school integration?

WEISSBOURD: This is a really important issue. Everybody benefits from integration, but integration is not just throwing kids together. We’re talking about thoughtful integration, where we pay attention to how we create an environment where everybody is respected and has dignity and where conversations about race are thoughtfully constructed. The evidence is that white kids in every income level of every demographic tend to benefit in many aspects of development from integration. They can benefit in terms of social emotional development; they can develop qualities like perspective-taking, gratitude, and empathy, which are very important for school success and work success. There are also ethical benefits for white kids in terms of having a deeper understanding of justice and a stronger commitment to justice. In our talks with parents, some said it was important for them to help their kids understand their privilege, and that’s one of the reasons they sent their kids to an economically integrated school. In other words, we’re not saying that white parents should do this as a service to other kids. That’s patronizing and not an accurate way to frame the issue. We’re saying that white parents should decide to send their kids to integrated schools because it’s good for both other kids and their own kids, because it’s vital to democracy and to the country as a whole.

TORRES: I would also add that many parents are really focused on the schools’ academic performance, and there’s good evidence that suggests that there’s no substantial harm to better-off students when schools achieve effective integration. And, of course, there are great benefits for, in particular, low-income students. White parents should think about integration in terms of the benefits it brings to their own children, and it shouldn’t be framed as a service to low-income and minority students because their own children are benefiting just as much as low-income and minority students.

Richard Weissbourd is a senior lecturer on education.

GAZETTE: Your report says that white, advantaged parents can play a role in closing the gap when it comes to school segregation. For parents who want to walk the talk, what steps do you suggest?

WEISSBOURD: We’re really making the case that white, advantaged parents can play a role but school districts can also do their part. We’re saying that white parents should do research and visit schools. There’s some evidence that when white parents actually visit schools they can change their minds. They should talk to people outside their bubble and spend some time doing self-reflection and thinking, “Do I have biases that are getting in the way here?” or “What’s the evidence that this school is lower quality than other schools?” They should also talk to people who have expertise: former teachers who know about the school system, informed school committee members, and diverse parents who have been in the system for a long time.

TORRES: Our national survey included people from all races and ethnicities, income levels and levels of education. But our focus groups and interviews focused more on white advantaged parents, in part because of historical and structural issues. We all know there is a consolidation of wealth and power among white, economically advantaged parents in this country. In many cases, they have the resources and the capacity to take action on integration and their choices affect its landscape. For example, white flight into the suburbs in the ’80s contributed to resegregation in some urban districts. The decisions of white parents, particularly when they are opting out, is something that requires attention.

GAZETTE: What’s your sense about the future of school integration?

WEISSBOURD: One of the messages we’re trying to get across is that we can’t be passive. If we let the forces out there just do their work, we’re going to see more segregation. But there are reasons to be optimistic. If those parents who really want integration take steps to research school choices, and if districts take the steps to educate parents and are proactive about lifting up the strengths of diverse schools and work toward thoughtful integration, you may see more parents sending their kids to integrated schools. There are concrete steps for both the parents and districts that can really improve the state of things. We’re saying that if we’re passive, we’re going to see things get worse, but there are some very doable actions that can make things better.

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TORRES: In some ways, our survey makes me optimistic because I believe the signal we’re getting from this data is that school integration is something people want in principle. I’m hopeful that, as districts hear that, and as parents are encouraged to make choices that support integration, it’s possible to take steps to see a more integrated country. On the other hand, there are real challenges such as residential segregation, income disparities, and structural features that make this a difficult problem. In our interviews with parents, I was pleasantly surprised when I heard some people with deeply conservative views who had similar thoughts as many of the liberal people we talked to; both groups had a great desire for integration, and when they reflected on its benefits, both sounded pretty similar. I’m generalizing, but hearing that, in addition to what we saw in the survey, gave me both hope and pause. It gave me pause because of how often we tend to think about this and so many other issues as being strictly partisan and polarized, and it didn’t always come out that way.

This interview was condensed and edited for clarity and length.

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Segregation in Schools Essay Examples

Effects of segregation in schools on children’s education.

Education is a fundamental right of each individual and it is imperative for each person to get education. Education has a critical impact on the lively hood of a society. the society ascent and fall relies upon the measure of intellect that individuals are willing...

Benefits of Gender Segregation in Modern Schools

The term segregation stirs up different images, feelings, and recollections among people. For some, segregation pertains to the mistreated African Americans in the early stages of the United States, irrelevant to the present-day situations. Nowadays, with the rise of feminism, this term has started to...

A Nationwide Epidemic of Segregation in Schools

Together sixty-five percent of kindergarten classrooms are made up of African Americans and Hispanic individuals. On the contrary, only eighteen percent of them are being admitted into gifted and talented programs. America's school system and student population remain segregated, by race and class. Inequalities still...

The Middle Ground Between Islamic Essentialist & Constructivist Views

The partition between the two school of thoughts between the Islamic scholars in matter of sexual diversity put the subject into the vicinity of two extremities. First and foremost, the essentialist approach to same-sex desires and acts as proposed by the revisionist Muslim scholars is...

the "Why" of Education System

I believe that some schools promote learning while others don’t, depending on the district. In some areas where poverty, low-income, and violence is present, schools do not promote learning as much as a stable city/town would. For example, as stated in this article by Anderson,...

The Effects of Social Stratification on Education

This essay encompasses the research done regarding the effects of social stratification on education, including societal standing, equal opportunity in education, diversity, and inclusive schools/education. This has resulted in a better understanding of how social stratification works and that it is used to separate people...

Digital Media Like Way to Promote Culture: the Royal Opera House

Access to art and culture has changed significantly due to digital developments and social media. The experience of watching an opera and ballet does not start like it was in the past going to the box office and purchasing that ticket. Due to social media...

Segregation in Education and Work

Have you ever wondered why employers in some companies have a large number of employees of the same race and only a few other races and ethnicity? If so, why does that happen? In July 2015, the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) released...

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