AMERICAN SCHOOLS: JIM CROW RESEGREGATION ON STEROIDS
How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Separate But "Equal" (Again)
Remember the good old days of Jim Crow, when schools were segregated and everyone knew exactly where they stood—literally, on opposite sides of town? Then the Supreme Court said "hold my beer" and dropped Brown v. Board of Education like a constitutional mic drop in 1954. Old Jim went reeling, integration buses started rolling, and for a hot minute, it looked like America might actually mean that whole "equal protection under the law" thing.
Fast forward seventy years, and plot twist: we've somehow managed to make our schools more segregated than they were during the actual Jim Crow era. If that doesn't deserve a slow clap for American ingenuity, I don't know what does.
No Child Left Behind (Except, You Know, Those Kids)
In 2001, we decided that "No Child Left Behind" sounded like a great slogan—as long as nobody asked too many questions about which children we were talking about. Poor kids? Left behind. Black and brown kids? Left behind. Disabled kids? They weren't even invited to the party in the first place.
But hey, at least the acronym was catchy.
The real genius of NCLB wasn't in its stated goals—it was in how it turbocharged the very mechanisms that had been quietly undermining integration since Brown. Vouchers, which had been invented in the 1950s as a legal fig leaf for segregation academies, came roaring back with bipartisan support. Charter schools, sold as "innovation labs" for public education, became the perfect vehicle for what we might politely call "demographic sorting"—and what everyone else calls segregation.
The Segregation Academy: A Love Story
Let's take a trip down memory lane to Prince Edward County, Virginia, circa 1959. Rather than integrate their schools, county officials did what any reasonable white supremacist would do: they closed the entire public school system for five years.
Where did the white kids go? To hastily established "private academies," funded—and this is the beautiful part—with taxpayer dollars via "tuition grants." Black children? They got nothing. No school. No education. Just five years of their childhood stolen because white adults couldn't handle sitting next to brown kids.
The Supreme Court eventually said "um, you can't do that" in Griffin v. County School Board (1964). But here's the thing about precedent: if you ignore it long enough and rebrand your discrimination creatively enough, you can keep the party going for decades.
Segregation Academies 2.0: Now With Tax Credits!
Those segregation academies never went away—they just got better PR. According to ProPublica's investigation, at least 20 Mississippi private schools that were explicitly founded to avoid integration are still operating in 2026, and they've collectively received nearly $10 million in taxpayer funds over the last six years through Mississippi's "Children's Promise Act."
Let that sink in: Schools that were created specifically to keep Black children out are now being subsidized by Black taxpayers.
Many of these schools remain over 85% white in communities that are majority Black. But don't worry—they'll tell you they're "open to everyone" now. They just happen to have rigorous "fit" requirements, or they're affiliated with churches that have very specific theological views, or their tuition (even with vouchers) is still out of reach for most families, or they don't offer special education services, or, or, or...
It's amazing how many creative ways you can say "whites only" without actually saying it.
The Voucher-Charter Tag Team
By 2026, we've perfected a beautiful two-pronged attack on integrated public education:
The Right-Wing Play: Universal Vouchers
Red states have gone all-in on "universal school choice," which sounds lovely until you realize it means siphoning public money to private schools that can reject students for any reason—or no reason at all. Don't like disabled kids? Don't take them. Think LGBTQ students are sinful? Show them the door. Want to maintain your 90% white student body in a 60% Black county? Just keep your "standards" high and your outreach low.
The Left-Wing Play: Charter Schools
Meanwhile, liberal billionaires like Bill Gates and Eli Broad championed charter schools as the "progressive" alternative. Never mind that studies consistently show charters are often more segregated than traditional public schools. Never mind that they can counsel out difficult students or avoid serving kids with expensive special needs. It's "innovation!" It's "choice!" It's definitely not a way for affluent families to access quasi-private schools on the public dime while avoiding the riffraff.
The result? A bipartisan consensus that the problem with public schools is that they're too... public.
The Supreme Court: "Segregation? I Don't See Color!"
If you were hoping the courts would save us, I have bad news. The current Supreme Court has fully embraced "colorblindness" as the ultimate legal philosophy—which is convenient when you want to ignore the ongoing effects of centuries of racism.
In Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle (2007), Chief Justice Roberts wrote: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." It's the legal equivalent of saying "I don't see color!" at a dinner party—technically a sentence, but utterly useless for addressing actual inequality.
By 2026, this logic has trickled down from universities (see: SFFA v. Harvard, 2023) to K-12 schools. Districts that try to maintain diversity through any race-conscious means get sued into oblivion. Meanwhile, districts that are 95% white due to "totally neutral" factors like property values and district boundaries? Perfectly legal!
The Court has essentially ruled that you can have all the segregation you want, as long as you don't say it's about race.
The Billionaire Boys Club
Here's where it gets really fun: the resegregation of American schools is one of the few truly bipartisan projects in modern America, brought to you by billionaires across the political spectrum.
Left-leaning billionaires (Gates, Broad, Zuckerberg) pumped billions into charter school networks, often in the name of "helping" poor Black and brown kids. The fact that these charters frequently ended up as segregated as the neighborhoods they served? Just an unfortunate side effect of all that innovation.
Right-wing billionaires (DeVos, Koch network, Walton family) bankrolled voucher campaigns and "school choice" ballot initiatives, flooding school board elections with dark money and astroturf organizations with names like "Parents for Educational Freedom" and "Coalition for Kids First."
Both sides set up tax-exempt foundations and nonprofit advocacy groups that exist in a legal gray zone between philanthropy and political lobbying. They've successfully reframed the conversation so that anyone who opposes charters or vouchers is "against choice" and "pro-status quo"—even if the status quo they're defending is actual integration.
The Milliken Wall: Segregation's Best Friend
Want to know the real secret to modern school segregation? It's not vouchers or charters—it's Milliken v. Bradley (1974), the Supreme Court case that nobody talks about but everyone lives with.
In Milliken, the Court ruled that you can't force suburban school districts to participate in desegregation plans with urban districts unless you can prove the suburbs intentionally caused the city's segregation. This created a legal fortress around district boundaries.
The result? White families could move just across a district line—often just a few miles—and their kids would be in a completely different, much whiter, much better-funded school system. Today, about 60% of school segregation happens between districts rather than within them.
We've essentially replaced "Whites Only" signs with property values and district maps. It's segregation with extra steps, but it's just as effective.
The 2026 Scorecard: How Are We Doing?
Let's check in on the state of American school segregation in 2026:
Intensely Segregated Schools (90-100% students of color):
- California has the highest proportion—it's quadrupled in 30 years
- In Los Angeles and New York, over 75% of schools are intensely segregated
- Nationally, 40% of Black students attend schools where 90%+ of students are non-white
The Voucher Explosion:
- Multiple states now have "universal" voucher programs with no income limits
- Segregation academies in the South are receiving millions in taxpayer funds
- Private schools have raised tuition to capture voucher money, pricing out the low-income families the programs supposedly help
Charter School Segregation:
- Charter schools are consistently more segregated than nearby traditional public schools
- "No excuses" charters in cities serve almost exclusively Black and Latino students
- "Classical education" charters in suburbs attract overwhelmingly white, affluent families
The Legal Landscape:
- Race-conscious school assignment policies are effectively dead
- "Colorblind" policies that produce segregated outcomes are perfectly legal
- Federal civil rights enforcement has been gutted
So... Now What?
Here's the uncomfortable truth: we've built a system where segregation is the path of least resistance. It's legal, it's funded, and it's supported by powerful interests on both sides of the aisle.
But here's the thing about democracy: it only works if you show up.
Every time you vote, you're making a choice about what kind of country we're going to be. Do you want a society where your tax dollars fund schools that reject disabled kids? Where billionaires get to redesign public education through their pet foundations? Where "school choice" means choosing which segregated school your kid attends?
Your Action Plan (Because Cynicism Without Action Is Just Depression)
1. Vote in school board elections. These are the races where a few hundred votes can determine whether your district embraces vouchers or funds public schools. Billionaire-backed PACs are flooding these elections with cash—your vote is the counterweight.
2. Tell your representatives that public education is non-negotiable. Call your state legislators. Email your congressional representatives. Make it clear that you expect them to fund public schools that serve all children, not just the ones who are easy or profitable to educate.
3. Follow the money. When a "grassroots" organization pops up supporting vouchers or charters, look up their funding. Chances are, you'll find billionaire foundations and dark money groups. Expose them.
4. Support candidates who support public education. Not "public education plus charters plus vouchers plus whatever." Actual public schools that are democratically governed, adequately funded, and open to every child.
5. Reject the false choice. The narrative that you have to choose between "failing public schools" and "school choice" is a trap. The real choice is between investing in public schools that serve everyone or defunding them in favor of a privatized system that serves the few.
The Bottom Line
We've spent 70 years since Brown v. Board proving that America is really, really committed to segregation—we just prefer it to be laundered through "choice" and "freedom" and "parental rights" rather than explicit racial laws.
Jim Crow didn't die. He just got a makeover, a 501(c)(3) designation, and a bipartisan coalition of billionaire backers.
But here's the thing about segregation: it's not inevitable. It's a choice. Every voucher program, every charter expansion, every underfunded public school—these are choices made by people we elected.
Which means we can make different choices.
Public education is a public good. It's the foundation of democracy. And it only works if it's actually public—open to everyone, funded by everyone, accountable to everyone.
So the next time someone tells you that "school choice" is about freedom, ask them: freedom for whom? And at whose expense?
Because right now, we've chosen segregation. Again.
Maybe it's time to choose something else.
Democracy dies in darkness. But apparently, it also dies when we replace public schools with a segregated marketplace and call it "innovation." Who knew?
Mississippi Segregation Academies Are Benefitting From Taxpayer Dollars — ProPublica https://www.propublica.org/article/mississippi-segregation-academies-taxpayer-dollars-1960s?
Segregation Academies Get Millions From School Voucher Programs — ProPublica https://www.propublica.org/article/segregation-academies-school-voucher-money-north-carolina
