Why school districts like Michael Brown’s have suffered ‘rapid resegregation’
GWEN IFILL: For the first time this school year, nonwhite children made up more than half of the country’s public school students. But the country’s schools have grown only more segregated since 1988.
The most recent data shows the average white student goes to a school that is more than 70 percent white. And less than a quarter of black students go to majority white schools.
Jeffrey Brown takes a look at whatever happened to integration.
JEFFREY BROWN: One metropolitan area where schools are largely segregated is Saint Louis. And one year after the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, it’s an issue that continues to resonate there and beyond.
New York Times magazine writer Nikole Hannah-Jones has reported on the situation in Ferguson and elsewhere in the country. Her work has appeared in ProPublica and on the radio program “This American Life.” Also joining us is Sheryll Cashin, a law professor at Georgetown University who writes on desegregation efforts. Her latest book is titled “Place, Not Race.”
And welcome to both of you.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, let me start with you.
Give us a quick overview of what you saw in Ferguson and its schools. What struck you most forcefully there?
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES, The New York Times Magazine: Well, the thing that strikes you most is, this is the most segregated, impoverished districts in the entire state.
There are 520 districts in Missouri, and this district ranked dead last. It was stripped of its accreditation, and in the classrooms, sometimes, there’s very minimal amount of teaching occurring.
JEFFREY BROWN: And there was even a short-lived effort, I gather, there to bring some of the students from that school district to another suburb, which was mostly white.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: Yes, it was because of the Missouri transfer law. I call it accidental integration, because the law was never intended as an integration statute.
But because Normandy is almost entirely black and lost its accreditation, it, under the law, was given the right to send its students to an accredited district. And in this case, the accredited districts are mostly heavily white.
JEFFREY BROWN: Sheryll Cashin, it is more, not less common that American schools are segregated, are more segregated these days.
SHERYLL CASHIN, Georgetown University Law Center: Right.
In the ’70s and ’80s, many school districts around the country were under court order to desegregate. And in the ’90s, the Supreme Court basically signaled it was time for courts to stop policing desegregation, and two-thirds of the school districts that had been under desegregation orders have come out from under them. And we have had a rapid, massive, resegregation since 1998.
JEFFREY BROWN: And have we largely given up on the idea of integration?
SHERYLL CASHIN: Well, I hope that’s not true.
There are about 80 school districts in this country that voluntarily have school integration plans. They tend to use economic integration as their model, rather than Why school districts like Michael Brown’s have suffered ‘rapid resegregation’:
