lawsuits in the decades since have chipped away at Brown v. Board, leaving fewer and fewer tools in the hands of districts to integrate schools effectively.WASHINGTON — Seventy years ago this week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled separating children in schools by race was unconstitutional. On paper, that decision — the fabled But for decades, American schools have been re-segregating.
It took further court rulings, monitoring and enforcement to bring a short-lived era of integration to hundreds of school districts. For the students who took part in those desegregation programs, their life trajectory changed — the more years spent in integrated schools, the better Black children fared on measures like educational attainment, graduation rates, health, and earning potential, with no adverse effects on white children.
“If you have the tools taken away from you ... by the Supreme Court, then you really don’t have a whole lot of tools,” said Stephan Blanford, a former Seattle Public Schools board member.The arc of history is clear in the city where the landmark Swann busing case originated. Instead, the district created a school assignment process that said diversity"will be based on the family’s decisions.” It left the families of Mecklenburg County, some of whom have always had better choices than others, on their own. In the first year of the district’s choice program, Black families were more likely to try to use the choice plan to pick an alternative school. They were also more likely to get none of the magnet schools they wanted.
Wherever you look, families are divided in how they view integration. For white and affluent families, it can exist as a noble idea, one filled with self-reflection. But for families of color or poor families — those with less of a safety net — the point of integration often is to place their children somewhere better.
More recent lawsuits have taken place in New Jersey and in Minnesota. In 2015, Alex Cruz-Guzman became a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging segregation in Minneapolis and St. Paul public schools. Cruz-Guzman immigrated to the United States from Mexico as a teenager. As a parent, he noticed his children's schools consisted almost entirely of other Latino students. When he tried to place them in more integrated schools, the family faced long waitlists.