Zahava Stadler
Project Director, Education Funding Equity initiative
Executive Summary
May 2024 marks the seventieth anniversary of the historic United States Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. For decades after the ruling, school integration efforts made halting progress, but backsliding began in the late 1980s. In the last few years, however, there has been a resurgent interest in school integration, with new federal support and recent state court developments.
If America is to succeed at bringing about more integrated schools, we must understand the current landscape of school segregation and direct our efforts at the problem as it exists today. In February, New America’s Education Funding Equity Initiative released Crossing the Line: Segregation and Resource Inequality Between America’s School Districts, a report that measured the present level of segregation between neighboring school districts. This short report builds upon Crossing the Line, showing how racial enrollment and racial divides between school districts have changed since 2000. It includes maps and data visualizations to help users understand the shifting nature of racial segregation between America’s school districts, and it explores trends in student enrollment and population movement to inform twenty-first-century advocacy and policy on school integration.
Read Crossing the Line and explore its interactive map and multimedia story to learn more about segregation and resource inequity between school districts.
Appendix: Data and Methodology
For all data referencing the degree of segregation between neighboring school districts, we follow the same methodology and exclusions outlined in the Crossing the Line report, but expand our dataset to include 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2020 school years. To calculate enrollment changes—both for school district enrollment generally and for the enrollment of specific racial groups—we use enrollment data from the U.S. Department of Education National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) Common Core of Data (CCD) for all regular public school districts, as defined by NCES.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to several people for their contributions to this analysis. Thank you to Justin Madron of the Center for Geospatial Solutions at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy for his mapping support; Natalya Brill and Naomi Morduch Toubman for their support with data visualization and web presentation; Sabrina Detlef for her copyediting support; and Katherine Portnoy, Amanda Dean, and Zoe Reier for their communications and media support. This report was produced as part of the Education Funding Equity Initiative at New America, which is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. New America thanks the foundation for its support. The findings and conclusions contained within are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect positions or policies of the foundation.
Notes
[1] Sonya Ramsey, “The Troubled History of American Education After the Brown Decision,” American Historian (February 2017), Organization of American Historians.
[2] See, for example, Ramsey, “The Troubled History of American Education After the Brown Decision;” Gary Orfield, “Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation,” Rethinking Schools 16, no. 1 (Fall 2001); and Janel George and Linda Darling-Hammond, “Brown at 67: Segregation, Resegregation, and the Promise of Federal Policy,” Learning Policy Institute (blog), May 18, 2021.
[3] George and Darling-Hammond, “Brown at 67.”
[4] United States Government Accountability Office, “Student Population Has Significantly Diversified, but Many Schools Remain Divided Along Racial, Ethnic, and Economic Lines,” GAO Highlights, June 2022.
[5] Andrew Ujifusa, “Education Dept. Gets $73.5 Billion in Funding Deal That Ends Ban on Federal Aid for Busing,” Education Week, December 21, 2020.
[6] United States Department of Education, “Biden-Harris Administration Awards $14 Million Under First-Ever Fostering Diverse Schools Demonstration Grant Program,” Press Release, October 19, 2023.
[7] Catherine Carrera, “New Jersey School Segregation Case: A Look at Key Points, What’s Next in Latino Action Network vs. NJ,” Chalkbeat Newark, October 13, 2023; and Becky Dernbach, “Competing Charter-School and Public-School Advocates Declare Victory in Minnesota Desegregation Ruling,” Sahan Journal, December 13, 2023.
[8] For the purposes of this analysis, “students of color” are those identified as a race or ethnicity other than non-Hispanic white in U.S. Department of Education data.
[9] New America calculation, based on United States Census data here and here.
[10] Justia U.S. Supreme Court (website), “Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).”
More About the Authors
Jordan Abbott
Senior Data Scientist, Education Funding Equity initiative
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