racial inequality in education usa

This is what the racial education gap in the US looks like right now

Racial achievement gaps in the United States has been slow and unsteady. Image:  Unsplash/Santi Vedrí

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Stay up to date:, education, gender and work.

• Racial achievement gaps in the United States are narrowing, a Stanford University data project shows.
• But progress has been slow and unsteady – and gaps are still large across much of the country.
• COVID-19 could widen existing inequalities in education.
• The World Economic Forum will be exploring the issues around growing income inequality as part of The Jobs Reset Summit .

In the United States today, the average Black and Hispanic students are about three years ahead of where their parents were in maths skills.

They’re roughly two to three years ahead of them in reading, too.

And while white students’ test scores in these subjects have also improved, they’re not rising by as much. This means racial achievement gaps – a key way of monitoring whether all students have access to a good education – in the country are narrowing, research by Stanford University shows.

But while the trend suggests progress is being made in improving racial educational disparities, it doesn’t show the full picture. Progress, the university says, has been slow and uneven.

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Standardized tests

Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Monitoring Project uses average standardized test scores for nine-, 13- and 17-year-olds to measure these achievement gaps.

It’s able to do this because the same tests have been used by the National Assessment of Educational Progress to observe maths and reading skills since the 1970s.

In the following decades, as the above chart shows, achievement gaps have significantly declined in all age groups and in both maths and reading. But it’s been something of a roller-coaster.

Substantial progress stalled at the end of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s and in some cases the gaps grew larger. Since then, they’ve been declining steadily and are now significantly smaller than they were in the 1970s.

But these gaps are still “very large”. In fact, the difference in standardized test scores between white and Black students currently amounts to roughly two years of education. And the gap between white and Hispanic students is almost as big.

Schools not to blame

This disparity exists across the US. Racial achievement gaps have narrowed in most states – although they’ve widened in a small number. In almost all of the country’s 100 largest school districts , though, there’s a big achievement gap between white and Black students.

So why is this? Stanford says its data doesn’t support the common argument that schools themselves are to blame for low average test scores, which is often made because white students tend to live in wealthier communities where schools are presumed to be better.

In fact, it says, the scores actually represent gaps in educational opportunity, which can be traced back to a child’s early experiences. These experiences are formed at home, in childcare and preschool, and in communities – and they provide opportunities to develop socioemotional and academic capacities.

Higher-income families are more likely to be able to provide these opportunities to their children, so a family’s socioeconomic resources are strongly related to educational outcomes , Stanford says. It notes that in the US, Black and Hispanic children’s parents typically have lower incomes and levels of educational attainment than those of white children.

Other factors, such as patterns of residential and school segregation and a state’s educational and social policies, could also have a role in the size of achievement gaps.

And discipline could play its part, too, according to another Stanford study. It linked the achievement gap between Black and white students to the fact that the former are punished more harshly for similar misbehaviour, for example being more likely to be suspended from school than the latter.

Long-term effects

Stanford says using data to map race and poverty could provide the insights needed to help improve educational opportunity for all children.

And this kind of insight is needed now more than ever. The school shutdowns forced by COVID-19 could have exacerbated existing achievement gaps , according to research from McKinsey. The consultancy says the resulting learning losses – predicted to be greater for low-income Black and Hispanic students – could have long-term effects on the economic well-being of the affected children.

Black and Hispanic families are less likely to have high-speed internet at home, making distance learning difficult. And students living in low-income neighbourhoods are less likely to have had decent home schooling, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Earlier in the pandemic, it said coronavirus would "explode" achievement gaps , suggesting it could expand them by the equivalent of another half a year of schooling.

The World Economic Forum’s Jobs Reset Summit brings together leaders from business, government, civil society, media and the broader public to shape a new agenda for growth, jobs, skills and equity.

The two-day virtual event, being held on 1-2 June 2021, will address the most critical areas of debate, articulate pathways for action, and mobilize the most influential leaders and organizations to work together to accelerate progress.

The Summit will develop new frameworks, shape innovative solutions and accelerate action on four thematic pillars: Economic Growth, Revival and Transformation; Work, Wages and Job Creation; Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning; and Equity, Inclusion and Social Justice.

The World Economic Forum will be exploring the issues around growing income inequality, and what to do about it, as part of The Jobs Reset Summit .

The summit will look at ways to shape more inclusive, fair and sustainable organizations, economies and societies as we emerge from the current crisis.

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U.S. Government Accountability Office

Racial Disparities in Education and the Role of Government

The death of George Floyd and other Black men and women has prompted demonstrations across the country and brought more attention to the issues of racial inequality. Over the past several years, GAO has been asked to examine various racial inequalities in public programs and we have made recommendations to address them.

Today is the first of 3 blog posts in which we will address these reports. The first deals with equality in education.

School Discipline

Unequal treatment can start at a young age. In  2018 , we reported that starting in pre-school, children as young as 3 and 4 have been suspended and expelled from school—a pattern that can continue throughout a child’s education. In K-12 public schools, Black students, boys, and students with disabilities were disproportionately disciplined (e.g., suspended or expelled), according to our review of the Department of Education’s national civil rights data.

These disparities were widespread and persisted regardless of the type of disciplinary action, level of school poverty, or type of public school attended. For example, while only 15.5% of public school students were Black, about 39% of students suspended from school were Black—an overrepresentation of about 23 percentage points (see figure).

Students Suspended from School Compared to Student Population, by Race, Sex, and Disability Status, School Year 2013-14

Note: Disparities in student discipline such as those presented in this figure may support a finding of discrimination, but taken alone, do not establish whether unlawful discrimination has occurred .

Minority students may also be more likely to attend alternative public schools because of issues like poor grades and disruptive behavior. In  2019 , we found that Black boys transferred to alternative schools at rates higher than any other group for disciplinary reasons, and that they, along with Hispanic boys and boys with disabilities, attended alternative schools in greater proportions than they did regular public schools attended by the majority of U.S. public school students.  For example, Black boys accounted for 16 percent of students at alternative schools, but only 8 percent of students at regular public schools in 2015-16.

Education Quality and Access

The link between racial and ethnic minorities and poverty is long-standing. Studies have noted concerns about this segment of the population that falls at the intersection of poverty and minority status in schools and how this affects their access to quality education. In  2018 , we reported that during high school, students in high-poverty areas had less access to college-prep courses.  Schools in high-poverty areas were also less likely to offer math and science courses than most public 4-year colleges expected students to take in high school. The racial composition of the highest poverty schools was also 80% Black or Hispanic.

The Department of Education has several initiatives to help students prepare for college. For example, GEAR UP (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs) seeks to increase the number of low-income students who are prepared to enter and succeed in postsecondary education. In 2016, Education awarded about $323 million in grants through GEAR UP.

In our 2018 report, we described  an investigation the Department of Education conducted in 2014 looking at  whether Black students in a Virginia school district had the same access to educational opportunities as other students. It found a significant disparity between the numbers of Black and White high school students who take AP, advanced courses, and dual-credit programs.

Addressing Disparity in Schools

So, what can be done to identify and address racial disparities in K-12 public schools? In  2016 , we recommended that the Department of Education, which is to ensure equal access to education and promote educational excellence through vigorous enforcement of civil rights in our nation’s schools, routinely analyze its Civil Rights dataset, which could help it identify issues and patterns of disparities. Our recommendation was implemented in 2018.

The Department of Justice also plays a role in enforcing federal civil rights laws in the context of K-12 education. For example, it monitors and enforces open federal school desegregation orders where Justice is a party to the litigation.  At the time of our study, many of these desegregation orders had been in place for 30 and 40 years.   For example, in a 2014 opinion in a long-standing desegregation case, the court described a long period of dormancy in the case and stated that lack of activity had taken its toll, noting, that the district had not submitted the annual reports required under the consent order to the court for the past 20 years. In 2016, we recommended that the Department of Justice systematically track key summary information across its portfolio of open desegregation cases to help inform its monitoring. Our recommendation was implemented in 2019.

To learn more about GAO’s work on education, visit our key issues pages on  Ensuring Access to Safe, Quality K-12 Education  and  Postsecondary Education Access and Affordability .

Comments on GAO’s WatchBlog? Contact  [email protected] .

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Related products, k-12 education: discipline disparities for black students, boys, and students with disabilities, product number, k-12 education: certain groups of students attend alternative schools in greater proportions than they do other schools, k-12 education: public high schools with more students in poverty and smaller schools provide fewer academic offerings to prepare for college.

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The blog format allows GAO to provide a little more context about its work than it can offer on its other social media platforms. Posts will tie GAO work to current events and the news; show how GAO’s work is affecting agencies or legislation; highlight reports, testimonies, and issue areas where GAO does work; and provide information about GAO itself, among other things.

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Income, segregated schools drive Black-white education gaps

By james dean, cornell chronicle.

Given the same levels of family, school and neighborhood hardship, Black students would be more likely than white students to complete high school and attend college – reversing current disparities, finds new research co-authored by Cornell sociologist Peter Rich .

Accounting for the unequal contexts in which Black and white children grow up and go to school also narrows test-score gaps substantially – by more than 60%, according to the study, which followed nearly 130,000 Michigan students from kindergarten through college enrollment.

The researchers say the findings show that a generation of federal education reforms aimed at closing racial gaps in achievement and attainment has not adequately addressed their two primary drivers: systemic economic inequality, and severely segregated schools.

“Our analysis reveals a stark divide in the social origins of Black and white children coming of age in the beginning of the 21st century – and the toll this divide takes on educational inequality,” the authors write.

Rich, an assistant professor of sociology and demographer in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, is the author with Katherine Michelmore, Ph.D. ’14, associate professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, of “ Contextual Origins of Black-White Educational Disparities in the 21st Century: Evaluating Long-Term Disadvantage Across Three Domains ,” published Oct. 1 in Social Forces.

Sociologists and policymakers have long sought to assess the extent to which family background, school quality and neighborhood environment each contribute to educational disparities.

Rich and Michelmore’s work updates that understanding for the No Child Left Behind era, by tracking students educated entirely after passage of the 2001 legislation focused on school accountability and choice. Michigan offered an ideal case study, they said, since its students mirror the nation demographically and could be observed over 16 years, from 2002 to 2018. The authors obtained restricted access to student records through a partnership with the Michigan Education Research Initiative and the Michigan Department of Education.

Students’ eligibility for subsidized lunches provided a measure of family economic hardship. Roughly half of all white students were disadvantaged at some point in time, compared with over 90% of Black students. The researchers also created indexes of school and neighborhood disadvantage, including factors such a school’s percentage of low-income students and average scores on eighth- and 11th-grade math tests, or a neighborhood’s poverty and unemployment rates.

Controlling for disadvantage across each context over time, the scholars determined that, consistent with prior research, family resources explain by far the biggest share of Black-white education gaps.

“This finding implies that material differences in the contexts inherited by Black and white children – rather than individual effort – drive the large education gaps we observe,” they write. “These trends have persisted through the recent era of federal accountability reforms.”

After family background, Rich and Michelmore found that schools – specifically, schools that are highly segregated due to systemic inequality in wealth and housing – are “consequential,” disproportionately exposing Black students to disadvantage for longer durations.

“Results from our study support concerns that schools exacerbate Black-white inequality,” they write, countering recent debates suggesting that neighborhood context primarily drives differences in student outcomes.

When they controlled for all three contexts together, the researchers found that gaps of nearly 13% in high school graduation and 17% in college enrollment were not only eliminated but reversed, and disparities in test scores narrowed dramatically.

Strengthening those insights, they said, was a longitudinal methodology that more accurately captured the effects of economic hardship over students’ careers until college. Researchers commonly rely on data reported for a single year, they said, which can obscure distinctions between students who are eligible for subsidized lunches consistently, sporadically or never.

“If you only look at a snapshot in time, you’re missing the true portrait of a student’s family economic hardship,” said Rich, a faculty affiliate in Cornell’s Center for the Study of Inequality . “That’s especially important for questions around racial inequality, because Black children are far more likely to live in economic hardship for longer periods of time.”

The authors said their analysis suggests a need for complex policy solutions addressing systemic inequities. Despite decades of ostensibly race-neutral policies, they concluded, Black-white educational disparities persist because of a long history of racial exclusion that has limited Black Americans’ access to homeownership, high-achieving schools, college degrees and high-paying jobs.

“We underscore the relevance of this study to renewed attention to systemic racism as an urgent crisis,” they write. “Our findings amplify the argument that uprooting systemic racism requires an ongoing confrontation with how this history warps Black and white childhood opportunities.”

The research was partly funded by the Cornell Population Center and the Center for Aging and Policy Studies , a consortium based at Syracuse University.

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Remote learning turned spotlight on gaps in resources, funding, and tech — but also offered hints on reform

“Unequal” is a multipart series highlighting the work of Harvard faculty, staff, students, alumni, and researchers on issues of race and inequality across the U.S. This part looks at how the pandemic called attention to issues surrounding the racial achievement gap in America.

The pandemic has disrupted education nationwide, turning a spotlight on existing racial and economic disparities, and creating the potential for a lost generation. Even before the outbreak, students in vulnerable communities — particularly predominately Black, Indigenous, and other majority-minority areas — were already facing inequality in everything from resources (ranging from books to counselors) to student-teacher ratios and extracurriculars.

The additional stressors of systemic racism and the trauma induced by poverty and violence, both cited as aggravating health and wellness as at a Weatherhead Institute panel , pose serious obstacles to learning as well. “Before the pandemic, children and families who are marginalized were living under such challenging conditions that it made it difficult for them to get a high-quality education,” said Paul Reville, founder and director of the Education Redesign Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (GSE).

Educators hope that the may triggers a broader conversation about reform and renewed efforts to narrow the longstanding racial achievement gap. They say that research shows virtually all of the nation’s schoolchildren have fallen behind, with students of color having lost the most ground, particularly in math. They also note that the full-time reopening of schools presents opportunities to introduce changes and that some of the lessons from remote learning, particularly in the area of technology, can be put to use to help students catch up from the pandemic as well as to begin to level the playing field.

The disparities laid bare by the COVID-19 outbreak became apparent from the first shutdowns. “The good news, of course, is that many schools were very fast in finding all kinds of ways to try to reach kids,” said Fernando M. Reimers , Ford Foundation Professor of the Practice in International Education and director of GSE’s Global Education Innovation Initiative and International Education Policy Program. He cautioned, however, that “those arrangements don’t begin to compare with what we’re able to do when kids could come to school, and they are particularly deficient at reaching the most vulnerable kids.” In addition, it turned out that many students simply lacked access.

“We’re beginning to understand that technology is a basic right. You cannot participate in society in the 21st century without access to it,” says Fernando Reimers of the Graduate School of Education.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard file photo

The rate of limited digital access for households was at 42 percent during last spring’s shutdowns, before drifting down to about 31 percent this fall, suggesting that school districts improved their adaptation to remote learning, according to an analysis by the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge of U.S. Census data. (Indeed, Education Week and other sources reported that school districts around the nation rushed to hand out millions of laptops, tablets, and Chromebooks in the months after going remote.)

The report also makes clear the degree of racial and economic digital inequality. Black and Hispanic households with school-aged children were 1.3 to 1.4 times as likely as white ones to face limited access to computers and the internet, and more than two in five low-income households had only limited access. It’s a problem that could have far-reaching consequences given that young students of color are much more likely to live in remote-only districts.

“We’re beginning to understand that technology is a basic right,” said Reimers. “You cannot participate in society in the 21st century without access to it.” Too many students, he said, “have no connectivity. They have no devices, or they have no home circumstances that provide them support.”

The issues extend beyond the technology. “There is something wonderful in being in contact with other humans, having a human who tells you, ‘It’s great to see you. How are things going at home?’” Reimers said. “I’ve done 35 case studies of innovative practices around the world. They all prioritize social, emotional well-being. Checking in with the kids. Making sure there is a touchpoint every day between a teacher and a student.”

The difference, said Reville, is apparent when comparing students from different economic circumstances. Students whose parents “could afford to hire a tutor … can compensate,” he said. “Those kids are going to do pretty well at keeping up. Whereas, if you’re in a single-parent family and mom is working two or three jobs to put food on the table, she can’t be home. It’s impossible for her to keep up and keep her kids connected.

“If you lose the connection, you lose the kid.”

“COVID just revealed how serious those inequities are,” said GSE Dean Bridget Long , the Saris Professor of Education and Economics. “It has disproportionately hurt low-income students, students with special needs, and school systems that are under-resourced.”

This disruption carries throughout the education process, from elementary school students (some of whom have simply stopped logging on to their online classes) through declining participation in higher education. Community colleges, for example, have “traditionally been a gateway for low-income students” into the professional classes, said Long, whose research focuses on issues of affordability and access. “COVID has just made all of those issues 10 times worse,” she said. “That’s where enrollment has fallen the most.”

In addition to highlighting such disparities, these losses underline a structural issue in public education. Many schools are under-resourced, and the major reason involves sources of school funding. A 2019 study found that predominantly white districts got $23 billion more than their non-white counterparts serving about the same number of students. The discrepancy is because property taxes are the primary source of funding for schools, and white districts tend to be wealthier than those of color.

The problem of resources extends beyond teachers, aides, equipment, and supplies, as schools have been tasked with an increasing number of responsibilities, from the basics of education to feeding and caring for the mental health of both students and their families.

“You think about schools and academics, but what COVID really made clear was that schools do so much more than that,” said Long. A child’s school, she stressed “is social, emotional support. It’s safety. It’s the food system. It is health care.”

“You think about schools and academics” … but a child’s school “is social, emotional support. It’s safety. It’s the food system. It is health care,” stressed GSE Dean Bridget Long.

Rose Lincoln/Harvard file photo

This safety net has been shredded just as more students need it. “We have 400,000 deaths and those are disproportionately affecting communities of color,” said Long. “So you can imagine the kids that are in those households. Are they able to come to school and learn when they’re dealing with this trauma?”

The damage is felt by the whole families. In an upcoming paper, focusing on parents of children ages 5 to 7, Cindy H. Liu, director of Harvard Medical School’s Developmental Risk and Cultural Disparities Laboratory , looks at the effects of COVID-related stress on parent’ mental health. This stress — from both health risks and grief — “likely has ramifications for those groups who are disadvantaged, particularly in getting support, as it exacerbates existing disparities in obtaining resources,” she said via email. “The unfortunate reality is that the pandemic is limiting the tangible supports [like childcare] that parents might actually need.”

Educators are overwhelmed as well. “Teachers are doing a phenomenal job connecting with students,” Long said about their performance online. “But they’ve lost the whole system — access to counselors, access to additional staff members and support. They’ve lost access to information. One clue is that the reporting of child abuse going down. It’s not that we think that child abuse is actually going down, but because you don’t have a set of adults watching and being with kids, it’s not being reported.”

The repercussions are chilling. “As we resume in-person education on a normal basis, we’re dealing with enormous gaps,” said Reville. “Some kids will come back with such educational deficits that unless their schools have a very well thought-out and effective program to help them catch up, they will never catch up. They may actually drop out of school. The immediate consequences of learning loss and disengagement are going to be a generation of people who will be less educated.”

There is hope, however. Just as the lockdown forced teachers to improvise, accelerating forms of online learning, so too may the recovery offer options for educational reform.

The solutions, say Reville, “are going to come from our community. This is a civic problem.” He applauded one example, the Somerville, Mass., public library program of outdoor Wi-Fi “pop ups,” which allow 24/7 access either through their own or library Chromebooks. “That’s the kind of imagination we need,” he said.

On a national level, he points to the creation of so-called “Children’s Cabinets.” Already in place in 30 states, these nonpartisan groups bring together leaders at the city, town, and state levels to address children’s needs through schools, libraries, and health centers. A July 2019 “ Children’s Cabinet Toolkit ” on the Education Redesign Lab site offers guidance for communities looking to form their own, with sample mission statements from Denver, Minneapolis, and Fairfax, Va.

Already the Education Redesign Lab is working on even more wide-reaching approaches. In Tennessee, for example, the Metro Nashville Public Schools has launched an innovative program, designed to provide each student with a personalized education plan. By pairing these students with school “navigators” — including teachers, librarians, and instructional coaches — the program aims to address each student’s particular needs.

“This is a chance to change the system,” said Reville. “By and large, our school systems are organized around a factory model, a one-size-fits-all approach. That wasn’t working very well before, and it’s working less well now.”

“Students have different needs,” agreed Long. “We just have to get a better understanding of what we need to prioritize and where students are” in all aspects of their home and school lives.

“By and large, our school systems are organized around a factory model, a one-size-fits-all approach. That wasn’t working very well before, and it’s working less well now,” says Paul Reville of the GSE.

Already, educators are discussing possible responses. Long and GSE helped create The Principals’ Network as one forum for sharing ideas, for example. With about 1,000 members, and multiple subgroups to address shared community issues, some viable answers have begun to emerge.

“We are going to need to expand learning time,” said Long. Some school systems, notably Texas’, already have begun discussing extending the school year, she said. In addition, Long, an internationally recognized economist who is a member of the  National Academy of Education and the  MDRC board, noted that educators are exploring innovative ways to utilize new tools like Zoom, even when classrooms reopen.

“This is an area where technology can help supplement what students are learning, giving them extra time — learning time, even tutoring time,” Long said.

Reimers, who serves on the UNESCO Commission on the Future of Education, has been brainstorming solutions that can be applied both here and abroad. These include urging wealthier countries to forgive loans, so that poorer countries do not have to cut back on basics such as education, and urging all countries to keep education a priority. The commission and its members are also helping to identify good practices and share them — globally.

Innovative uses of existing technology can also reach beyond traditional schooling. Reimers cites the work of a few former students who, working with Harvard Global Education Innovation Initiative,   HundrED , the  OECD Directorate for Education and Skills , and the  World Bank Group Education Global Practice, focused on podcasts to reach poor students in Colombia.

They began airing their math and Spanish lessons via the WhatsApp app, which was widely accessible. “They were so humorous that within a week, everyone was listening,” said Reimers. Soon, radio stations and other platforms began airing the 10-minute lessons, reaching not only children who were not in school, but also their adult relatives.

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The U.S. student population is more diverse, but schools are still highly segregated

Sequoia Carrillo

Pooja Salhotra

The U.S. student body is more diverse than ever before. Nevertheless, public schools remain highly segregated along racial, ethnic and socioeconomic lines.

That's according to a report released Thursday by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). More than a third of students (about 18.5 million of them) attended a predominantly same-race/ethnicity school during the 2020-21 school year, the report finds. And 14% of students attended schools where almost all of the student body was of a single race/ethnicity.

The report is a follow up to a 2016 GAO investigation on racial disparity in K-12 schools. That initial report painted a slightly worse picture, but findings from the new report are still concerning, says Jackie Nowicki, the director of K-12 education at the GAO and lead author of the report.

Why White School Districts Have So Much More Money

"There is clearly still racial division in schools," says Nowicki. She adds that schools with large proportions of Hispanic, Black and American Indian/Alaska Native students – minority groups with higher rates of poverty than white and Asian American students – are also increasing. "What that means is you have large portions of minority children not only attending essentially segregated schools, but schools that have less resources available to them."

"There are layers of factors here," she says. "They paint a rather dire picture of the state of schooling for a segment of the school-age population that federal laws were designed to protect."

School segregation happens across the country

Segregation has historically been associated with the Jim Crow laws of the South. But the report finds that, in the 2020-21 school year, the highest percentage of schools serving a predominantly single-race/ethnicity student population – whether mostly white, mostly Hispanic or mostly Black etc. – were in the Northeast and the Midwest.

School segregation has "always been a whole-country issue," says U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., who heads the House education and labor committee. He commissioned both the 2016 and 2022 reports. "The details of the strategies may be different, but during the '60s and '70s, when the desegregation cases were at their height, cases were all over the country."

How The Systemic Segregation Of Schools Is Maintained By 'Individual Choices'

The GAO analysis also found school segregation across all school types, including traditional public schools, charter schools and magnet schools. Across all charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run, more than a third were predominantly same-race/ethnicity, serving mostly Black and Hispanic students.

There's history behind the report's findings

Nowicki and her team at the GAO say they were not surprised by any of the report's findings. They point to historical practices, like redlining , that created racially segregated neighborhoods.

And because 70% of U.S. students attend their neighborhood public schools, Nowicki says, racially segregated neighborhoods have historically made for racially segregated schools.

The 50 Most Segregating School Borders In America

"There are historical reasons why neighborhoods look the way they look," she explains. "And some portion of that is because of the way our country chose to encourage or limit where people could live."

Though the 1968 Fair Housing Act outlawed housing discrimination on the basis of race, the GAO says that in some states, current legislation reinforces racially isolated communities.

"Our analysis showed that predominantly same-race/ethnicity schools of different races/ethnicities exist in close proximity to one another within districts, but most commonly exist among neighboring districts," the report says.

School district secessions have made segregation worse

One cause for the lack of significant improvement, according to the GAO, is a practice known as district secession, where schools break away from an existing district – often citing a need for more local control – and form their own new district. The result, the report finds, is that segregation deepens.

"In the 10 years that we looked at district secessions, we found that, overwhelmingly, those new districts were generally whiter, wealthier than the remaining districts," Nowicki says.

Six of the 36 district secessions identified in the report happened in Memphis, Tenn., which experienced a historic district merger several years ago. Memphis City Schools, which served a majority non-white student body, dissolved in 2011 due to financial instability. It then merged with the neighboring district, Shelby County Schools, which served a wealthier, majority white population.

This Supreme Court Case Made School District Lines A Tool For Segregation

Joris Ray was a Memphis City Schools administrator at the time of the merger. He recalls that residents of Shelby County were not satisfied with the new consolidated district. They successfully splintered off into six separate districts.

As a result, the GAO report says, racial and socioeconomic segregation has grown in and around Memphis. All of the newly formed districts are whiter and wealthier than the one they left, which is now called Memphis-Shelby County Schools.

Why Busing Didn't End School Segregation

"This brings negative implications for our students overall," says Ray, who has led Memphis-Shelby County Schools since 2019. "Research has shown that students in more diverse schools have lower levels of prejudice and stereotypes and are more prepared for top employers to hire an increasingly diverse workforce."

The GAO report finds that this pattern – of municipalities removing themselves from a larger district to form their own, smaller school district – almost always creates more racial and socioeconomic segregation. Overall, new districts tend to have larger shares of white and Asian American students, and lower shares of Black and Hispanic students, the report finds. New districts also have significantly fewer students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, a common measure of poverty.

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Still Separate, Still Unequal: Teaching about School Segregation and Educational Inequality

By Keith Meatto

• May 2, 2019

Racial segregation in public education has been illegal for 65 years in the United States. Yet American public schools remain largely separate and unequal — with profound consequences for students, especially students of color.

Today’s teachers and students should know that the Supreme Court declared racial segregation in schools to be unconstitutional in the landmark 1954 ruling Brown v. Board of Education . Perhaps less well known is the extent to which American schools are still segregated. According to a recent Times article , “More than half of the nation’s schoolchildren are in racially concentrated districts, where over 75 percent of students are either white or nonwhite.” In addition, school districts are often segregated by income. The nexus of racial and economic segregation has intensified educational gaps between rich and poor students, and between white students and students of color.

Although many students learn about the historical struggles to desegregate schools in the civil rights era, segregation as a current reality is largely absent from the curriculum.

“No one is really talking about school segregation anymore,” Elise C. Boddie and Dennis D. Parker wrote in this 2018 Op-Ed essay. “That’s a shame because an abundance of research shows that integration is still one of the most effective tools that we have for achieving racial equity.”

The teaching activities below, written directly to students, use recent Times articles as a way to grapple with segregation and educational inequality in the present. This resource considers three essential questions:

• How and why are schools still segregated in 2019? • What repercussions do segregated schools have for students and society? • What are potential remedies to address school segregation?

School segregation and educational inequity may be a sensitive and uncomfortable topic for students and teachers, regardless of their race, ethnicity or economic status. Nevertheless, the topics below offer entry points to an essential conversation, one that affects every American student and raises questions about core American ideals of equality and fairness.

Six Activities for Students to Investigate School Segregation and Educational Inequality

Activity #1: Warm-Up: Visualize segregation and inequality in education.

Based on civil rights data released by the United States Department of Education, the nonprofit news organization ProPublica has built an interactive database to examine racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline. In this activity, which might begin a deeper study of school segregation, you can look up your own school district, or individual public or charter school, to see how it compares with its counterparts.

To get started: Scroll down to the interactive map of the United States in this ProPublica database and then answer the following questions:

1. Click the tabs “Opportunity,” “Discipline,” “Segregation” and “Achievement Gap” and answer these two simple questions: What do you notice? What do you wonder? (These are the same questions we ask as part of our “ What’s Going On in This Graph? ” weekly discussions.) 2. Next, click the tabs “Black” and “Hispanic.” What do you notice? What do you wonder? 3. Search for your school or district in the database. What do you notice in the results? What questions do you have?

For Further Exploration

Research your own school district. Then write an essay, create an oral presentation or make an annotated map on segregation and educational inequity in your community, using data from the Miseducation database.

Activity #2: Explore a case study: schools in Charlottesville, Va.

The New York Times and ProPublica investigated how segregation still plays a role in shaping students’ educational experiences in the small Virginia city of Charlottesville. The article begins:

Zyahna Bryant and Trinity Hughes, high school seniors, have been friends since they were 6, raised by blue-collar families in this affluent college town. They played on the same T-ball and softball teams, and were in the same church group. But like many African-American children in Charlottesville, Trinity lived on the south side of town and went to a predominantly black neighborhood elementary school. Zyahna lived across the train tracks, on the north side, and was zoned to a mostly white school, near the University of Virginia campus, that boasts the city’s highest reading scores.

Before you read the rest of the article, and learn about the experiences of Zyahna and Trinity, answer the following questions based on your own knowledge, experience and opinions:

• What is the purpose of public education? • Do all children in America receive the same quality of education? • Is receiving a quality public education a right (for everyone) or a privilege (for some)? • Is there a correlation between students’ race and the quality of education they receive?

Now read the entire article about lingering segregation in Charlottesville and answer the following questions:

1. How is Charlottesville’s school district geographically and racially segregated? 2. How is Charlottesville a microcosm of education in America? 3. How do white and black students in Charlottesville compare in terms of participation in gifted and talented programs; being held back a grade; being suspended from school? 4. How do black and white students in Charlottesville compare in terms of reading at grade level? 5. How do Charlottesville school officials explain the disparities between white and black students? 6. Why are achievement disparities so common in college towns? 7. In what ways do socioeconomics not fully explain the gap between white and black students?

After reading the article and answering the above questions, share your reactions using the following prompts:

• Did anything in the article surprise you? Shock you? Make you angry or sad? Why? • On the other hand, did anything in the article strike you as unsurprising? Explain. • How might education in Charlottesville be made more equitable?

Choose one or more of the following ideas to investigate school segregation in the United States and around the world.

1. Read and discuss “ In a Divided Bosnia, Segregated Schools Persist .” Compare and contrast the situations in Bosnia and Charlottesville. How does this perspective confirm, challenge, or complicate your understanding of the topic?

2. Read and discuss the article and study the map and graphs in “ Why Are New York’s Schools Segregated? It’s Not as Simple as Housing .” How does “school choice” confirm, challenge or complicate your understanding of segregation and educational inequity?

3. Only a tiny number of black students were offered admission to the highly selective public high schools in New York City in 2019, raising the pressure on officials to confront the decades-old challenge of integrating New York’s elite public schools. To learn more about this story, listen to this episode of The Daily . For more information, read these Op-Ed essays and editorials offering different perspectives on the problem and possible solutions. Then, make a case for what should be done — or not done — to make New York’s elite public schools more diverse.

• Stop Fixating on One Elite High School, Stuyvesant. There Are Bigger Problems. • How Elite Schools Stay So White • No Ethnic Group Owns Stuyvesant. All New Yorkers Do. • De Blasio’s Plan for NYC Schools Isn’t Anti-Asian. It’s Anti-Racist. • New York’s Best Schools Need to Do Better

3. Read and discuss “ The Resegregation of Jefferson County .” How does this story confirm, challenge or complicate your understanding of the topic?

Activity #3: Investigate the relationship between school segregation, funding and inequality.

Some school districts have more money to spend on education than others. Does this funding inequality have anything to do with lingering segregation in public schools? A recent report says yes. A New York Times article published in February begins:

School districts that predominantly serve students of color received $23 billion less in funding than mostly white school districts in the United States in 2016, despite serving the same number of students, a new report found. The report, released this week by the nonprofit EdBuild, put a dollar amount on the problem of school segregation, which has persisted long after Brown v. Board of Education and was targeted in recent lawsuits in states from New Jersey to Minnesota. The estimate also came as teachers across the country have protested and gone on strike to demand more funding for public schools.

Answer the following questions based on your own knowledge, experience and opinions.

• Who pays for public schools? • Is there a correlation between money and education? Does the amount of money a school spends on students influence the quality of the education students receive?

Now read the rest of the Times article about funding differences between mostly white school districts and mostly nonwhite ones, and then answer the following questions:

1. How much less total funding do school districts that serve predominantly students of color receive compared to school districts that serve predominantly white students? 2. Why are school district borders problematic? 3. How many of the nation’s schoolchildren are in “racially concentrated districts, where over 75 percent of students are either white or nonwhite”? 4. How much less money, on average, do nonwhite districts receive than white districts? 5. How are school districts funded? 6. How does lack of school funding affect classrooms? 7. What is the new kind of ”white flight” in Arizona and why is it a problem? 8. What is an “enclave”? What does the statement “some school districts have become their own enclaves” mean?

• Did anything in the article surprise you? Shock you? Make you angry or sad? Why? • On the other hand, did anything in the article strike you as unsurprising? Explain. • How could school funding be made more equitable?

Choose one or more of the following ideas to investigate the interrelationship among school segregation, funding and inequality.

1. Research your local school district budget, using public records or local media, such as newspapers or television reporting. What is the budget per student? How does that budget compare with the state average? The national average? 2. Compare your findings about your local school budget to your research about segregation and student outcomes, using the Miseducation database. Do the results of your research suggest any correlations?

Activity #4: Examine potential legal remedies to school segregation and educational inequality.

How do we get better schools for all children? One way might be to take the state to court. A Times article from August reports on a wave of lawsuits that argue that states are violating their constitutions by denying children a quality education. The article begins:

By his own account, Alejandro Cruz-Guzman’s five children have received a good education at public schools in St. Paul. His two oldest daughters are starting careers in finance and teaching. Another daughter, a high-school student, plans to become a doctor. But their success, Mr. Cruz-Guzman said, flows partly from the fact that he and his wife fought for their children to attend racially integrated schools outside their neighborhood. Their two youngest children take a bus 30 minutes each way to Murray Middle School, where the student population is about one-third white, one-third black, 16 percent Asian and 9 percent Latino. “I wanted to have my kids exposed to different cultures and learn from different people,” said Mr. Cruz-Guzman, who owns a small flooring company and is an immigrant from Mexico. When his two oldest children briefly attended a charter school that was close to 100 percent Latino, he said he had realized, “We are limiting our kids to one community.” Now Mr. Cruz-Guzman is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit saying that Minnesota knowingly allowed towns and cities to set policies and zoning boundaries that led to segregated schools, lowering test scores and graduation rates for low-income and nonwhite children.

Read the entire article and then answer the following questions:

1. What does Mr. Cruz-Guzman’s suit allege against the State of Minnesota? 2. Why are advocates for school funding equity focused on state government, as opposed to the federal government? 3. What did a state judge rule in New Mexico? What did the Kansas Supreme Court rule? 4. What fraction of fourth and eighth graders in New Mexico is not proficient in reading? What does research suggest may improve their test scores? 5. According to a 2016 study, if a school spends 10 percent more per pupil, what percentage more would students earn as adults? 6. What does the economist Eric Hanushek argue about the correlation between spending and student achievement? 7. What remedy for school segregation is Daniel Shulman, the lead lawyer in the Minnesota desegregation suit, considering? Why are charter schools nervous about the case? 8. How does Khulia Pringle see some charter schools as “culturally affirming”? What problems does Ms. Pringle see with busing white children to black schools and vice versa?

• Did anything in the article surprise you? What other emotional responses did you have while reading? Why? • On the other hand, did anything in the article strike you as unsurprising? Explain. • Do the potential “cultural” benefits of school segregation outweigh the costs?

Choose one or more of the following ideas to investigate potential remedies to school segregation and educational inequality.

1. Read the obituaries “ Jean Fairfax, Unsung but Undeterred in Integrating Schools, Dies at 98 ” and “ Linda Brown, Symbol of Landmark Desegregation Case, Dies at 75 .” How do their lives inform your grasp of legal challenges to segregation?

2. Watch the following video about school busing . How does this history inform your understanding of the benefits and challenges of busing?

3. Read about how parents in two New York City school districts are trying to tackle segregation in local middle schools . Then decide if these models have potential for other districts in New York or around the country. Why or why not?

Activity #5: Consider alternatives to integration.

Is integration the best and only choice for families who feel their children are being denied a quality education? A recent Times article reports on how some black families in New York City are choosing an alternative to integration. The article begins:

“I love myself!” the group of mostly black children shouted in unison. “I love my hair, I love my skin!” When it was time to settle down, their teacher raised her fist in a black power salute. The students did the same, and the room hushed. As children filed out of the cramped school auditorium on their way to class, they walked by posters of Colin Kaepernick and Harriet Tubman. It was a typical morning at Ember Charter School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, an Afrocentric school that sits in a squat building on a quiet block in a neighborhood long known as a center of black political power. Though New York City has tried to desegregate its schools in fits and starts since the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the school system is now one of the most segregated in the nation. But rather than pushing for integration, some black parents in Bedford-Stuyvesant are choosing an alternative: schools explicitly designed for black children.

Before you read the rest of the article, answer the following questions based on your own knowledge, experience and opinions:

• Should voluntary segregation in schools be permissible? Why or why not? • What potential benefits might voluntary segregation offer? • What potential problems might it pose?

Now, read the entire article and then answer these questions:

1. What is the goal of Afrocentric schools? 2. Why are some parents and educators enthusiastic about Afrocentric schools? 3. Why are some experts wary of Afrocentric schools? 4. What does Alisa Nutakor want to offer minority students at Ember? 5. What position does the city’s schools chancellor take on Afrocentric schools? 6. What “modest desegregation plans” have some districts offered? With what result? 7. Why did Fela Barclift found Little Sun People? 8. Why are some parents ambivalent about school integration? According to them, how can schools be more responsive to students of color? 9. What does Mutale Nkonde mean by the phrase “not all boats are rising”? 10. What did Jordan Pierre gain from his experience at Eagle Academy?

• Did anything in the article surprise you? What other emotional responses did you have while reading? Why? • On the other hand, did anything in the article strike you as unsurprising? Explain. • Did the article challenge your opinion about voluntary segregation? How?

Choose one or more of the following ideas to investigate some of the complicating factors that influence where parents decide to send their children to school.

1. Read and discuss “ Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City .” How does reading about segregation, inequity and school choice from a parent’s perspective confirm, challenge or complicate your understanding of the topic?

2. Read “ Do Students Get a Subpar Education in Yeshivas? ” How might a student’s religious affiliation complicate the issue of segregation and inequity in education?

Activity #6: Learn more and take action.

Segregation still persists in public schools more than 60 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. What more can you learn about the issue? What choices can you make? Is there anything students can do about the issue?

Write a personal essay about your experience with school segregation. For inspiration, read Erin Aubrey Kaplan’s op-ed essay, “ School Choice Is the Enemy of Justice ,” which links a contemporary debate with the author’s personal experience of school segregation.

Interview a parent, grandparent or another adult about their educational experiences related to segregation, integration and inequity in education. Compare their experiences with your own. Share your findings in a paper, presentation or class discussion.

Take action by writing a letter about segregation and educational inequity in your community. Send the letter to a person or organization with local influence, such as the school board, an elected official or your local newspaper.

Discuss the issue in your school or district by raising the topic with your student council, parent association or school board. Be prepared with information you discovered in your research and bring relevant questions.

Additional Resources

Choices in Little Rock | Facing History and Ourselves

Beyond Brown: Pursuing the Promise | PBS

Why Are American Public Schools Still So Segregated? | KQED

Toolkit for “Segregation by Design” | Teaching Tolerance

Exploring Equity: Race and Ethnicity

• Posted February 18, 2021
• By Gianna Cacciatore
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
• Inequality and Education Gaps
• Moral, Civic, and Ethical Education
• Teachers and Teaching

The history of education in the United States is rife with instances of violence and oppression along lines of race and ethnicity. For educators, leading conversations about race and racism is a challenging, but necessary, part of their work.

“Schools operate within larger contexts: systems of race, racism, and white supremacy; systems of migration and ethnic identity formation; patterns of socialization; the changing realities of capitalism and politics,” explains historian and Harvard lecturer Timothy Patrick McCarthy , co-faculty lead of Race and Ethnicity in Context, a new module offered at the Harvard Graduate School of Education this January as part of a pilot of HGSE’s Equity and Opportunity Foundations course. “How do we understand the role that racial and ethnic identity play with respect to equity and opportunity within an educational context?”

>> Learn more about Equity and Opportunity and HGSE’s other foundational learning experiences.

For educators exploring question in their own homes, schools, and communities, McCarthy and co-faculty lead Ashley Ison, an HGSE doctoral student, offer five ways to get started.

1.    Begin with the self.

Practitioners enter conversations about race and racism from different backgrounds, with different lived experiences, personal and professional perspectives, and funds of knowledge in their grasps. Given diverse contexts and realities, it is important that leaders encourage personal transformation and growth. Educators should consider how race and racism, as well as racial and ethnic identity formation, impact their lives as educational professionals, as parents, and as policymakers – whatever roles they hold in society. “This is personal work, but that personal work is also political work,” says Ison.

2.    Model vulnerability.

Entering into discussions of race and racism can be challenging, even for those with experience in this work. A key part of enabling participants to lean into the challenge is being vulnerable. “You have trust your students,” explains McCarthy. “Part of that is modeling authentic vulnerability and proximity to the work.” This can be done by modeling discussion skills, like sharing the space and engaging directly with the comments of other participants, as well as by opening up personally to participants.  

“Fear can impact how people feel talking about race and ethnicity in an inter-group space,” says Ison. Courage, openness, and trust are key to overcoming that fear and enabling listening, which ultimately allows for critical thinking and change.

3.    Be transparent.

Part of being vulnerable is being fully transparent with your students from day one. “Intentions are important,” explains McCarthy. “The gap between intention and impact is often rooted in a lack of transparency about where you’re coming from or where you are hoping to go.”

4.    Center voices of color.

Voice and story are powerful tools in this work. Leaders must consider whose voices and stories take precedence on the syllabus. “Consider highlighting authors of color, in particular, who are thinking and writing about these issues,” says Ison. Becoming familiar with a variety of perspectives can help practitioners understand the voices and ideas that exist, she explains.

“Voice and storytelling can bear witness to the various kinds of systematic injustices and inequities we are looking at, but they also function as sources of power for imagining and reimagining the world we are trying to build, all while providing a deeper knowledge of the world as it has existed historically,” adds McCarthy.

5.    Prioritize discussion and reflection.

Since this work is as much about critical thinking as it is about content, it is important for educators to make space for discussion and reflection, at the whole-class, small-group, and individual levels. Ison and McCarthy encourage educators to allow students to generate and guide the discussion of predetermined course materials. They also recommend facilitating small group reflections that may spark conversation that can extend into other spaces outside of the classroom.

Selected Resources:

• Poor, but Privileged
• NPR: "The Importance of Diversity in Teaching Staff”
• TED Talk with Clint Smith: "The Danger of Silence"

More Stories from the Series:

• Exploring Equity: Citizenship and Nationality
• Exploring Equity: Gender and Sexuality
• Exploring Equity: Dis/ability
• Exploring Equity: Class

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Racial and ethnic equity in US higher education

Higher education in the United States (not-for-profit two-year and four-year colleges and universities) serves a diversifying society. By 2036, more than 50 percent of US high school graduates will be people of color, 1 Peace Bransberger and Colleen Falkenstern, Knocking at the college door: Projections of high school graduates through 2037 – Executive summary , Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE), December 2020. and McKinsey analysis shows that highly research-intensive (R1) institutions (131 as of 2020 2 Institutions with very high research activity as assessed by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. ) have publicly shared plans or aspirations regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Ninety-five percent of R1 institutions also have a senior DEI executive, and diversity leaders in the sector have formed their own consortiums to share expertise. 3 Two examples are the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education and the Liberal Arts Diversity Consortium.

Despite ongoing efforts, our analysis suggests that historically marginalized racial and ethnic populations—Black, Hispanic and Latino, and Native American and Pacific Islander—are still underrepresented in higher education among undergraduates and faculty and in leadership. Students from these groups also have worse academic outcomes as measured by graduation rates. Only 8 percent of institutions have at least equitable student representation while also helping students from underrepresented populations graduate at the same rate as the general US undergraduate population. 4 For a closer look at the data behind the racial and ethnic representation among students and faculty in higher education, see Diana Ellsworth, Erin Harding, Jonathan Law, and Duwain Pinder, “ Racial and ethnic equity in US higher education: Students and faculty ,” McKinsey, July 14, 2022. Not included in this discussion are Asian Americans, who face a distinct set of challenges in higher education. These issues deserve a separate discussion.

These finding are not novel, but what is significant is the slow rate of progress. Current rates of change suggest that it would take about 70 years for all not-for-profit institutions to reflect underrepresented students fully in their incoming student population, primarily driven by recent increases in Hispanic and Latino student attendance. For Black and Native American students and for faculty from all underrepresented populations, there was effectively no progress from 2013 to 2020. 5 For a closer look at college completion rates, see Diana Ellsworth, Erin Harding, Jonathan Law, and Duwain Pinder, “ Racial and ethnic equity in US higher education: Completion rates ,” McKinsey, July 14, 2022.

Intensified calls for racial and ethnic equity in every part of society have made the issue particularly salient. In this article, we outline some of the key insights from our report on racial and ethnic equity in higher education in the United States. We report our analysis of racial and ethnic representation in student and faculty bodies and of outcomes for underrepresented populations. Then we discuss how institutions can meet goals around racial and ethnic equity.

A mirror of wider systemic inequities

Colleges and universities are places of teaching and learning, research and creative expression, and impact on surrounding communities. As the data and analysis in this report illustrate, these institutions have been reflections of existing racial and socioeconomic inequities across society.

These hierarchies include chronic disparities in outcomes throughout the education system. Consider that students from underrepresented populations still graduate from high school at lower rates compared to White and Asian students and tend to be less prepared for college. 6 “Public high school graduation rates,” National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), US Department of Education, May 2021; “Secondary school completion: College and career readiness benchmarks,” American Council on Education (ACE), 2020; “Secondary school completion: Participation in advanced placement,” ACE, 2020. Evidence suggests that the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are exacerbating these high school inequities, 7 For more, see Emma Dorn, Bryan Hancock, Jimmy Sarakatsannis, and Ellen Viruleg, “ COVID-19 and education: The lingering effects of unfinished learning ,” McKinsey, July 27, 2021. which heavily influence the makeup of higher education’s student population. Forty-one percent of all 18- to 21-year-olds were enrolled in undergraduate studies in 2018 compared to 37 percent of Black students, 36 percent of Hispanic students, and 24 percent of American Indian students. 8 “College enrollment rates,” NCES, US Department of Education, May 2022.

Our analysis suggests that higher education has opportunities to address many of these gaps. However, our analysis of student representation over time also suggests that progress has been uneven. In 2013, 38 percent of all not-for-profit institutions had a more diverse population than would be expected given the racial and ethnic makeup of the traditional college-going population—that is, 18- to 24-year-olds, our proxy for equitable racial representation—within a given home state. By 2020, that number was 44 percent. At this rate, the student bodies of not-for-profit institutions overall will reach representational parity in about 70 years, but that growth would be driven entirely by increases in the share of Hispanic and Latino students.

Many institutions have indicated that in addition to increasing student-body diversity, they also seek to improve graduation rates for students from underrepresented populations. A positive finding from our analysis is that nearly two-thirds of all students attend not-for-profit institutions with higher-than-average graduation rates for students from underrepresented populations. However, when we overlay institution representativeness with graduation rates, only 8 percent of students attend four-year institutions that have student bodies that reflect their students’ home states’ traditional college population and that help students from underrepresented populations graduate within six years at an above-average rate (Exhibit 1). 9 For institution-specific completion data, see Diana Ellsworth, Erin Harding, Jonathan Law, and Duwain Pinder, “ Racial and ethnic equity in US higher education: Completion rates ,” McKinsey, July 14, 2022.

In addition, our analysis shows that from 2013 to 2020, only one-third of four-year institutions had improved both racial and ethnic representation and completion rates for students from underrepresented populations at a higher rate than underrepresented populations’ natural growth rate in that period (2 percent). If we look at improvements in racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic representation among students, only 7 percent of four-year institutions have progressed.

Among faculty, complex reasons including the changing structure of academia and patterns of racial inequity in society mean that faculty members from underrepresented populations are less likely to be represented and to ascend the ranks than their White counterparts. 10 Colleen Flaherty, “The souls of Black professors,” Inside Higher Ed, October 21, 2020; Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez, “Race on campus: Anti-CRT laws take aim at colleges,” email, The Chronicle of Higher Education , April 26, 2022; Mike Lauer, “Trends in diversity within the NIH-funded workforce,” National Institutes of Health (NIH), August 7, 2018. Additionally, representational disparity among faculty is more acute in R1 institutions. When we analyzed the full-time faculty population relative to the population with a bachelor’s degree or higher (given that most faculty positions require at least a bachelor’s degree), in 2020, approximately 75 percent of not-for-profit institutions were less diverse than the broader bachelor’s degree–attaining population, and 95 percent of institutions defined as R1 were less diverse. Additionally, the pace of change is slow: it would take nearly 300 years to reach parity for all not-for-profit institutions at the current pace and 450 years for R1 institutions.

Higher education’s collective aspirations for parity of faculty diversity could arguably be even greater. Faculty diversity could be compared to the total population (rather than just the population with a bachelor’s degree or higher) for several reasons. First, comparing faculty diversity to bachelor’s degree recipients incorporates existing inequities in higher-education access and completion across races and ethnicities (which have been highlighted above). Second, the impact of faculty (especially from the curriculum they create and teach, as well as the research, scholarship, and creative expression they produce) often has repercussions across the total US population.

Therefore, in this research, we compared faculty diversity to the total population. Our analysis shows that 88 percent of not-for-profit colleges and universities have full-time faculties that are less diverse than the US population as of 2020. That number rises to 99 percent for institutions defined as R1. Progress in diversifying full-time faculty ranks to match the total population over the past decade has been negligible; it would take more than 1,000 years at the current pace to reach parity for all not-for-profit institutions. (R1 institutions will never reach parity at current rates.) When looking at both faculty and students, few institutions are racially representative of the country; only 11 percent of not-for-profit institutions and 1 percent of R1 institutions are (Exhibit 2).

With faculty representativeness as the goal, it is important to highlight multiple opportunities to improve across the pipeline. From 2018 to 2019, there was a four-percentage-point gap between the percent of individuals from underrepresented populations with a bachelor’s degree and the percent of the total population with a bachelor’s degree. In the same period, there was a 12-percentage-point gap between the groups in regard to doctorate degrees, whose holders are a significant source for new full-time faculty. 11 “Degrees conferred by race/ethnicity and sex,” NCES, US Department of Education, accessed June 22, 2022. Therefore, addressing the lack of advanced-degree holders is one near-term priority for moving toward parity. Additionally, multiple studies have highlighted that faculty from underrepresented populations have less success receiving funding, getting published, or having their recommendations adopted, despite high scientific novelty, which could be driving the increased gaps at R1 institutions. 12 See the full report for more details.

Finally, colleges and universities are often prominent employers in their communities. University workforces reflect societal patterns of racialized occupational segregation, with employees of color disproportionately in low-salary, nonleadership roles. Our analysis suggests that these roles also shrunk by 2 to 3 percent from 2013 to 2020.

A webinar on ‘Racial and ethnic equity in US higher education’

Institutional reflection and progress.

Eighty-four percent of presidents in higher education who responded to a 2021 survey said issues of race and ethnicity have become more important for their institutions. 13 Scott Jaschik and Doug Lederman, 2021 Survey of College and University Presidents , Inside Higher Ed, 2021. However, sectorwide challenges such as declining enrollment, greater public scrutiny—accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic—and stagnating completion rates can make institutional progress on racial and ethnic equity more complicated. 14 Richard Vedder, “Why is public support for state universities declining?,” Forbes , May 24, 2018; Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, “Colleges lost 465,000 students this fall. The continued erosion of enrollment is raising alarm.,” Washington Post , January 13, 2022; Emma Dorn, Andre Dua, and Jonathan Law, “ Rising costs and stagnating completion rates: Who is bucking the trend? ,” McKinsey, April 2022. In this context, institutions looking to advance their goals around racial equity could consider five broad actions learned from their peers who are further along in their efforts:

• realignment

Institutions looking to advance their goals around racial equity could consider five broad actions learned from their peers who are further along in their efforts.

While none of these strategies is a magic bullet, some or all of them may be useful for decision makers throughout higher education.

To start, decision makers and stakeholders at individual institutions could understand and reflect on their institution’s role in ongoing racial inequities before applying those insights in a review of its current systems. The initial reflection can create an environment of intellectual and psychological honesty and make conversations about each institution’s commitment to rectifying racial inequities feel more natural and productive.

After a comprehensive historical review , institutions could identify the ways in which their processes, systems, and norms contribute to the marginalization of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. For instance, universities could incorporate processes designed to boost racial equity in their administration of research and grant activities. Such processes would consider factors from researcher diversity to how the execution of the research may affect racial and ethnic groups differently.

Each institution could then realign its resources based on its stakeholders’ shared aspirations for racial equity. Decision makers could consider areas of initial focus, the breadth of impact they wish to have, and the institutional capabilities they can use to realize their goals.

Leaders may respond by embedding their new racial-equity priorities into their institution’s culture. This work involves incorporating racial equity as part of the strategic plan, dedicating sufficient resources to the effort, and assigning a senior leader and staff to support the president in implementing ideas and tracking progress. Clear and frequent communication to each institution’s stakeholders—including alumni, staff, and donors—at each stage of this work will ensure that people in every part of the institution and its extended community are progressing together toward a shared goal.

To be sure, many institutions have begun to explore measures that address some of the inequities embedded in higher education. Some of these actions may light the path for collective action by all institutions to achieve sectorwide reform . For instance, colleges and universities can provide learning opportunities more equitably if they eliminate race- and wealth-based advantages in admissions, such as legacy and donor admissions. Johns Hopkins University is one institution that has eliminated legacy admissions, which helped to increase the share of Federal Pell Grant–eligible students from 9 percent to 19 percent over the past decade. 15 Pell Grants are awarded by the US Department of Education to low-income students seeking postsecondary education. For more, see “Federal Pell Grants are usually awarded only to undergraduate students,” US Department of Education, accessed June 29, 2022. Sara Weissman, “Johns Hopkins ditched legacy admissions to boost diversity – and it worked,” Diverse: Issues in Higher Education , February 5, 2020. Significantly, the change has made no meaningful difference in alumni giving. 16 Scott Simon, “Johns Hopkins sees jump in low-income students after ending legacy admissions,” National Public Radio (NPR), January 25, 2020.

As centers of research and creative expression, higher-education institutions could also consider targeted programs that support the work and progression of researchers from underrepresented populations. For example, the University of Massachusetts Boston allocates at least 20 percent of its faculty-hiring budget for pairing a specialized hire with a complementary hire from a historically marginalized group.

Finally, universities could ensure that their financial success is translated into positive outcomes for the surrounding communities. Action from the higher-education sector could result in institutions—especially ones with significant endowments—committing to investing in their surrounding communities.

By pursuing racial-equity goals, the higher-education sector may achieve gains in core areas of impact. If sustained, these investments in institutional action could benefit students, faculty, community members, and society.

Diana Ellsworth is a partner in McKinsey’s Atlanta office, Erin Harding is an associate partner in the Chicago office, Jonathan Law is a senior partner in the Southern California office and leader of the global higher education practice, and Duwain Pinder is a partner in the Ohio office and leader in the McKinsey Institute for Black Economic Mobility.

The authors wish to thank Arthur Bianchi, Avery Cambridge, Elisia Ceballo-Countryman, Judy D’Agostino, Ayebea Darko, Maclaine Fields, Kyle Hutzler, Charmaine Lester, and Sadie Pate for their contributions.

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Where Does School Segregation Stand, 70 Years After Brown v. Board of Education?

A still from the 2014 FRONTLINE documentary "Separate and Unequal."

As the United States marks the 70th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, many of the nation’s classrooms remain racially separate and unequal.

FRONTLINE examined one element of the resurgence of school segregation in the 2014 documentary Separate and Unequal , which was recently released on YouTube for the first time.

The documentary followed a group of mostly white, middle-class residents in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, working to carve out a new city — and school district — following concerns that East Baton Rouge Parish District schools were underperforming and dangerous.

Last month, after a 12-year battle, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled  to allow the incorporation of the new city of St. George.

Such school district secession efforts across the country are one of the factors contributing to racial segregation in schools, studies show. As of 2022, more than 18 million American students — one in three — attended K-12 public schools in which a majority of students are of one race or ethnicity, a 10-year government analysis found. Schools that secede from larger districts typically end up less racially diverse, according to the report.

“I think it speaks volumes that decades after ‘separate but equal’ was supposed to end, we still have millions of kids who are attending what are essentially single-race schools,” said Jacqueline Nowicki, director of Education, Workforce and Income Security at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which issued the 2022 report .

A Troubled History

In the May 17, 1954, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas ruling , the Supreme Court found that the longstanding precedent of “separate but equal” schools for Black and white children was unconstitutional. In the aftermath, many white residents revolted , attacking pro-integration activists and eroding integrated public schools by fleeing the districts, defunding them or closing them altogether.

In the decades that followed, federally mandated busing and ongoing oversight gradually led to more racially diverse American schools.

But when some court orders were lifted in the 1980s and 1990s, studies show , schools began to resegregate. Since then, many factors have contributed to the resurgence of school segregation — including school secession movements.

A ‘Breakaway Movement’ in the Spotlight

Proponents say such efforts create more community-oriented schools and improve their childrens’ education. In the 2014 documentary Separate and Unequal , Norman Browning, a leader of the movement to carve out the City of St. George from Baton Rouge, said, “They’re failing our children because our children are not getting the education they deserve.”

Critics have argued that such efforts reverse hard-fought civil rights gains and leave schools less racially and economically diverse.

“The end result of that is it excludes children, and those children are minority children. Those children are Black children,” Domoine D. Rutledge, then East Baton Rouge Parish school district’s attorney, said in the film. “We have done a full-throttle reversal in this community, and we’re resegregating our school system.”

A 2019 ballot initiative to form the new city of St. George won by 54%. At the time of the vote, the proposed city would have been more than 70% white and less than 15% Black — compared to East Baton Rouge Parish which was around 46.5% Black, according to Census estimates. The city’s boundaries have shifted since then to include 100,000 residents .

Last month, after the Louisiana Supreme Court decision allowing St. George to be incorporated as a city, Andrew Murrell, a leader of the effort, in a statement called the ruling a “culmination of citizens exercising their constitutional rights.” He added, “Now we begin the process of delivering on our promises of a better city.”

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Baton Rouge branch said in a statement , “The St. George plan poses significant risks to our education system, threatens the continuity of critical programs, and challenges community representation.” It also echoed concerns about “potential segregation and unequal resource distribution.”

Baton Rouge leaders said that the new city would take millions in annual tax revenue away from a majority-Black district. The estimates of how much annual tax revenue would be lost vary widely.

As Separate and Unequal reported, St. George advocates argued that the racial and financial implications of their plan were being exaggerated.

“When I read headlines such as the fact that this is nothing but a secession to get away from the low-income citizens, as well as making it a race issue, it’s extremely disturbing to me,” Norman Browning said in the documentary. “This is nothing more than a middle-class community incorporating a city.”

Broader Impacts of Breakaway Movements

The GAO, a non-partisan agency working for Congress, analyzed 10 years of Department of Education data for its 2022 report , which found that carving new school districts out of existing districts led to districts that tended to have more white and Asian American students than Black and Hispanic students, and were generally wealthier than the districts they broke away from.

“When you have a portion that secedes and that portion that is seceding is the wealthier portion, you are obviously leaving fewer resources for the folks that stay behind,” Nowicki, the GAO director, told FRONTLINE. Fewer resources are linked to worse educational outcomes and typically, less access to experienced teachers.

Sherri Doughty, GAO’s assistant director, also noted the “racial composition of those districts changed” one year after seceding.

From school years 2009-10 through 2019-20, GAO identified 36 school districts that seceded from existing districts.

“Thirteen of those secessions were in the South. Nine of those 13 seceding districts were whiter and wealthier than the districts that they seceded from,” Nowicki said.

She added, “Three of the four that were not whiter and wealthier were under active federal desegregation orders or plans,” referring to the fact that some school districts across the country have been federally mandated to increase the racial integration of Black and Latino students. Many of these orders have been lifted over the years.

“We also saw a lot of secessions in the Northeast, but they were smaller ones,” Doughty said, noting that the school carve outs in the South tended to impact a higher number of students.

Meanwhile, the tensions surrounding St. George’s creation continue, with advocates celebrating the chance at what they say will be a better education for their children and better use of their tax dollars, and opponents fearful that civil rights gains will be eroded.

In early May, a Baton Rouge city councilman who previously sued to prevent the incorporation of St. George requested that the state Supreme Court reverse the ruling.

Days later, Gov. Jeff Landry appointed an interim mayor and interim chief of police for St. George.

Erin Texeira contributed to this story.

Watch the full 2014 documentary Separate and Unequal :

Kaela Malig , Tow Journalism Fellow, FRONTLINE/Columbia Journalism School Fellowship

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Unequal Opportunity: Race and Education

Subscribe to governance weekly, linda darling-hammond ld linda darling-hammond.

March 1, 1998

• 13 min read

W.E.B. DuBois was right about the problem of the 21st century. The color line divides us still. In recent years, the most visible evidence of this in the public policy arena has been the persistent attack on affirmative action in higher education and employment. From the perspective of many Americans who believe that the vestiges of discrimination have disappeared, affirmative action now provides an unfair advantage to minorities. From the perspective of others who daily experience the consequences of ongoing discrimination, affirmative action is needed to protect opportunities likely to evaporate if an affirmative obligation to act fairly does not exist. And for Americans of all backgrounds, the allocation of opportunity in a society that is becoming ever more dependent on knowledge and education is a source of great anxiety and concern.

At the center of these debates are interpretations of the gaps in educational achievement between white and non-Asian minority students as measured by standardized test scores. The presumption that guides much of the conversation is that equal opportunity now exists; therefore, continued low levels of achievement on the part of minority students must be a function of genes, culture, or a lack of effort and will (see, for example, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve and Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s America in Black and White).

The assumptions that undergird this debate miss an important reality: educational outcomes for minority children are much more a function of their unequal access to key educational resources, including skilled teachers and quality curriculum, than they are a function of race. In fact, the U.S. educational system is one of the most unequal in the industrialized world, and students routinely receive dramatically different learning opportunities based on their social status. In contrast to European and Asian nations that fund schools centrally and equally, the wealthiest 10 percent of U.S. school districts spend nearly 10 times more than the poorest 10 percent, and spending ratios of 3 to 1 are common within states. Despite stark differences in funding, teacher quality, curriculum, and class sizes, the prevailing view is that if students do not achieve, it is their own fault. If we are ever to get beyond the problem of the color line, we must confront and address these inequalities.

The Nature of Educational Inequality

Americans often forget that as late as the 1960s most African-American, Latino, and Native American students were educated in wholly segregated schools funded at rates many times lower than those serving whites and were excluded from many higher education institutions entirely. The end of legal segregation followed by efforts to equalize spending since 1970 has made a substantial difference for student achievement. On every major national test, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gap in minority and white students’ test scores narrowed substantially between 1970 and 1990, especially for elementary school students. On the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), the scores of African-American students climbed 54 points between 1976 and 1994, while those of white students remained stable.

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Even so, educational experiences for minority students have continued to be substantially separate and unequal. Two-thirds of minority students still attend schools that are predominantly minority, most of them located in central cities and funded well below those in neighboring suburban districts. Recent analyses of data prepared for school finance cases in Alabama, New Jersey, New York, Louisiana, and Texas have found that on every tangible measure—from qualified teachers to curriculum offerings—schools serving greater numbers of students of color had significantly fewer resources than schools serving mostly white students. As William L. Taylor and Dianne Piche noted in a 1991 report to Congress: Inequitable systems of school finance inflict disproportionate harm on minority and economically disadvantaged students. On an inter-state basis, such students are concentrated in states, primarily in the South, that have the lowest capacities to finance public education. On an intra-state basis, many of the states with the widest disparities in educational expenditures are large industrial states. In these states, many minorities and economically disadvantaged students are located in property-poor urban districts which fare the worst in educational expenditures (or) in rural districts which suffer from fiscal inequity.

Jonathan Kozol s 1991 Savage Inequalities described the striking differences between public schools serving students of color in urban settings and their suburban counterparts, which typically spend twice as much per student for populations with many fewer special needs. Contrast MacKenzie High School in Detroit, where word processing courses are taught without word processors because the school cannot afford them, or East St. Louis Senior High School, whose biology lab has no laboratory tables or usable dissecting kits, with nearby suburban schools where children enjoy a computer hookup to Dow Jones to study stock transactions and science laboratories that rival those in some industries. Or contrast Paterson, New Jersey, which could not afford the qualified teachers needed to offer foreign language courses to most high school students, with Princeton, where foreign languages begin in elementary school.

Even within urban school districts, schools with high concentrations of low-income and minority students receive fewer instructional resources than others. And tracking systems exacerbate these inequalities by segregating many low-income and minority students within schools. In combination, these policies leave minority students with fewer and lower-quality books, curriculum materials, laboratories, and computers; significantly larger class sizes; less qualified and experienced teachers; and less access to high-quality curriculum. Many schools serving low-income and minority students do not even offer the math and science courses needed for college, and they provide lower-quality teaching in the classes they do offer. It all adds up.

What Difference Does it Make?

Since the 1966 Coleman report, Equality of Educational Opportunity, another debate has waged as to whether money makes a difference to educational outcomes. It is certainly possible to spend money ineffectively; however, studies that have developed more sophisticated measures of schooling show how money, properly spent, makes a difference. Over the past 30 years, a large body of research has shown that four factors consistently influence student achievement: all else equal, students perform better if they are educated in smaller schools where they are well known (300 to 500 students is optimal), have smaller class sizes (especially at the elementary level), receive a challenging curriculum, and have more highly qualified teachers.

Minority students are much less likely than white children to have any of these resources. In predominantly minority schools, which most students of color attend, schools are large (on average, more than twice as large as predominantly white schools and reaching 3,000 students or more in most cities); on average, class sizes are 15 percent larger overall (80 percent larger for non-special education classes); curriculum offerings and materials are lower in quality; and teachers are much less qualified in terms of levels of education, certification, and training in the fields they teach. And in integrated schools, as UCLA professor Jeannie Oakes described in the 1980s and Harvard professor Gary Orfield’s research has recently confirmed, most minority students are segregated in lower-track classes with larger class sizes, less qualified teachers, and lower-quality curriculum.

Research shows that teachers’ preparation makes a tremendous difference to children’s learning. In an analysis of 900 Texas school districts, Harvard economist Ronald Ferguson found that teachers’ expertise—as measured by scores on a licensing examination, master’s degrees, and experienc—was the single most important determinant of student achievement, accounting for roughly 40 percent of the measured variance in students’ reading and math achievement gains in grades 1-12. After controlling for socioeconomic status, the large disparities in achievement between black and white students were almost entirely due to differences in the qualifications of their teachers. In combination, differences in teacher expertise and class sizes accounted for as much of the measured variance in achievement as did student and family background (figure 1).

Ferguson and Duke economist Helen Ladd repeated this analysis in Alabama and again found sizable influences of teacher qualifications and smaller class sizes on achievement gains in math and reading. They found that more of the difference between the high- and low-scoring districts was explained by teacher qualifications and class sizes than by poverty, race, and parent education.

Meanwhile, a Tennessee study found that elementary school students who are assigned to ineffective teachers for three years in a row score nearly 50 percentile points lower on achievement tests than those assigned to highly effective teachers over the same period. Strikingly, minority students are about half as likely to be assigned to the most effective teachers and twice as likely to be assigned to the least effective.

Minority students are put at greatest risk by the American tradition of allowing enormous variation in the qualifications of teachers. The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future found that new teachers hired without meeting certification standards (25 percent of all new teachers) are usually assigned to teach the most disadvantaged students in low-income and high-minority schools, while the most highly educated new teachers are hired largely by wealthier schools (figure 2). Students in poor or predominantly minority schools are much less likely to have teachers who are fully qualified or hold higher-level degrees. In schools with the highest minority enrollments, for example, students have less than a 50 percent chance of getting a math or science teacher with a license and a degree in the field. In 1994, fully one-third of teachers in high-poverty schools taught without a minor in their main field and nearly 70 percent taught without a minor in their secondary teaching field.

Studies of underprepared teachers consistently find that they are less effective with students and that they have difficulty with curriculum development, classroom management, student motivation, and teaching strategies. With little knowledge about how children grow, learn, and develop, or about what to do to support their learning, these teachers are less likely to understand students’ learning styles and differences, to anticipate students’ knowledge and potential difficulties, or to plan and redirect instruction to meet students’ needs. Nor are they likely to see it as their job to do so, often blaming the students if their teaching is not successful.

Teacher expertise and curriculum quality are interrelated, because a challenging curriculum requires an expert teacher. Research has found that both students and teachers are tracked: that is, the most expert teachers teach the most demanding courses to the most advantaged students, while lower-track students assigned to less able teachers receive lower-quality teaching and less demanding material. Assignment to tracks is also related to race: even when grades and test scores are comparable, black students are more likely to be assigned to lower-track, nonacademic classes.

When Opportunity Is More Equal

What happens when students of color do get access to more equal opportunities’ Studies find that curriculum quality and teacher skill make more difference to educational outcomes than the initial test scores or racial backgrounds of students. Analyses of national data from both the High School and Beyond Surveys and the National Educational Longitudinal Surveys have demonstrated that, while there are dramatic differences among students of various racial and ethnic groups in course-taking in such areas as math, science, and foreign language, for students with similar course-taking records, achievement test score differences by race or ethnicity narrow substantially.

Robert Dreeben and colleagues at the University of Chicago conducted a long line of studies documenting both the relationship between educational opportunities and student performance and minority students’ access to those opportunities. In a comparative study of 300 Chicago first graders, for example, Dreeben found that African-American and white students who had comparable instruction achieved comparable levels of reading skill. But he also found that the quality of instruction given African-American students was, on average, much lower than that given white students, thus creating a racial gap in aggregate achievement at the end of first grade. In fact, the highest-ability group in Dreeben’s sample was in a school in a low-income African-American neighborhood. These children, though, learned less during first grade than their white counterparts because their teacher was unable to provide the challenging instruction they deserved.

When schools have radically different teaching forces, the effects can be profound. For example, when Eleanor Armour-Thomas and colleagues compared a group of exceptionally effective elementary schools with a group of low-achieving schools with similar demographic characteristics in New York City, roughly 90 percent of the variance in student reading and mathematics scores at grades 3, 6, and 8 was a function of differences in teacher qualifications. The schools with highly qualified teachers serving large numbers of minority and low-income students performed as well as much more advantaged schools.

Most studies have estimated effects statistically. However, an experiment that randomly assigned seventh grade “at-risk”students to remedial, average, and honors mathematics classes found that the at-risk students who took the honors class offering a pre-algebra curriculum ultimately outperformed all other students of similar backgrounds. Another study compared African-American high school youth randomly placed in public housing in the Chicago suburbs with city-placed peers of equivalent income and initial academic attainment and found that the suburban students, who attended largely white and better-funded schools, were substantially more likely to take challenging courses, perform well academically, graduate on time, attend college, and find good jobs.

What Can Be Done?

This state of affairs is not inevitable. Last year the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future issued a blueprint for a comprehensive set of policies to ensure a “caring, competent, and qualified teacher for every child,” as well as schools organized to support student success. Twelve states are now working directly with the commission on this agenda, and others are set to join this year. Several pending bills to overhaul the federal Higher Education Act would ensure that highly qualified teachers are recruited and prepared for students in all schools. Federal policymakers can develop incentives, as they have in medicine, to guarantee well-prepared teachers in shortage fields and high-need locations. States can equalize education spending, enforce higher teaching standards, and reduce teacher shortages, as Connecticut, Kentucky, Minnesota, and North Carolina have already done. School districts can reallocate resources from administrative superstructures and special add-on programs to support better-educated teachers who offer a challenging curriculum in smaller schools and classes, as restructured schools as far apart as New York and San Diego have done. These schools, in communities where children are normally written off to lives of poverty, welfare dependency, or incarceration, already produce much higher levels of achievement for students of color, sending more than 90 percent of their students to college. Focusing on what matters most can make a real difference in what children have the opportunity to learn. This, in turn, makes a difference in what communities can accomplish.

An Entitlement to Good Teaching

The common presumption about educational inequality—that it resides primarily in those students who come to school with inadequate capacities to benefit from what the school has to offer—continues to hold wide currency because the extent of inequality in opportunities to learn is largely unknown. We do not currently operate schools on the presumption that students might be entitled to decent teaching and schooling as a matter of course. In fact, some state and local defendants have countered school finance and desegregation cases with assertions that such remedies are not required unless it can be proven that they will produce equal outcomes. Such arguments against equalizing opportunities to learn have made good on DuBois’s prediction that the problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line.

But education resources do make a difference, particularly when funds are used to purchase well-qualified teachers and high-quality curriculum and to create personalized learning communities in which children are well known. In all of the current sturm und drang about affirmative action, “special treatment,” and the other high-volatility buzzwords for race and class politics in this nation, I would offer a simple starting point for the next century s efforts: no special programs, just equal educational opportunity.

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70 Years After ‘Brown,’ Schools Are Still Separate and Unequal

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Fully seven decades after the U.S. Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education , Black students and their schools remain functionally separate and unequal.

Pre- Brown de jure segregation has been replaced by today’s de facto with more than a third of students attending schools where the students are predominantly their own race or ethnicity.

According to an analysis by EdBuild, school districts mostly attended by Black and brown students got $23 billion less in state and local funding than majority-white districts in the 2015-16 school year.

Schools attended primarily by Black and brown students are overwhelmingly high poverty. Our schools generally have fewer advanced course offerings and extracurriculars. And, critically, too many of our schools have less experienced educators and a dearth of Black and brown teachers.

Seventy years later, looking back on why and how we collectively arrived here is important. One relevant and vital observation is that civil rights leaders’ desire for school integration —for access to better-funded schools—was not driven by a wish to escape Black teachers. Black and brown families valued the support and care provided by Black educators.

Their struggle was not against the presence of Black teachers but against the systemic injustices that relegated them to underresourced and neglected educational institutions. At times, well-resourced schools were mere steps away from Black families’ homes, but because Black students were barred from them, they might have had to go miles to the designated school for Black children.

The decision to prioritize integration over resource allocation was not without its detractors within Black leadership circles. Some leaders argued that the NAACP should sue for equal funding , contending that more resources for segregated schools could have yielded greater dividends in terms of educational equity. But Thurgood Marshall’s legal strategy that concluded with Brown instead focused on achieving desegregation.

The unforeseen consequence of integration was the loss of Black teachers en masse, turning integration into a one-way street. Had integration been a two-way process, with white students attending predominantly Black schools, resources might have flowed into these institutions, bolstering their capacity to provide high-quality education. Instead, white flight and the exodus of white students from integrated schools drained resources from those schools and exacerbated the practical inequality faced by Black and brown students.

The Black teachers lost in the integration shuffle never returned. Today, less than 7 percent of teachers identify as Black. In my home state of Pennsylvania, more than half our schools had no teachers of color in the 2016-17 school year— zero!

The dearth of Black and brown teachers has materially negative impacts on all students. There is now conclusive evidence on the positive impacts of having more Black and brown teachers in the classroom. Research shows that Black male students who have had a Black teacher have reduced dropout rates, fewer disciplinary issues, more positive views of schooling, and better test scores. Even one teacher can make a difference.

For better (and worse) Brown v. Board of Education continues to shape our modern education system today. Disregard for Black and brown pedagogical frameworks and educational practices that foster a positive racial identity of students of color pervades schools and districts from coast to coast. Schools of education are struggling to adequately prepare aspiring teachers to effectively serve students of color , but they simply do not produce enough Black and brown teachers to make up for that deficiency.

Historically Black colleges and universities, which produce about half of all Black teachers, and other minority-serving institutions on the whole, are doing incredible work in this area. They’re graduating higher percentages of their enrollees and get higher marks for the quality of those teachers that they launch into the field compared with other teacher preparation programs.

However, too many of our minority-serving institutions operate on a knife’s edge financially —with lagging public financial backing and comparatively small endowments to advance their work.

So 70 years post- Brown , the state of Black and brown education is not anywhere close to the vision that Thurgood Marshall likely held as he fought the good fight. If we want to achieve that vision—one where Black and brown children are afforded the same high-quality education that their white peers are now more likely to receive—it’s well past time to provide the resources the schools of Black and brown communities need. We must support also the institutions that are at the vanguard of providing the educators that are key to their success.

Only through concerted efforts to rectify historical injustices and invest in the educational futures of all students can we truly honor the noble intentions, if not true legacy, of Brown .

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Inequality in USA mathematics education: the roles race and socio-economic status play

• Original Paper
• Published: 28 May 2024

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• William H. Schmidt   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7933-5457 1 ,
• Siwen Guo 2 &
• William F. Sullivan 1  

The recent PISA mathematics results delivered disappointing news for the United States of America (USA). These results underscored the education system’s continuing inequalities. An important question concerns to what extent and to which part of the educational system do these sources of inequality occur? In this paper we use PISA 2012 data merged with district- and school-level variables derived from five additional national databases to explore the way socio-economic status (SES) and race are related to inequalities in student performance as well as to inequalities in other components of schooling at both the system and student-levels, such as the academic ‘zeitgeist’ of the school, the nature of the mathematics curriculum and characteristics of both the teacher and the student. The results demonstrated how race and SES had significant relationships not only to student performance but to other aspects of schooling as well. Those relationships occurred at both the system- and within-school levels but differed in their implications. The policy implications of the research could help determine where the greatest effort could be made to provide all children of all racial and social classes equal opportunities to learn.

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Schmidt, W.H., Guo, S. & Sullivan, W.F. Inequality in USA mathematics education: the roles race and socio-economic status play. ZDM Mathematics Education (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-024-01593-9

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This Map Lets You See How School Segregation Has Changed in Your Hometown

The new interactive tool accompanies a study of school enrollment data, which shows that segregation has worsened in recent decades

Daily Correspondent

Today marks the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education , the landmark Supreme Court ruling that marked the beginning of the end of school segregation. On May 17, 1954, the nine justices unanimously agreed that separating children on the basis of race in public schools was unconstitutional. Their decision ended the “ separate but equal ” doctrine that had applied since the mid-1890s.

But while American public schools are more integrated now than they were prior to 1954 , they’ve become increasingly racially and economically segregated in recent years, according to a new analysis: In the country’s 100 largest school districts, segregation between white and Black students has increased by 64 percent since 1988. Meanwhile, segregation by economic status has increased by roughly 50 percent since 1991.

The two co-authors, who presented their findings at a May 6 conference , also created an  interactive map that displays changes in racial and economic school segregation across the country between 1991 and 2022. 

The tool, called Segregation Explorer, breaks down demographic trends by state, county, metro area and school district. It also allows users to search for the names of specific schools, which then pop up alongside graphs and tables tracking the composition of the student body over time.

“School segregation levels are not at pre- Brown levels, but they are high and have been rising steadily since the late 1980s,” says co-author Sean Reardon , the faculty director of Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project , in a statement .

In many large school districts, segregation has gotten worse while  housing segregation and racial disparities in income have improved. According to the researchers, these trends suggest that educational and legal policy changes are to blame, rather than demographic changes.

“School systems became more segregated, but that increase in segregation isn’t because neighborhoods got more segregated,” Reardon tells  Education Week ’s Sarah D. Sparks. “It’s because school systems stopped trying to create schools that were more integrated than neighborhoods, and let them kind of revert to their neighborhood patterns.”

More specifically, the researchers point to two main factors: expanding school choice and declining court oversight.

Beginning in the 1960s, many school districts were placed under court orders that mandated integration. However, since the early 1990s, roughly two-thirds of those districts have been released from court oversight. The researchers estimate that school segregation would have increased by about 20 percent less if those court orders had remained in place, per the  Washington Post ’s Laura Meckler.

“Some districts have voluntary programs [that promote integration],” co-author Ann Owens , a sociologist at the University of Southern California, tells Education Week. However, the “real carrots and sticks” that accompany pressure from the courts “just aren’t available to districts anymore.”

In addition, school choice programs have allowed more parents to enroll their children in alternatives like charter schools, “whose numbers began to increase rapidly in the late 1990s,” writes Hechinger Report ’s Jill Barshay. “​​In many cases, either white or Black families flocked to different charter schools, leaving behind a less diverse student body in traditional public schools.” The researchers estimate that school segregation would have grown by roughly 14 percent less if not for the charter school boom.

Reardon and Owens suggest several measures that school districts could use to counteract these changes, such as voluntary integration programs and socioeconomic-based student assignment policies. These interventions could help reduce the opportunity and test score gaps that exist among predominantly Black and Hispanic schools, which tend to have  higher poverty rates than predominantly white schools.

“It’s not that sitting next to a student of a certain race makes the school good or bad,” Owens tells  Chalkbeat ’s Erica Meltzer. “But we’ve never done ‘separate but equal.’ Until we eliminate broader systemic underlying inequalities in our society, we haven’t shown an ability to actually serve kids equitably.”

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ACE Releases 2024 Update to Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education Project May 21, 2024

As the diversity of the U.S. population increased, more Hispanic and Latino, Black and African American students have enrolled in undergraduate programs over the last 20 years, according to data outlined in the report. However, completion rates have not risen accordingly—the number of Hispanic or Latino students earning bachelor’s degrees rose about 10 percent from 2002 to 2022, while the rates for white and Asian students grew even faster, widening the existing gaps.

Black or African American students consistently had lower completion rates than those of any other racial and ethnic group. Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, Hispanic or Latino, and American Indian or Alaska Native students earned a larger share of associate degrees and certificates, while bachelor’s degrees are mainly earned by Asian, White, and multiracial students.

“Despite some progress, racial disparities are still alarmingly high, especially in light of the Supreme Court’s decision to end race-conscious admissions,” stated Ted Mitchell, the president of ACE. “This report is timely for everyone involved in higher education—administrators, researchers, policymakers. It allows us to examine the current state of race and ethnicity in higher education and strive to bridge these equity gaps.”

The data also reveal disparities in how students pay for college, with Black or African American undergraduate students borrowing at the highest rates across all sectors and income groups (49.7 percent). Hispanic or Latino and Asian students borrowed at lower-than-average rates. However, Asian students borrowed the highest amount per borrower when including parent loans.

Additionally, the report provides a look at the diversity of faculty and staff across race and ethnicity. In 2021, 69.4 percent of all full-time faculty and 56.2 percent of newly hired full-time faculty were White, compared to Black or African American full-time faculty (6.1 percent) and new full-time faculty (9.3 percent).

“This report is just one of the ways ACE is working to democratize data by creating accessible and actionable insights that empower evidence-inspired decision-making across the postsecondary landscape,” said Hironao Okahana, assistant vice president and executive director of ACE’s Education Futures Lab. “This work bolsters our engagement in the data ecosystem, such as our partnership with the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies, to strengthen and lead the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI ) and the recently announced Global Data Consortium Initiative.”

This status report builds on the findings from preceding publications in the Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education series. It presents 201 indicators drawn from eight data sources, most of which come from the U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Census Bureau. The indicators present a snapshot of the most recent publicly available data, while others depict data over time. 

The Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education: 2024 Status Report was made possible through the generous support of the Mellon Foundation. The accompanying website was generously supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

  Related

U.S. Department of the Treasury

Racial inequality in the united states.

By: Counselor for Racial Equity Janis Bowdler and Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy Benjamin Harris  

Racial inequality is the unequal distribution of resources, power, and economic opportunity across race in a society. While the discussion of racial inequality in the United States is often focused on economic inequality, racial inequality also manifests itself in a multitude of ways that alone and together impact the well-being of all Americans. This includes racial disparities in wealth, education, employment, housing, mobility, health, rates of incarceration, and more. 1

In her January 2022 remarks at the 2022 ‘Virtual Davos Agenda’ hosted by the World Economic Forum, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen stated, “A country’s long-term growth potential depends on the size of its labor force, the productivity of its workers, the renewability of its resources, and the stability of its political systems.” This concept underpins the Biden Administration’s economic growth strategy, which Secretary Yellen has coined “modern supply side economics.” According to Secretary Yellen, modern supply side economics “prioritizes labor supply, human capital, R&D, and investments in a sustainable environment. These focus areas are all aimed at increasing economic growth and addressing longer-term structural problems, particularly inequality.” 2  This reflects a recognition that despite an aim to advance economic growth, many policies in areas such as access to the labor market, housing, and infrastructure have not benefited all Americans. This has impacted the ability of communities of color, rural communities, and other historically marginalized people to fully participate in and benefit from the nation’s prosperity. Our economy as a whole cannot be as productive as possible unless all individuals are given the opportunity to be as productive as possible. As a result, the legacies of structural racism continue to hamper economic growth for everyone. Furthermore, some economic policies that would directly benefit Americans of all races and ethnicities have been undermined by zero-sum arguments that play to fears that one group will benefit at the expense of another. 

There are, of course, moral, legal, microeconomic, and other reasons to promote a more just and equitable society. In a series of blog posts over the coming months, we will focus on the economic argument for reducing racial inequality. The economic cost of racial inequality is borne not just by the individuals directly faced with limited opportunities, but also has spillovers to the entire U.S. economy. Especially as the country becomes more racially diverse (see Figure 1), inequality poses an ongoing threat to our individual and collective economic welfare.  

Figure 1: Changing Racial and Ethnic Composition of the U.S. Population

Notes: Hispanic refers to anyone of Hispanic ethnicity, regardless of race. The remaining groups exclude anyone of Hispanic ethnicity. Prior to the 1980 decennial census, individuals were not directly asked about whether they were of Hispanic origins. For data before the 1980 decennial census, Hispanic is imputed by IPUMS.  Source: Treasury calculations using U.S. Census Bureau data from IPUMS. Steven Ruggles, Sarah Flood, Sophia Foster, Ronald Goeken, Jose Pacas, Megan Schouweiler and Matthew Sobek. IPUMS USA: Version 11.0 [dataset]. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS, 2021. https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V11.0  

Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo emphasized this argument in his September 2021 blog post: “The exclusion of communities of color from the ladder of economic opportunity holds back economic growth for the entire country. Pursuing racial equity is a vital opportunity to drive innovation and boost growth across the U.S. economy.” 3  When people gain access to the resources they need to build their economic future and withstand financial shocks, it is not just good for individuals and their families, but it also benefits the communities where they live, work, and invest, with beneficial spillovers to the economy as a whole. Likewise, when investments are made that allow millions of people who have been held back economically to reach their full economic potential, it gives the United States an important advantage in an increasingly competitive global economy. We cannot afford to leave talent and opportunity on the table.

Below we briefly discuss the origins and persistence of inequality in the United States, highlight some of the key economic indicators of its impact, and give an overview of the issues we will explore in more depth in future posts.

Origins and Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States

Racial inequality in the United States today is rooted in longstanding behaviors, beliefs, and public and private policies that resulted in the appropriation of the physical, financial, labor, and other resources of non-white people. While a review of the origins of racial inequity is beyond the scope of this blog, it is important to note the prominent role of inequitable and harmful policies—dating back to before the country’s founding. These include attacks on Native Americans’ political status and expropriation of their land, the reliance on slavery to underpin a significant portion of the colonial and then U.S. economy, and the Jim Crow laws and other formal and informal policies that enforced segregation and severely limited opportunities for non-white Americans. The millions of African Americans who left the southern United States to escape Jim Crow laws faced formal and informal employment, housing, and educational discrimination in destination cities in the North and West. 4  Native Americans who survived the military conquests of the mid-19th century were subject to policies that disenfranchised them, forced their assimilation and relocation, and removed Native children from their households. Anti-Latino sentiment, which grew in the 19th century as emigration from Mexico to the United States increased in the years following the Mexican-American War, grew further following the Great Depression due to concerns that Mexican Americans were taking jobs from European-Americans. 5  Similarly, anti-Asian sentiment grew following the arrival of Chinese immigrants during the California Gold Rush, which was manifested in the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibiting the immigration of Chinese laborers beginning in 1882, and was ignited again after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, with the establishment of Japanese internment camps by executive order, which resulted in the forced relocation and internment of about 120,000 Japanese Americans. 6

While the most targeted racist laws and policies have been repealed or otherwise abandoned, subsequent policies, uneven enforcement of equal protections, and a failure to invest in individuals harmed by de jure and de facto discrimination has resulted in vastly limited opportunities and stark inequities between white and non-white Americans that have continued to this day. For example, maps drawn by the Home Owners Loan Corporation, a now defunct federal agency, to portray the relative riskiness of lending across neighborhoods in the 1930s were used by banks to deny access to credit to residents of the lowest-rated neighborhoods, who were often racial and ethnic minorities, though these policies also hurt poor white individuals. 7  Moreover, this conduct depressed home ownership rates, house values, and rents and increased racial segregation in low-rated neighborhoods in subsequent decades, highlighting the lasting, negative economic consequences of racism on the community and on future residents of these neighborhoods, regardless of race. 8   These and other policies and actions not only led to continued racial disparities in access to resources and opportunities, they also led to differences in the extent to which people of different races benefit from the resources and opportunities they already possess. 9

These disparities are evident in the persistent over-representation of Black and Hispanic Americans among the population in poverty in the United States and in the widening of the racial wealth gap in recent decades. 10   While the poverty rates for all racial and ethnic groups had been declining prior to the COVID-19 pandemic (see Figure 2), the gaps between the rates for Black and Hispanic Americans and non-Hispanic white Americans has remained relatively constant since the early 2000s. At the same time, the gap in average net wealth between Black and Hispanic households and non-Hispanic white households has widened significantly (see Figure 3).

Figure 2. Poverty Rate by Race and Hispanic Origin: 1959 to 2019

Figure 3. Household Net Worth by Race and Hispanic Origin: 1989 to 2019

Source: Federal Reserve Board, https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/wealth-inequality-and-the-racial-wealth-gap-20211022.htm  

Racial disparities in outcomes predictive of future success appear early in life. In 2010, math skills at kindergarten entry were over half a standard deviation higher for white students than for Black or Hispanic students, with similar disparities in reading skills. 11  These disparities in educational outcomes continue into higher education. In 2019, 40 percent of white adults had earned a bachelor’s degree compared to just 26, 19, and 17 percent of Black, Hispanic, and American Indian or Alaska Native adults, respectively. 12

Large educational disparities, coupled with racial discrimination in the labor market and other factors, lead to pronounced differences in economic security across racial groups. In 2019, the unemployment rate was 6.1 percent for both Black and American Indian or Alaska Native adults, compared to just 3.3 and 2.7 percent for white and Asian adults, respectively. Similarly, the rate for Hispanic adults was 4.3 percent and only 3.5 percent for non-Hispanics. 13

In addition, Black and Hispanic adults continue to have considerably lower earnings than White or Asian adults. Median household income in 2020 was roughly $46,000 and $55,500 for Black and Hispanic workers, respectively, compared to $75,000 and $95,000 for white and Asian households, as shown in Figure 4. These earnings differences have changed little since 1970 and are one of the primary contributors to the persistence of the racial wealth gap. In 2019, the median white family had $184,000 in family wealth compared to just $23,000 and $38,000 for the median Black and Hispanic families, respectively. 14

Racial disparities in educational and economic outcomes not only impact the economic well-being of racial and ethnic minorities, they have also been shown to inhibit economic growth for the U.S. economy as a whole, which affects the economic security of every American, regardless of race. For example, recent research by economists Chang-Tai Hsieh, Erik Hurst, Charles I. Jones, and Peter J. Klenow shows that up to 40 percent of growth in U.S. GDP per capita between 1960 and 2010 can be attributed to increases in the shares of women and Black men working in highly skilled occupations, likely due to changes in social norms that previously hindered talented women and Black men from pursuing their comparative advantage. 15  This research suggests that sexist and racist social norms prevented the U.S. economy from reaching its full potential and that working to ensure that every American has an equal opportunity to pursue the career he or she chooses should improve economic outcomes for all.

Figure 4. Real Median Household Income by Race and Hispanic Origin: 1967 to 2020

Racial gaps in well-being extend beyond educational attainment and economic security. Health disparities, for example, also begin early in life and persist over the lifespan. Black and Hispanic Americans face higher rates of child abuse, 16  lead exposure, 17  obesity in childhood, 18  and chronic illness in adulthood than white Americans. 19  These groups often experience restricted access to quality health care, an issue further illuminated by the recent global pandemic. Compared to white non-Hispanic Americans, Hispanic, Black non-Hispanic, and American Indian or Alaska Native non-Hispanic Americans are 1.8, 1.7, and 2.1 times more likely to die from COVID-19. 20   Moreover, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, the inequitable distribution of healthcare in the United States can negatively impact the health of all Americans, including those with access to high-quality services.

In addition, people of color in the United States are over-represented in neighborhoods with high poverty rates. In 2019, nearly a quarter of American Indians or Alaska Natives, 21 percent of non-Hispanic Black people, and 17 percent of Hispanic people lived in high-poverty neighborhoods, defined as Census tracts with a poverty rate of 30 percent or higher. In contrast, only 4 percent and 6 percent of white and Asian or Pacific Islander people lived in high-poverty neighborhoods. 21  High-poverty neighborhoods often lack vital resources and amenities like good schools, large and affordable grocery stores, reliable public transportation, and safe and clean community spaces that enable residents to succeed in the classroom and on the job.

It is important to note that while we have reliable measures and data sources to define the differences in many outcomes between racial and ethnic groups over the past forty years, our ability to trace racial inequality back further and examine the country’s progress since the end of slavery is limited by the quality and quantity of data available. For example, greater disparities exist within the Asian American and Pacific Islander group than are often evident in aggregate data, and data on Native communities in the United States is usually inadequate for any in depth analyses. Moreover, for some outcomes such as wealth, our ability to measure contemporary differences is also limited by data availability.

Roadmap for this Blog Series

Upcoming posts will discuss in greater depth the extent of racial inequality in economic security and explain how differences in in educational opportunity and attainment, neighborhoods and environmental factors, health and access to healthcare, and employment and job quality, contribute to and are caused by the persistence of racial disparities in economic well-being. Each post will highlight important facts, discuss how key outcomes have evolved over time, and emphasize the connections with other components of economic inequality, with the goal of calling attention to areas where more work is needed to advance racial equity. In addition, we will discuss issues related to data quality and coverage that affect our ability to truly understand the trajectory of racial inequality in the United States.

[1] Shapiro, Thomas M. The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

[2] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0565

[3] https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/American-Rescue-Plan-Centering-Equity-in-Policymaking.pdf

[4] Derenoncourt, Ellora. 2022. “Can You Move to Opportunity? Evidence from the Great Migration.” American Economic Review 11 (2): 369-408.

[5] https://www.history.com/news/the-brutal-history-of-anti-latino-discrimination-in-america

[6] https://www.britannica.com/event/Japanese-American-internment. For additional details on the economic impacts of inequitable government policy, see:

• Aaronson, Daniel, Daniel Hartley, and Bhashkar Mazumder. 2021. “The Effects of the 1930s HOLC ‘Redlining’ Maps.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 13 (4): 355-92.
• Carruthers, Celeste K., and Marianne H. Wanamaker. 2017. “Separate and Unequal in the Labor Market: Human Capital and the Jim Crow Wage Gap.” Journal of Labor Economics 35 (3): 655-696.
• Jones, Maggie E.C. 2021. “The Intergenerational Legacy of Indian Residential Schools.” Unpublished working paper. Available at: https://maggieecjones.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/intergenerationalrs.pdf
• Rothstein, Richard. The color of law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America . Liveright Publishing, 2017.

[7] https://www.britannica.com/topic/redlining

[8] Aaronson, Daniel, Daniel Hartley, and Bhashkar Mazumder. 2021. “The Effects of the 1930s HOLC ‘Redlining’ Maps.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 13 (4): 355-92.

[9] Pfeffer, Fabian T., and Alexandra Killewald. 2018. “Generations of Advantage: Multigenerational Correlations in Family Wealth.” Social Forces 96 (4): 1411-42.

[10] Wealth is the total financial value of what an individual or household owns (assets) minus all debts (liabilities), representing the sum of financial resources available to an individual or household at a point in time. Assets include the value of a home, retirement savings, stocks, bonds, money in the bank, and other items of value, while liabilities include home mortgages, auto loans, credit card debt, and student debt. The racial wealth gap is the difference in wealth held by different racial and ethnic groups.

[11] Reardon, Sean F., and Ximena A. Portilla. 2016. “Recent Trends in Income, Racial, and Ethnic School Readiness Gaps at Kindergarten Entry.” AERA Open 2(3): 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332858416657343.

[12] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_104.10.asp

[13] https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/race-and-ethnicity/2019/home.htm

[14] https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2020/december/has-wealth-inequality-changed-over-time-key-statistics

[15] Hsieh, Chang-Tai, Erik Hurst, Charles I. Jones, and Peter J. Klenow. 2019. “The Allocation of Talent and U.S. Growth.” Econometrica , 87 (5): 1439-1474.

[16] Dakil, Suzanne R., Matthew Cox, Hua Lin, and Glenn Flores. “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in    Physical Abuse Reporting and Child Protective Services Interventions in the United States.” Journal of the National Medical Association 103(9-10): 926-931.

[17] Teye, Simisola O., Jeff D. Yanosky, Yendelea Cuffee, Xingran Weng, Raffy Luquis, Elana Farace, and Li Wang. 2021. “Exploring Persistent Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Lead Exposure among American Children Aged 1-5 Years: Results from NHANES 1999-2016.” International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health 94: 723-730.

[18] Anderson, Sarah E., and Robert C. Whitaker. 2009. “Prevalence of Obesity Among US Preschool Children in Different Racial and Ethnic Groups.” Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 163(4):344–348. doi:10.1001/archpediatrics.2009.18

[19] Quiñones, Ana R., Anda Botoseneanu, Sheila Markwardt, Corey L. Nagel, Jason T. Newsom, David A. Dorr, Heather G. Allore. 2019. “Racial/Ethnic Differences in Multimorbidity Development and Chronic Disease Accumulation for Middle-Aged Adults.” PLoS ONE 14(6): e0218462. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0218462

[20] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-race-ethnicity.html

[21] https://nationalequityatlas.org/indicators/Neighborhood_poverty#/?geo=01000000000000000

Enrichment only for the rich? How school segregation continues to divide students by income

Seventy years after brown v. board, school funding policies continue to segregate students by wealth. it doesn't have to be that way..

Kathy Giglio’s high school memories in Bridgeport, Connecticut, include regular lockdowns and the sound of gunfire in the lobby. Classrooms lacked basic supplies and teachers didn’t notice how often she skipped class . Desks tended to be broken and textbooks decades old. 

“​​You could tell it was very poverty-driven, with the attitudes of the students and the attitudes of the staff,” said Giglio, 34. “It was a zoo in my high school – there wasn’t a lot of learning that you were able to do because life was in the way.” Her 10-year-old daughter now attends school in the same district, and conditions haven’t improved much.

Giglio, who is Latina, appreciates living in the community she grew up in, near her parents and among other people of color working hard to give their children as many opportunities as possible. Most Bridgeport residents are Black or Latino.

She has also seen how different learning is for others in the area through her job at an after-school program in Westport, which feels like a world apart even though it’s a short drive away. The students learn on electronic whiteboards and eat in cafeterias that spill into beautiful courtyards. Kids who are struggling get one-on-one tutoring.

This week marks 70 years since Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that determined school segregation violated the Constitution. Decades later, severe divides like those Giglio has seen persist in communities around the country. Although they have received a historic infusion of relief funding since COVID-19 capsized learning, many schools are struggling to help kids catch up – especially low-income ones. School funding has remained uneven, which means the disparities could worsen once relief dollars expire later this year. 

Data shared exclusively with USA TODAY shows that even within the same metropolitan area, school districts in wealthy communities often get more dollars per pupil than lower-income districts. In many regions, state funding policies designed to offset these disparities don’t make much of a dent, according to the analysis by the think tank Bellwether. Bellwether's research found some of the greatest funding disparities in blue states like Connecticut. Some of the most equitably funded metro areas are in red states such as Texas. 

The findings provide a window into the insidious forces that continue to segregate children – decades after the high court ruled it was unfair to deny a Black girl access to a better-resourced school blocks from her Kansas home. In 2024, students are still sorted into school systems that reinforce rather than level out inequities.

"It's been a long road since Brown v. Board," said Alex Spurrier, an associate partner with Bellwether who helped lead the research.

"A lot of progress has been made on many fronts," he said, "but looking at the way we resource our schools right now, it's very clear there's still a lot of progress to be made."

The communities are side by side. They have wildly different education outcomes – by design.

The reality after Brown v. Board: Same urban area, starkly different worlds

Bellwether, a research nonprofit that focuses on educational equity, examined 123 metro areas across 38 states. Low-income districts tend to get the most dollars per student in just a third of those metro areas. In 40% of the metro areas, wealthier districts get the most funding. A little more than half of the students in the study live in a metro area where the wealthiest communities get the most resources.

The inequities tend to happen in metro areas divided into tiny school districts that draw in vastly different tax revenue. Schools in affluent neighborhoods rake in so much money from taxes on expensive homes that it dwarfs the amount invested in poorer schools through progressive state funding formulas meant to balance the resources.

“If you have a metro area that only has a handful of school districts, that helps to smooth out those differences in the levels of wealth,” Spurrier said. “The more boundaries and borders you have within a metro area, the more there will be these inequities in overall funding.” 

Nationally, local property taxes comprise about 37% of public schools' total revenue. That percentage is often higher in wealthy areas. While state funding formulas usually seek to address the gaps, “it’s just not enough to overcome these vast differences in local revenue,” Spurrier said.

For example, in the greater Columbus, Ohio, area, affluent districts raise $13,477 per pupil on average, compared with $9,129 per pupil in lower-income districts like Columbus proper. Even with state dollars, the suburbs maintain a $1,333 advantage. 

In the San Francisco Bay Area, elite districts such as Piedmont raise more than twice as much as poorer ones – and despite state interventions, they still eke out a $2,379 per-pupil advantage. Similar phenomena are seen in Philadelphia and its surrounding districts. 

See which wealth class in your metro area receives the most funding:

Inequities have become ‘normalized’.

Bridgeport is another metro area where funding differences result in vastly different educational experiences for poor and wealthy kids. The city’s local tax rate is more than four times higher than the rate in Greenwich, but the affluent suburb can still produce more per-pupil funding because of property values.

Wealthy districts in the Bridgeport area, such as Greenwich, raise an average of $24,922 per pupil in local revenue. That’s $18,325 more than Bridgeport and Danbury, another poor city nearby. The additional $6,763 these low-income districts receive from the state only goes so far: Even after that funding, the elite districts still generate $11,548 more in per-pupil dollars. 

According to separate research by the think tank New America, Connecticut is home to many of the country’s most unequal sets of neighboring school districts. The report compared economic circumstances in districts that sit next to each other. In Connecticut, acute differences in wealth and funding between districts almost always correlate with acute differences in racial composition. 

Steven Hernández, the executive director of a local advocacy organization called ConnCAN, said these inequities are rooted in Connecticut’s past: It is a provincial state whose borders were drawn based on centuries-old religious, economic, racial and ethnic divides. Some of those drastic divides are relics of former eras, but they reverberate for present-day students.

“Each town considers itself different from the others in meaningful ways,” he said. But “these days, what you see more than anything is the divide between the haves and have-nots.”

In conversations with USA TODAY, more than a dozen Bridgeport parents and students highlighted the lack of resources. 

Chantal Almonte, a parent who immigrated from the Dominican Republic, explained in Spanish that while she’s generally happy with her children’s teachers, the school facilities are abysmal. During a heat wave last year, her son was sent home early several times with headaches because his school didn’t have air conditioning.

Francisca Gabriel García, a Bridgeport resident who grew up in Mexico, cares for her niece and two children. Visiting different campuses, she has seen how unequal the funding is. Before she was accepted into her daughters’ magnet program, Gabriel García’s niece often said she was afraid to attend her former school because she worried the building would collapse. The school routinely closed for days at a time because the classrooms couldn’t operate in the heat.

The magnet program also has issues. Every Monday, the school sends home a packet of homework and activities for the week. Almost always, Gabriel García said, it comes with a note requesting the students bring basic supplies – paper towels, crayons, disinfecting spray.

“I don’t understand – my question has always been, why? Why are towns like Fairfield, Trumbull reputed to have a much better system if they are also public schools, if we also pay taxes?” Gabriel García, who volunteers as a community advocate , said in Spanish. “I am afraid that in the future – when my daughters go to high school – they will not be competitive girls.”

Giglio has considered moving to another district so her daughter, who was recently diagnosed with ADHD, could get tutoring and other necessary support. But doing so has felt nearly impossible, she said. She tried to take advantage of a program that allows select students to attend schools in other districts, but her daughter didn’t get in. 

“I don’t work in a field that pays well enough” to move, Giglio said, remarking on the high cost of homes. According to Realtor.com, the median sold home price in Westport, where Giglio works, is $2.3 million. 

The not-having has become “normalized,” said Tracey Elizabeth Garcia, a 15-year-old freshman in Bridgeport. One of her earliest school memories is of a teacher cautioning her and her classmates to share and conserve their gluesticks. As a freshman in high school, the lack of resources is stymying her ability to prepare for college – her school doesn’t have enough counselors. 

School district lines are ‘arbitrary’

The landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling focused on the segregation of students by race – it didn’t tackle the more subtle dynamic of uneven school funding . However, recent studies show that funding disparities break down along racial lines. A 2018 report found that school districts with the greatest number of students of color received $1,800 – or 13% – less than those with the fewest. 

To address these seemingly intractable disparities, Bellwether estimates that states would need to increase allocations to poorer districts in areas with gaps by more than 20% on average. But such vast funding increases aren’t realistic, Spurrier said. Instead, he and his colleagues propose limits on how much districts can pull from local tax revenue or policies that allow the revenue to be spread more evenly across a metro area. Another solution could be consolidating districts.

“School district lines are an arbitrary thing,” said Preston Green, a professor of educational leadership and law at the University of Connecticut who studies school funding and segregation. “Other than the politics, there’s nothing that prevents us from redrawing school district lines.”

The politics are a major barrier, parents said. As one mother, Elizabeth Robinson, put it when asked about district consolidation: “I think as a resident of Bridgeport, it’s is a great idea, but if I was a resident of Southport? Absolutely not.” The median sold home price in Southport is $1.2 million. 

Connecticut is known as “the Land of Steady Habits,” said Hernández, from ConnCAN. And in an educational context, habits have become a curse. “There is this quiet complicity between the haves and have-nots about the way things are. … The people who live in poverty will always live in poverty.” Decision-makers might never say that explicitly, “but that’s how they budget.” 

Mixed messages: Parents think their kids are doing well in school. More often than not, they're wrong.

This persistent inequity forces families that can do so to vote with their feet. Some Bridgeport families USA TODAY interviewed said they had been forced to attend or send their children to schools elsewhere to avoid the poor conditions of city campuses. 

Jackson Thomas, who now attends a Trumbull private school thanks to tuition help, noted how much safer and higher-quality his education is now – he went from struggling with failing grades to earning A’s and B’s and playing on the football team. Arantza Victoria Gonzalez Cardenas, who goes to school in Milford, said her learning now feels more organized, relaxed and connected. Everything is different, she said.

More: Supreme Court allows Louisiana's congressional map with new, mostly Black district

Several mothers who have participated in a local parent leadership institute told USA TODAY they would invest in the Bridgeport system if the system invested in them. 

“Being in Bridgeport, in order for your child to really succeed, you have to go into a private school setting,” said Arlene Harris-Webber, whose son was denied special-needs services in Bridgeport schools. She later discovered her son tested in the top percentile. “If his IQ is so high, why is he failing?”

Graphics: Javier Zarracina , USA TODAY

Contact Alia Wong at (202) 507-2256 or [email protected]. Follow her on X at @aliaemily.