History of Racial Segregation in American Education

1954 is the year that the Supreme Court declared the separation of minority and white children educational institutions unconstitutional but in the past couple of years, school segregation is making a comeback. Segregation of race in public schools, even while the facilities may be equal, strips away the equal educational opportunities of minority children. In her article, “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City”, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a staff writer for the New York Times, informs the readers on why she chose to enroll her daughter into an “intensely segregated” public school. Hannah-Jones talks about how segregated schools lacks the many opportunities that can make a minority child's education great. To inform us on the problem on segregation in education, Hannah-Jones writes about the historical events of segregation in the United States, the reasoning why a segregated school was the best option for her daughter, and how there is a huge gap because of the unfair academic advantages that white children compared to minority children.

If you read the title of Hannah-Jones’ article, Choosing A School For My Daughter In A Segregated City, you know that she chose to enroll her daughter into an intensely segregated school. Although Hannah-Jones’ was enrolled into one of the “best” desegregated public schools by her parents and she knows that the exposure to a desegregated environment helped her get a job as a New York Times Magazine writer, the “idea of placing our daughter in one of the small numbers of integrated schools troubled me” (Hannah-Jones 155). She goes on to say how these integrated schools are mainly white upper and middle-class students with sprinkles of poor Latino and African American students to create a “diverse” environment. “Part of what makes those schools desirable to white parents, aside from the academics, is that they have some students of color, but not to many.

This carefully curated integration, the kind that allows many white parents to boast that their children’s public schools looked like the United Nations, comes at a steep cost for the rest of the cities black and Latino children” (Hannah-Jones 155). She doesn’t want her daughter to be enrolled in a school that only cares to have minority children because it “diversifies” the school and as a result, makes the school look good. Hannah-Jones suggests that it isn’t fair to send her child to the “best” public school so she can get a good education with excellent resources while minority children are stuck at under-resourced schools. She doesn’t want to send her daughter to a private school until the problem of segregated schools not having any to none educational opportunities is fixed.

Before diving into what’s happening right now with segregation in schools, you have to look back at the historical events that contributed to it. Plessy v. Ferguson was a Supreme Court ruling in 1896 that declared racial segregation constitutional for any public facility as long as they were equal. This court ruling became known as “separate but equal” which means that as long as African Americans had “equal” facilities, then the races can be separated but in fact, black schools were not equal to white schools and lacked necessities. “In one county, $149 was spent per year on each white student, but only $43 on each black student” (Khan Academy par. 2). In 1981 our president at the time, Ronald Reagan promoted the idea of how using race to integrate schools was just as bad as using race to segregate them. Reagan believed in the “separate but equal” doctrine and his administration emphasized that “busing and other desegregation programs discriminated against white students” (Hannah-Jones 160). Reagan pushed to end school desegregation orders and cut off all the federal dollars that would help desegregation happen.

In 1954, the Supreme court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruled “separate but equal” unconstitutional because they found that the schools weren’t equal. After this case was ruled, black students were assigned to white schools and vice versa to diminish racism. “All things being equal, with no history of discrimination, it might well be desirable to assign pupils to schools nearest their homes” (Hannah-Jones 159 ). Despite this ruling, many Northern congresses were unwilling to accept desegregation in their schools so they tucked a passage into the 1964 Civil Rights Act that limits school desegregation in the North by not allowing schools to choose children to integrate them unless the court orders them to. It was less likely that these officials would get caught in violating the terms of the Constitution because they practice segregation off the books. Ritchie Torres, a city councilman who represents the Bronx and pushes the city to address school segregation, states “the moral vision behind Brown v. Board of Education is dead” and that integration is “something that would be nice to have but not something we need to create a more equitable society.

At the same time, we have an intensely segregated school system that is denying a generation of kids of colors a fighting chance at a decent life” (Hannah-Jones 161). Torres is stating that he knows integration is nice but before we get to that, we need to focus on fixing our segregated schools and strengthen the education opportunities there first. There has been a series of Supreme Court rulings that have tried to limit the reach of Brown v. Board of Education. Rulings such as Milliken v. Bradley struck down a lower court order for a metro-area-wide desegregation program for most of all blacks schools in Detroit and white suburbs that surround the area.

The academic achievement gap has increased for African Americans as they are in segregated schools because of the lack of equal resources. According to the United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, “Schools with large numbers of black and Latino kids are less likely to have experienced teachers, advanced courses, instructional materials, and adequate facilities. Most black and Latino students today are segregated by both race and class, a combination that wreaks havoc on the learning environment” (Hannah-Jones 155). Minority children already have a hard time because of their skin color but to add on to the fact that they are poor, puts them in such a greater academic risk. Research shows that “Being born into a poor family places students at risk, but to be assigned to a school with a high concentration of poverty poses a second, independent disadvantage that poor children attending middle-class schools do not face” (PRRAC par. 6). The academic achievement gap between blacks and whites has only increased since resegregation and there have been studies that prove this.

The Century Foundation conducted a study and found that when children in public housing enrolled in middle-class schools, their scores decreased by half in math and a third in reading while their classmates were doing significantly better, although if they were in the poor school they would be doing remarkably better. Peer influence also affects students achievements in schools. According to PRRAC, peer influence in high poverty schools diminishes the student’s motivation to learn and their ability to learn. “Whether rich, poor or middle class, a student placed in a high-poverty school will encounter an atmosphere that can be hostile to hard work and high achievement. Impoverished students lack the life experience to see the value of hard work in school, and may regard academic success as a capitulation to the values of a middle class they have been excluded from” (PRRAC 3). Students in schools with poverty won’t be motivated and the poor curriculum doesn’t give them many options to learn.

Segregated schools don’t offer low income minority children as many opportunities as they offer white children. “We need to address school inequality not with integration but by giving poor, segregated schools more resources and demanding of them more accountability”(Hannah-Jones 163). Every child, no matter if she/he is white or a minority, should all be given access to the same educational opportunities. No child, no matter what race, should be deprived of a good education.