The Continued Nexus between School and Residential Segregation

Abstract

One of the goals of the symposium, "Rekindling the Spirit of Brown," is "to develop innovative and creative strategies for insuring equal educational opportunity for students of color in K-12 grades." As the other articles point out, the cry to recommit to the struggle for educational equity is a response to the failure to achieve this goal over the last half century. Effective strategies must be rooted in a concrete understanding of the forces and dynamics that block progress. This article tackles one aspect of this problem: how the residential location of children reinforces school segregation. Overcoming the barriers created by this spatial pattern is, in our opinion, necessary to achieving the symposium's goals, and the first step is to understand the nature and magnitude of the problem. Two of the most visible and pernicious manifestations of a racially divided society are school and residential segregation. Both are the results of and contributing factors to racial inequality. Perhaps less understood is how school and residential segregation are inherently linked to each other. De jure residential and school segregation has long disappeared. In 1948, the Supreme Court ended the legal use of restrictive covenants to restrict the sales of homes in white neighborhoods to minorities in its Shelley v. Kraemer decision.' By 1954, the Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision also ended the practice of "separate but equal" schools for 2 African Americans. Moreover, civil rights laws enacted in the 1960s further prohibited racial discrimination in housing and education. Yet, despite these judicial and statutory prohibitions against discrimination, and even with considerable efforts to desegregate neighborhoods and schools, we still remain a spatially divided society. De facto segregation remains prevalent in both housing and education.