Was 'Brown v. Board' a Failure?

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/was-brown-v-board-a-failure/265939/


Students at Barnard Elementary School in Washington, D.C., one of the first schools to desegregate after Brown. (Library of Congress)

After half a century, America's efforts to end segregation seem to be winding down. In the years after Brown v. Board of Education, 755 school districts were under desegregation orders. A new Stanford study reports that as of 2009, that number had dropped to as few as 268.

The study is the first to take a comprehensive look at whether court-ordered busing successfully ended the legacy of Jim Crow in public education, and it suggests a mission that is far from accomplished. On average, those districts that stopped forcing schools to mix students by race have seen a gradual but steady--and significant--return of racial isolation, especially at the elementary level.

It's unclear what effect school "re-segregation" will have on minority achievement, though a large body of research suggests it certainly won't help efforts to improve test scores, graduation rates, and college entry levels for blacks and Hispanics, a growing share of the U.S. population. But the retreat from desegregation also suggests the policy had significant flaws--problems current education reformers should pay attention to.

The hope behind desegregation was that it would bring together white and black children to learn with, and from, each other, and end the disparities that blacks suffered under legal segregation -hand-me-down textbooks, decrepit buildings, lower-paid teachers, and, of course, lagging achievement. In the three decades following Brown v. Board of Education, courts ordered districts to create elaborate student assignment plans--often dependent on forced busing--to mix black, Hispanic, and white students together in the same schools. Most school boards complied reluctantly, and parents in places like Boston reacted violently.

[cthulu2016]

1. I think this piece mischaracterizes the legal reason for Brown

Legally, Brown was not to promote diversity. It was a practical recognition that separate but equal is impossible.

The goal of Brown was better education for black students.

Since the article begins with a goal for Brown that all nine justices would probably have considered unconstitutional, at the time, a restatement of the headline argument that did not invoke Brown would make more sense.

Have post-Brown efforts to create self-sustaining ethnic patterns in schools that are more diverse than patterns in where people live been less effective than some assumed or hoped?

Yes.