In a 2007 decision, the court ruled that school boards can't use the race of an individual student to decide where they go to school. But the Supreme Court put limits on that, too. This still left room for districts to make sure their classrooms weren't separated by race. As Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in his dissent, the decision meant "school district lines, however innocently drawn, will surely be perceived as fences to separate the races." Segregated geography, created by government policies, would just be recreated in our schools. Bradley, the court ruled that school districts did not have to integrate among each other if the district lines weren't drawn with racist intent. So a truly comprehensive integration plan would require a solution that mixes students from different districts together.īut in the 1974 Supreme Court case Milliken v. Board of Education, which was aided by government policies that backed development loans to suburbs that would guarantee only white residents. This is a product of the white flight that ensued after the Supreme Court integrated schools in the 1954 decision Brown v. On one hand, there is a lot more stratification between districts - between, say, an urban district and a suburban one. There's kind of a twisted reason why we focus on school attendance zones. Why thinking about segregation in the context of school attendance zones is important I get that this is a problem, but what does this have to do with me? Two recent studies - one by Meredith Richards and another by Tomas Monarrez - find that most districts draw these lines to perpetuate the underlying residential segregation. But using school zones, we can actually gerrymander these lines so we’re not recreating the underlying segregation. This is why everyone going to the nearest school perpetuates very segregated classrooms. In America, there is already a massive amount of residential segregation, shaped by a long history of racist government policies.
Board of Education Supreme Court decision.īut this exact strategy - gerrymandering school districts to include certain kinds of students and exclude others - can also be used to integrate a school, rather than segregate them. In fact, schools in the South are as segregated now as they were about 50 years ago, not long after the landmark Brown v. The result is that schools today are re-segregating. We see this in city after city, state after state.Īnd often the attendance zones are gerrymandered to put white students in classrooms that are even whiter than the communities they live in. Groups with political clout - mainly wealthier, whiter communities - have pushed policies that help white families live in heavily white areas and attend heavily white schools. Once you look at the school attendance zones this way, it becomes clearer why these lines are drawn the way they are. But if you take a step back and look at the demographics of who lives in each attendance zone, you’re faced with maps like this: We tend to assume these are neutrally drawn, immutable borders. You probably didn’t think twice about it. If you attended an American public school, chances are you went to that school because your family lived in that school’s attendance zone.
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