School desegregation never happened, and no one noticed

This year’s July Fourth fireworks are extra special, combined with celebration of another landmark moment in American history. 

This year is the 70th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s most significant ruling in at least a century — that it is both wrong and illegal to have separate schools for white and Black children.

The Brown v. Board of Education ruling affirmed the nation’s founding principle that every American has equal rights under law.

Good schools for all American children is at the heart of the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights … life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

The good news on this July Fourth is that an extremely high percentage of Americans hold high the court’s Brown decision and oppose school segregation.

But hold the fireworks for a moment. Most Americans, Black and white, also tell pollsters they think schools are now racially integrated. That’s not true. In fact, America’s schools are more segregated today than they were in the late 1980s, the high point of school integration.

Black students “on average, attended 76 percent nonwhite schools, and Latino students went to 75 percent nonwhite schools,” Education Week recently wrote of a 2021 study by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA.

This rise in separate schools is happening even as the nation includes more people of color than ever.

Nearly half of all American students are still young white people. But The Associated Press reports that 40 percent of Black and Latino students rarely share a classroom with a white student. They are in schools “where almost every one of their classmates” is also Black and Latino. AP links the disparity to family income. “Schools where students of color compose more than 90 percent of the student body are five times more likely to be located in low-income areas. That in turn has resounding academic consequences … [h]igh poverty schools … have worse educational outcomes.”

To avoid that bitter reality, many Black and white Americans look the other way. Eighty percent of Americans told The Washington Post poll that they think the nation’s schools are more integrated and “less racially segregated than they were 30 years ago,” or maybe, only as segregated and not more.

There is even harsher reality for anyone opening their eyes to the difference in budgets for white and minority schools. Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who won the Brown case at the Supreme Court before becoming its first Black justice, explained to me for a biography I wrote about him that integration of schools was intended to ensure that white school boards and politicians gave equal funding, to create good schools in all neighborhoods.

Justice Marshall would be upset to see the situation today. As of 2019, according to a report by Edbuild, Black and Latino majority school districts were receiving $23 billion less in state and local dollars than white majority districts despite serving a similar number of students. Not counting federal dollars or capital funds, nonwhite districts were receiving $11,682 per student, compared to $13,908 spent for each student in majority white communities. This gap in resources remains a secret to most Americans.

Washington Post polling has 75 percent of white people and 70 percent of Black people agreeing that school integration has improved the lives of Black students.

As recently as 1973, 70 percent of a then-heavily white majority nation opposed busing to create racially mixed schools. Today, 50 years later, white people and Black people remain opposed to busing. White Americans are split on other strategies to bring students of all races together, such as enlarging school districts or putting more low-income housing into affluent school districts. 

The only widely popular idea is more magnet schools.

The general lack of interest among white Americans in dealing with school segregation is a political hot potato.

Under Donald Trump, 85 percent of whose voters in 2020 were non-Hispanic white people, the education department pursued policies to shift funding from public school to private, religious and charter schools.

Even fans of using vouchers to spur innovations to help students trapped in failing schools — including me — grew uneasy with the lack of oversight to ensure these strategies were about creating better schools and not paving new ways for white people to avoid going to school with nonwhite people.

The Associated Press reported that in Trump’s wake, school board elections, once “sleepy affairs,” became hotbeds with “right-leaning groups” such as Moms for Liberty becoming a sensation by promoting the idea that white students are being indoctrinated by liberal teachers with the history of racial oppression, and lessons on how gay people are marginalized.

A series of stumbles, including a scandal involving the husband of one of the group’s co-founders, has created problems for the group. And now there is a countermovement called “Educated. We Stand.” Jennifer Jenkins, the founder, says the group is “not just fighting back; we are defending the very essence of learning … inclusion in our schools.”

This year it is important for students to know that the most famous July Fourth oratory came from a Black man intent on ending slavery in 1852: “Are the great principles of political freedom and natural justice embodied in the Declaration of Independence, extended to us?” asked Frederick Douglass.

The persistence of school segregation is evidence of failure to live up the declaration’s promise of an equal chance at success for all Americans.

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.