Expert: 70 years later, schools still deeply segregated

Rick Dandes, The Daily Item, Sunbury, Pa.
·3 min read

May 16—Seventy years after the Supreme Court decision, the promise of Brown v. Board of Education has yet to be fulfilled, said Erica Frankenberg, Penn State University professor of education and demography.

"Brown helped to advance us along the path toward realizing a multi-racial democracy in some really important ways," said Frankenberg. But public schools are still deeply segregated, "particularly in northeast metropolitan areas," she said.

The legal case in Brown v. Board was relatively easy for the Supreme Court to decide, based on its merits, said Stanley M. Brand, Penn State University professor of law. "The 14th Amendment says you can't deny equal protection and the inferior educational system that had been fostered before this case wasn't equal. The court went outside of what they called the 'tangible' aspects of education — the buildings, the books, the teachers — to delve into the psychological impact of segregating minorities in a way that impacted them psychologically. That is where Brown pushed the frontier," Brand said.

The promiseIn the South where schools were completely racially segregated, as well as other aspects of society, Frankenberg said, "Brown had a dramatic effect in helping to change that reality."

Outside of the South, she continued, "Brown had an effect on desegregating schools as well as providing legal and rhetorical justification for a range of other groups, advocating for equitable access for educational opportunity."

But in the northeast, Frankenberg said, "segregation has been rising for decades. The northeast has much higher levels of segregation for Black students than in the south, which we typically think of as the place of segregation, where most of the cases involved in Brown v. Board of Education originated from."

The northeast is different in several respects, she said. "One of which is the extreme fragmentation of our metropolitan areas, where there might be hundreds of school districts."

In Pennsylvania, there are 500 public school districts and 127 charter schools that are "essentially autonomous from school districts. "What we find in Pennsylvania, in keeping with the research, is there are very small school districts with predominantly students of color existing very close to districts that are white because students don't often cross school district boundary lines," Frankenberg said.

The fact that we have so many boundary lines creates segregation in our metropolitan areas, Frankenberg said.

One difference between boundary lines in the North and the South is that historically, the South had countywide school districts, which allowed for different ways to assign students to further desegregation. "Some of the policy and legal tools used in the South weren't as readily available to address some of the segregation in the North," she said.

Spirit of the law todayBrown did open the door to the court's later rulings in other areas by taking it beyond the plain text, of the Amendment, Brand said.

But now, we are seeing "the retrenchment of that understanding and the pendulum seems to be swinging back to the fundamental way," he said.

"There is an ongoing battle on the court between taking a very broad interpretation of judicial powers, as was the case with Brown, and the more narrow textual argument that the conservative justices make."

There are still some important things to think about the legacy of Brown, Frankenberg said. "One is the mid-to-late-1960s when we had all branches of the federal government working together to try to change segregation in the South and elsewhere, there was pretty dramatic change in a short amount of time. Particularly in the South, districts implemented desegregation remedies that have provided for decades of desegregation. Even now you'll find Southern schools highly integrated. That's an important legacy.

"Sixty years ago," Frankenberg added, "we were primarily focused on desegregating black and white students. Today we have a more multi-racial society. And so thinking about integrating across racial groups is important."

Reconceptualizing public schools as a public good and an important place for people to learn with and from students across different backgrounds "is one of the core reasons we have publicly-funded schools," Frankenberg said.