Like a ship with no wind in its sails, the driving force to desegregate public schools — to provide equal opportunity to minority and white students — is evaporating in the sea of apathy.

More than 60 years after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which effectively launched a campaign to end segregation, there is a lack of evidence to suggest that campaign is still alive and well. The Star Tribune, a Minneapolis, Minnesota-based newspaper, described re-segregation as a national phenomenon, yet there is no national movement to counter the new trend.

Instead, news articles from across the country tell a similar story, but often lack the data to put it in a national context. They usually compare the percentage of white students and minority students in their local urban schools today with information from several decades ago when integration started. In many cases, integration was apparently on the right track, but for one reason or another the mandate to integrate schools ended.

In the case of Minneapolis in 1972, a federal court mandated that the city’s schools could not allow more than 35 percent of its student population to be minorities, thus successfully desegregating schools, according to the Star Tribune. In the 1990s, immigration changed the city’s demographics, making it harder to fulfill the court order. Minnesota declared by the end of the decade that unless segregation was intentional it could not legally integrate schools.

Today, suburban schools in the region are diversified, but urban ones see high concentrations of minorities. Nineteen schools in Minneapolis have a student body that is more than 80 percent minority-based, and many of these schools have test scores that, on average, fall about 25 percentage points behind integrated schools, reported the Star Tribune.

What has happened and is happening in Minneapolis is not an isolated event. The Tampa Bay Times is covering a similar trend that is occurring in Pinellas County, Florida, in its series “Failure Factories.” According to the news outlet, the county school board ended integration plans in 2007, which gave rise to five poor schools with a majority of black students.

The series paints a vivid picture of experienced teachers fleeing to wealthier schools or retiring early, leaving the newly-impoverished schools with recent graduates who rarely last long. The result, according to a Tampa Bay Times investigation, is that 80 percent or more of the students in the five schools fail reading and math in the state’s standardized test.

Both the Star Tribune and Tampa Bay Times cite similar causes for re-segregation. Students were once strategically bussed out of their neighborhoods to schools in their district to provide a racially-mixed student body. When integration was put to the wayside, the bussing stopped and minority students were concentrated into urban schools that became underfunded.

Though other factors derailed integration plans, the lack of a clear battle stifled desegregation efforts. When the Supreme Court contemplated Brown v. Board of Education, blatant racism was rampant in the U.S., making it easy to point a finger at the problem.

Today, there is a lack of a consensus as to why schools have unequal funding, racial diversity and academic outcomes. Decades-old practices of redlining, which effectively divided communities based on race and, in some cases, a school funding system partially based on local property taxes, are two factors that may be to blame.

The problem has largely been seen as cyclical — poor schools fail to educate the young, leaving them without the means to get higher paying jobs, leaving them stuck in an impoverished community.

Regardless of who or what is to blame, the energy that once prevailed during the Civil Rights Movement has waned. A lack of national media attention and general apathy and ignorance to the phenomenon have led to a system in which the quality of your education is determined by which side of the school boundary line you happen to live on.

Share