Zahava Stadler
Director, Education Funding Equity Initiative
Executive Summary
May 2024 marks the seventieth anniversary of the historic United States Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. For decades after the ruling, school integration efforts made halting progress, but backsliding began in the late 1980s. In the last few years, however, there has been a resurgent interest in school integration, with new federal support and recent state court developments.
If America is to succeed at bringing about more integrated schools, we must understand the current landscape of school segregation and direct our efforts at the problem as it exists today. In February, 麻豆果冻传媒鈥檚 Education Funding Equity Initiative released Crossing the Line: Segregation and Resource Inequality Between America鈥檚 School Districts, a report that measured the present level of segregation between neighboring school districts. This short report builds upon Crossing the Line, showing how racial enrollment and racial divides between school districts have changed since 2000. It includes maps and data visualizations to help users understand the shifting nature of racial segregation between America鈥檚 school districts, and it explores trends in student enrollment and population movement to inform twenty-first-century advocacy and policy on school integration.
Read Crossing the Line聽and explore its and to learn more about segregation and resource inequity between school districts.
Appendix: Data and Methodology
For all data referencing the degree of segregation between neighboring school districts, we follow the same methodology and exclusions outlined in the , but expand our dataset to include 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2020 school years.聽To calculate enrollment changes鈥攂oth for school district enrollment generally and for the enrollment of specific racial groups鈥攚e use聽聽from the U.S. Department of Education National Center for Education Statistics鈥 (NCES) Common Core of Data (CCD) for all regular public school districts,聽聽by NCES.聽
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to several people for their contributions to this analysis. Thank you to Justin Madron of the Center for Geospatial Solutions at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy for his mapping support; Natalya Brill and Naomi Morduch Toubman for their support with data visualization and web presentation; Sabrina Detlef for her copyediting support; and Katherine Portnoy, Amanda Dean, and Zoe Reier for their communications and media support. This report was produced as part of the Education Funding Equity Initiative at 麻豆果冻传媒, which is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 麻豆果冻传媒 thanks the foundation for its support. The findings and conclusions contained within are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect positions or policies of the foundation.
Notes
[1] Sonya Ramsey, 鈥,鈥 American Historian (February 2017), Organization of American Historians.
[2] See, for example, Ramsey, 鈥;鈥 Gary Orfield, 鈥,鈥 Rethinking Schools 16, no. 1 (Fall 2001); and Janel George and Linda Darling-Hammond, 鈥,鈥 Learning Policy Institute (blog), May 18, 2021.
[3] George and Darling-Hammond, 鈥.鈥
[4] United States Government Accountability Office, 鈥,鈥 GAO Highlights, June 2022.
[5] Andrew Ujifusa, 鈥,鈥 Education Week, December 21, 2020.
[6] United States Department of Education, 鈥,鈥 Press Release, October 19, 2023.
[7] Catherine Carrera, 鈥,鈥 Chalkbeat Newark, October 13, 2023; and Becky Dernbach, 鈥,鈥 Sahan Journal, December 13, 2023.
[8] For the purposes of this analysis, 鈥渟tudents of color鈥 are those identified as a race or ethnicity other than non-Hispanic white in U.S. Department of Education data.
[9] 麻豆果冻传媒 calculation, based on United States Census data and .
[10] Justia U.S. Supreme Court (website), 鈥.鈥
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Jordan Abbott
Senior Data Scientist, Education Funding Equity initiative
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