Does America no longer have use for the precedent set in Brown vs. Board of Education? Upcoming Supreme Court decisions might, more or less, decide this for us. The question facing the Supreme Court is whether the methods employed by some school districts (Louisville’s and Seattle’s in particular) to make the racial balance in their public schools reflect the area’s demographics discriminate against white students. In last week’s issue of the Economist, an article broke down the crisis facing race in public schools, which, in some areas, would be completely segregated if it weren’t for local government intervention.

Segregation no longer has the force of law, but it is still a fact of life in most cities. Many districts are actually going backwards, as Charles Clotfelter of Duke University documented in a 2004 book, “After Brown: the Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation”.

The reasons for this failure have long been more apparent than the solutions. High-income and middle-class white parents have moved in droves to suburban school districts that are outside the reach of city ones, thereby using the housing market to buy a better education for their children. Other affluent families have quit the public system entirely, and use private schools instead. And even though many white children still attend public schools in cities, big gaps in wealth—and in parents’ ability to work the system—force school administrators to adapt constantly if they want to keep their schools racially integrated.

An alternative to race-based intervention in public schools is intervention on an economic level. Proponents of this method say creating a balance of students from low income and high income families in public schools has a similar effect as doing the same thing with race, even in an all-white or all-black district. According to the article, none of this will really matter in the end. Politicians appeal directly to middle class voters, and the racial/economic segregation issue deals almost solely with improving the educational opportunities of students from lower income backgrounds.

I went to high school in a suburban area, and I was one of very few black students in the entire school. It’s not a myth — a better balance would have done wonders for my white peers, who honestly counted me as the only black person they knew, and for myself when I often felt completely out of place. When vast portions of the populations see issues like school segregation as, well, non-issues, things will only continue to revert to the way they used to be. If and when the Supreme Court intervenes and prohibits school systems from manipulating the racial makeup of their schools, I’m scared to see how much the law (and not our citizens hearts and minds) is responsible for a lot of the progress made in our education system in the past 50 years.
[Economist]