Resegregation of Schools

Resegregation is the reinstitution of segregation after a period of desegregation. Although desegregation spurred the multicultural education movement, which has been critical to interrogating, complicating, and broadening the work in the field of curriculum studies, resegregation brings to bear more critical challenges for the field to consider, not the least of which is its impact on the promise of quality education for all children. More than 30 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which mandated school desegregation, educational scholars have noted a disturbing trend toward the resegregation of U.S. schools. Since the late 1980s, the number of Black and Latino students attending schools with a 90% to 100% minority population increased significantly, just as the number of White students attending predominately White schools did. Research also confirms that the schools with predominantly minority populations are typically located in central cities, are underfunded and therefore are also under resourced compared with predominately White schools in suburban districts. The impact of resegregation on the development, implementation, and study of school curriculum has been significant.

In 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the “separate but equal” mandate established in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, and in a follow-up decision ordered U.S. public schools to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” As many school districts and public institutions of higher education began to implement desegregation plans, students and scholars began to recognize that access was but one challenge in the struggle for equal educational opportunity. Another challenge dealt with the lack of minority representation in school curricula, which was either altogether absent or projected in a negative light. By the 1960s, many underrepresented groups began to push for more and better representation [Page 745]in school curricula. Their protests rendered the rise of ethnic studies programs in colleges and universities, which eventually became the basis for the multicultural education movement, which has not only called for more representation of minority groups but has also sought to rethink school curricula in ways that support a pluralistic democracy. Beginning in the 1970s, multicultural education was implemented in school districts and institutions of higher education across the nation. At the same time, many public schools were also implementing desegregation plans, which were far more successful in the South, where residential segregation was less of a problem, than in the North. For nearly three decades following the 1954 decision, the notable achievement gap between White and Black students began closing. According to many researchers, this was a sure sign that equal educational opportunity was being realized.

By the late 1980s, however, scholars began to notice a disturbing trend toward resegregation of U.S. schools, a trend that steadily increased throughout the 1990s in major metropolitan areas across the country. Researchers have noted that one of the key factors driving the resegregation trend has been White flight, which is the tendency of White residents to move out of neighborhoods that have been integrated by minority families for fear of a decrease in property values and school quality. In various communities, the result was the reestablishment of racially segregated urban neighborhoods and consequently racially segregated neighborhood schools, which often face a decrease in necessary funding because of decreases in property value and thus, the property taxes, which are important sources of school funding. Financially strapped school districts in urban communities with high rates of poverty have been shown to have multiple curriculum-related problems, such as high rates of teacher turnover, high rates of teachers teaching in areas for which they are not credentialed, significantly less college preparatory courses, and less resources and updated materials. These also are shown to be the schools where the curriculum tends to be dominated by rote learning materials and strategies in lieu of critical engagement and thinking. Since the late 1980s, U.S. public schools have grown more racially isolated, and for some researchers this correlates with the widening achievement gap between Black and Latino students and their White counterparts.

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