I grew up in a town with a liberal reputation and an overwhelmingly white k-12 school district, where racism was an animating feature of everything from zoning laws to playground “jokes.” There are obviously many places like this, and, as you know, these places typically aren’t considered to be “segregated schools” in need of political…
San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, the case that essentially approved school funding inequity, has been called one of the “most important SCOTUS decisions you’ve never heard of.” I was thinking about why/how it got this reputation during the #RodriguezAt50 Twitter chat marking its 50th anniversary, hosted by the National Coalition on School Diversity…
This guest post is written by Alexandra Cooperstock, a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the intersection of neighborhoods, schools, and policy for shaping inequality and educational opportunity. Originally published in the Social Forces journal, this post is a summary of research about school district secession in…
After long decades of silence or backsliding, state legislatures are newly beginning to think about policy solutions to contemporary school segregation. A bill in North Carolina, for example, would require public reporting on levels of segregation at each school, and my home state of Massachusetts is considering a bill that would establish a grant program…
What if the equal protection clause wasn’t the primary basis for school integration lawsuits? This week’s guest author – Erika Wilson, a Law Professor at the University of North Carolina – looks at perhaps unintended consequences of our long reliance on equal protection arguments. In a forthcoming paper, she presents an alternative that speaks to…
In a previous post, I summarized key points from the Brown@65 conference hosted by the Center for Education & Civil Rights and the Africana Research Center at Penn State. This post focuses on the riveting keynote from Nikole Hannah-Jones. As regular blog readers know, I write about her often, given her central role in the…
This is the first part of a two-part series on the Brown@65 conference, hosted by Penn State’s Center for Education and Civil Rights & Africana Research Center. Part two covers the conference keynote from Nikole Hannah-Jones, and it is available here. Today – 65 years after the Brown decision – the school integration movement is…
May 17th will mark 65 years since the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown vs. Board of Education. It’s a key moment in the year for the school integration movement, a time to reflect (often on the pace of resegregation or the unfulfilled promises of Brown) and a time that many groups use for conversation…
This post is about a great piece of recent research on school resegregation. I want to talk about the content of the article itself as well as the value, more generally, of research that relies on interviews and media analysis to understand the current moment that we’re experiencing with race and schooling. I think this…
The SD Notebook is back today, the 64th anniversary of the Brown decision, after a short hiatus to wrap up the semester and submit final grades. Especially because many others will attempt (better than I can) more comprehensive summaries of the state of school (re)segregation on the anniversary, I try to use my blog posts…
School Diversity Notebook 