This summer, for the first time since racial segregation in America’s schools was outlawed over 50 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to set new standards changing the extent to which primary and secondary students nationwide can reap the benefits of ethnically and racially diverse academic environments.
The stakes are high. The issue was brought forward in challenges to school boards in Seattle and Louisville that tried to foster integrated public schools through modest, voluntary measures relating solely to students seeking to attend schools outside their own neighborhoods.
Despite what plaintiffs maintain in the two cases at issue, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, racial engineering is not part of the equation. This much was affirmed by the lower courts.
In Seattle, the student assignment plan concerns the district’s 10 high schools: a racial “tiebreaker” is used when a school draws more pupils than there are places. The idea is to keep King County schools within 15 percent of their makeup (which is 60 percent minority). In Louisville, Jefferson County schools have a system of “managed choice,” which also permits some degree of choice, but includes race as a deciding factor in schools where there are not enough seats to meet student demand.
For their part, a majority of parents support the Seattle and Louisville schools. A University of Kentucky study found that 82 percent of parents felt students benefited from a racially diverse environment. And they are not alone: communities across the country have rallied to ensure children from different backgrounds learn together.
Still, in the years since 1954’s historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the goal of fully integrated schooling remains lamentably distant. In fact, public primary and secondary schools in the U.S. are now more segregated than at any time since 1970. This is not only a legacy of local resistance, but also residential segregation.
It is a legacy that continues to haunt the Asian American and Pacific Islander community in Seattle as well as blacks in Louisville. In Seattle, for example, covenants dating back to the late 1940s forbade the sale of land to Asian Americans.
Today, Seattle’s housing patterns are still influenced by these abolished covenants, with over 50 percent of King County’s Asian Pacific Americans classified as having low to moderate incomes — still living in segregated neighborhoods.
Not surprisingly, access to education mirrors these inequities. King County APA adults 25 and older possess below-average rates of graduating high school. Nineteen percent of Pacific Islanders and 18 percent of Asian American adults do not even have a high school degree — nearly double the 10 percent of King County residents overall.
Worse yet, a majority of Seattle-area Hmong and Laotian and more than a third of Vietnamese and Cambodian adults do not even have a high school degree.
All this contrasts sharply with the much-vaunted “model minority myth.”
There are many compelling benefits to voluntary integration, among them the universally acknowledged tolerance that exists among students from diverse schools. In an era of increasing global competition, the importance of this cannot be overstated. It is also well-documented that students who attend integrated schools have higher levels of academic achievement.
School segregation in the 21st century is a culmination of the institutional racism that has afflicted minorities for many years. Voluntary measures by local school boards are a good first step toward reintegrating their classrooms. The justices of the Supreme Court would do well to keep this in mind come this summer, when they make a final decision.
Aimee J. Baldillo is director of programs at the Asian American Justice Center, a national civil and human rights organization that promotes advocacy issues for Asian Americans. She can be reached at Abaldillo@advancingequality.org