The Resegregation Thesis: What’s the Evidence?

Two previous reports by the Lewis Mumford Center documenting segregation trends suggest that there was very little change in the 1990s - neither continued progress nor significant reversal of desegregation. 

The first report (Choosing Segregation: Racial Imbalance in American Public Schools, 1990-2000, revised March 29, 2002) studied segregation across schools in metropolitan regions.  It showed a small increase (from 63 to 65) in the Index of Dissimilarity between whites and blacks.  This Index measures the degree to which the two groups are distributed unevenly among schools, and a higher value represents more segregation.  The report stressed, though, that much larger increases had taken place in some specific central-city school districts that had been released from desegregation orders in the 1990s - such as Cleveland, Columbus, and Denver.  Similarly there were small increases in segregation between whites and both Hispanics and Asians.  These groups, however, had been little affected by desegregation efforts prior to 1990, and there were few examples of large increases in segregation affecting them.

The second report (The Continuing Legacy of the Brown Decision: Court Action and School Segregation, 1960-2000, January 28, 2004) focused on black-white segregation, including data from 1968, 1990 and 2000.  It also distinguished between districts that had been ordered to desegregate (about 1100 districts, based on our inventory) and those that had not.  For school districts with at least 5% black enrollment, it documented very large declines in the Index of Dissimilarity within school districts between 1968 and 1990 (from over 80 to below 50 as a national average -see Table 1 below).  This index value increased by just 1 point between 1990 and 2000.  Because desegregation efforts in response to the Brown decision rarely extended beyond the boundaries of a single district, segregation at the metropolitan level -where differences between school districts are also counted - declined less between 1968 and 1990 (from 82 to 62).  After 1990 segregation increased by 1 point at the metropolitan level.