What is resegregation?

Let us be clear from the outset about how we understand the term “resegregation."   If a larger share of minority students were enrolled in majority-minority or predominantly minority school in 2000 than in 1990, and if at the same time white students shifted more heavily toward majority-white or predominantly white schools, that would represent a trend toward polarization between races.  It would mean that minority and white students were separating from one another.  This phenomenon would be captured by an increase in the Index of Dissimilarity, and the term resegregation would legitimately apply to that case.

On the other hand, if schools attended by both white and minority students were changing their composition in the same direction, in a way that left white and minority children neither more nor less separated from one another, we should use other language to describe the change.  We might say, for example, that there has been a growth of majority minority schools, and that this means that whites are increasingly in schools with greater racial diversity at the same time as black, Hispanic, and Asian children are more likely to be in schools where whites are in the minority.  Even if desegregation had not been supplanted by resegregation, such trends could have significant effects on public education.  But they would not indicate that “we are losing many of the gains of desegregation"

To illustrate this point, Table 3 lists several large school districts with substantial black student populations where there was no increase in racial imbalance across schools in the 1990s (as measured by the Index of Dissimilarity).  In each of these districts, the average black student had a much lower share of white classmates in 2000 than in 1990.  Based on the Civil Rights Project criteria, these districts were “resegregating." In fact, the table shows that the source of the change was simply the declining share of white enrollment in these districts, and that white students were distributed across schools no differently in 2000 than they had been in 1990.