Last Saturday was the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, and that prompted many on the Left to claim that any celebration should be tempered by a recognition that “segregation” and/or “resegregation” continues. Below is an op-ed I wrote for USA Today that explains why these claims are specious. Center for Equal Opportunity board member Abigail Thernstrom and her husband Stephan likewise set the record straight in their excellent Wall Street Journal op-ed here.
On May 17, we will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. And that is certainly something worth celebrating.
The only fly in the ointment is that this event will also prompt many solemn pronouncements that, alas, our schools are just as segregated as ever and/or that they are resegregating. We will be told that therefore the promise of Brown remains unfulfilled, and that this is the reason for continuing racial disparities in education.
But this is not true.
Here’s the key statistic that must always be borne in mind: The number of segregated (or resegregated) public schools in the United States in 2014 is … zero.
Segregation means sending children to separate schools because of their race; it does not mean a failure to have socially engineered racial balance. So we can celebrate, unreservedly, the fact that we no longer have racial segregation in our public schools.
It is true that there are educational disparities across racial and ethnic lines, but racial imbalances in classrooms have little if anything to do with this. It is not necessary for there to be a certain number of white children in a classroom in order for black children to learn.
As Justice Clarence Thomas once wrote, “It never ceases to amaze me that courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominately black must be inferior.” Some intellectuals and academics, unfortunately, are even quicker than the courts to jump to this conclusion.
Indeed and ironically, the real reasons for existing racial disparities are generally left unaddressed by the same well-meaning people who complain about “resegregation.”
When you think about it, a child’s environment has three major components — parents, schools and peers — and in all three respects African American children, in particular, face more hurdles. That is, they are more likely to grow up in single-parent homes, go to a substandard school and have peers who are, to put it mildly, unsupportive of academic achievement.
It may be politically incorrect, but we must acknowledge that out-of-wedlock births are a bad thing and that anti-“acting white” peer pressure exists. And while liberal groups will admit that substandard schools are a problem, they will also resist (partly because of recalcitrant teacher unions) the most promising reforms — involving competition among schools, merit pay for teachers and more choice for parents and children — in favor of just throwing more money at the problem. But lack of money is not the problem, any more than lack of racial balance is.
The only way to achieve the politically correct balance that some misguidedly demand is not by ignoring students’ skin color, but by using it to sort, assign and bus them. This is flatly at odds with Brown, which prohibited race-based assignments of students.
And it’s not even true that there is a declining lack of racial balance. Sometimes an “Index of Exposure” has been used to bolster that claim, but this is a flawed measure, as explained by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom in their 2003 classic No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. The Thernstroms conclude that “minority students are not becoming more racially isolated; white students typically attend schools that are much more racially and ethnically diverse than 30 years ago, and the modest decline in the exposure of black and Hispanic children to whites is solely due to the declining share of white children in the school age population.”
There is also good reason to be skeptical, as Justice Thomas warned, of the claim that more racial-balance means better education. To quote two other leading experts in this area, David Armor and Christine Rossell, “there is not a single example in the published literature of a comprehensive racial balance plan that has improved black achievement or that has reduced the black-white achievement gap significantly.”
Bottom line: Let’s celebrate the anniversary of Brown. And let’s forget about racial bean-counting and, instead, focus on improving our schools, regardless of their racial makeup.
