When unified status was granted to numerous school districts, school boards developed redistricting plans to implement neighborhood schools. Social justice advocates decried these plans as they reversed over 40 years of progress, as many of these efforts resulted in resegregating schools homogenously grouped by race and wealth. Using piecewise and…

This research applies critical race theory to investigate Michigan's system for funding public schools, focusing on structural racism and discrimination embedded in education finance laws, housing policies, and residential and educational segregation. We find that the average Black student receiving free or reduced-price lunch (FRL) receives $411…

This dissertation outlines a comprehensive research endeavor focused on the history of elementary literacy instruction in the Kansas City Kansas Public Schools (KCKPS) from 1990 until 2022. The research methodology combines historical analysis of artifacts, archives, and oral histories to answer the overarching research question, "What is the…

May 17, 2024 marks the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that ruled segregated schools were "inherently unequal." At the time, North Carolina was one of 17 states that enforced de jure segregation, that is, segregation by law. The state of North Carolina and the school districts within…

School districts must not only be knowledgeable about the historical context of school desegregation, but also what current efforts are occurring across the U.S. to combat school segregation as they may help guide them in leveraging policy in their own school communities' school integration endeavors. Thus, the purpose of this "Equity by…

Racially separate and unequal schooling is alive and thriving today. School districts are typically segregated by income, with non-White school districts getting 23 billion dollars less than White districts. Higher education is increasingly stratified by both race and class, and children of the wealthy are almost assured that they will attend…

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education overturned the "separate but equal" principle promulgated in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson. Yet, almost 70 years after Brown, schools continue to be segregated, and the structure of the public education system has fostered inequities across the nation. Although…

The decades-long resistance to federally imposed school desegregation entered a new phase at the turn of the new century, when federal courts stopped pushing racial balance as a remedy for past segregation, adopting in its place a color-blind approach in judging local school districts' assignment plans. Using data that span 1998 to 2016 from North…

According to a report by the UCLA Civil Rights Project (2017), New Jersey is the sixth most segregated state for Black students and the seventh most for Latino students. Black and Latino students in New Jersey also attend schools with large percentages of low-income students. Volumes of research on school segregation show that students attending…

Resource exposure was a key mechanism linking patterns of racial segregation and student outcomes during the Brown v. Board of Education era. Decades later, past progress on school desegregation may have stalled, raising concerns about resource equity and associated student outcomes. Are recent trends in segregation associated with racial…

Purpose: This paper uses former Black girl students' experiential knowledge as a lens to examine Black students' experiences with formal and informal curriculum; it looks to the 1970s during Waco Independent School District's desegregation implementation process. Design/methodology/approach: Guided by critical race theory, I used historical and…

Background/Context: In "Milliken v. Bradley" (1974), the U.S. Supreme Court deemed unconstitutional a metropolitan-wide desegregation plan in Detroit that sought to achieve racial balance in part by busing white suburban students to the city's majority black schools. In a stark departure from "Brown v. Board of Education of…

Nearly 70 years after one of the most important U.S. Supreme Court rulings was handed down in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) declaring segregated schools unconstitutional, the promise of desegregation has remained unfulfilled. However, there are still actions that can be taken to address the extant disparities in schools that exist in large…

In the 1954 "Brown v. Board of Education" case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregated schools unconstitutional, and the process of school desegregation fell mostly to Black children. For over 35 years, Black families in St. Louis City have been using school transfers to cross boundaries in order to send their children to higher…

In this paper I study the impact of court-mandated school desegregation by race on student suspensions and special education classification. Simple descriptive statistics using student enrollment and outcome data collected from the largest school districts across the country in the 1970s and 1980s show that Black-White school integration was…