Sixty-five years after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, the federal and judicial role in school desegregation has declined. In a more difficult political and legal environment, it has fallen on school districts to develop and implement voluntary integration plans through diversity-minded student assignment…

Derrick Bell's interest convergence thesis is a seminal framework to analyze social change within critical race theory. While interest convergence's influence has grown, two foundational questions have been raised: do interest groups act rationally; does interest convergence also offer a change prescription or only an explanation of prior events.…

This study uses a North Carolina administrative data set to analyze racial segregation and student achievement in Wake County during race-based and income-based school assignment plans. We find a modest increase in the level of racial segregation in Wake schools during the income-based plan, but compared with other large districts in the state,…

In 1954, "Brown v. Board of Education" struck down state laws that required schools to be segregated by race, which then existed in 17 southern states. Yet in 2016, many schools across the country are still segregated along largely racial and socioeconomic lines. There are many reasons schools aren't better integrated. School district…

Using data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, this study examines the association between high school socioeconomic segregation and student attainment outcomes and the mechanisms that mediate those relationships. The results show that socioeconomic segregation has a strong association with high school graduation and college enrollment.…

Recent literature reviews have emphasized the weakness and inconsistency of research on school desegregation outcomes. If social science is to have more influence on school desegregation policy, future research will need to work from comprehensive causal models that incorporate the conditions under which desegregation occurs. (Author/LC)

The history of the ideal of equality is traced from Plato to the present. The relevance for American society of equality of opportunity and of condition is explored, especially in terms of legal developments and educational policy. An intermediate judicial standard has evolved, straddling rational basis and strict scrutiny interpretations. (AF)

Considers the Supreme Court Brown and Bakke decisions the results of socioeconomic influences rather than of moral imperative. Discusses social conditions as influences on judicial processes, economic conditions in the United States when the decisions were made, and the effects of the decisions on school desegregation, educational competition, and…

This issue reviews national demographic trends in school segregation, summarizing research findings. Though the national debate on school segregation emphasizes blacks and whites, present-day school segregation includes segregation by socioeconomic level, ethnicity, and native language. The research study examined features of the ecology of…