Logan, John, Oakley, Deirdre, & Stowell, Jacob
Researchers: Deirdre OakleyJacob StowellJohn Logan
University Affiliation: Brown University, Georgia State University
Email: John_Logan@brown.edu
Research Question:
Evaluate how court orders and federal intervention affected segregation within school districts in the post-Brown period.
Published: 1
Journal Name or Institutional Affiliation: American Journal of Sociology
Journal Entry: Vol. 113, No. 6, pp. 1611-44
Year: 2008
Findings:
- Small increases in segregation between districts were outweighed by larger declines within districts.
- Desegregation was not limited to districts and metropolitan regions where enforcement actions required it, and factors such as private schooling, district size, and inclusion of both city and suburban areas within district boundaries had stronger effects than individual court mandates.
- Segregation within districts was actually higher in metropolitan areas where larger shares of children were in districts with desegregation mandates.
- At the metropolitan level mandates did not have a salutary effect on the average within-district segregation, where court orders directly reached district policies.
- The whole pattern of enforcement of new constitutional law across the United States had a system-wide impact on nontargeted districts, even in metropolitan areas where no policy change was specifically required.
- Metropolitan areas where whites and blacks are more segregated into separate neighborhoods do not necessarily also have higher school segregation.
- The gains in segregation in the 1990s concentrated in shifts within school districts, which is where enforcement actions have almost always been targeted. There was nearly a 40% fall in segregation at this level. But these gains were partly counterbalanced by increasing between-district segregation that occurred especially between 1970 and 1990.
- White flight was of sufficient magnitude to limit gains from desegregation but not to ify them.
- Mandates were consistently associated with higher segregation within districts but lower segregation between districts within a metropolis.
- Tentative conclusion: Within-district segregation was higher in metropolitan areas with more widespread desegregation mandates because segregation itself invited judicial or executive-branch action.
- Despite to the publicity surrounding White academies, segregation at the metropolitan level had little relation to the share of children in private schools.