On Top of the News
Segregation is Back
5/15/14 | Politico

Behind the Headline
Is Desegregation Dead?
Fall 2010 | Education Next

“Segregation is back” reads the headline of an article by Peg Tyre in Politico, which continues, “Sixty years after Brown v. Board, educational advantages are still unequally divided—not by race, but by zip code.” Tyre looks at the impact of the court ruling on racial integration and concludes, “increasingly, we live in a country in which educational attainment and its rewards are determined not by personal merit but by zip code.”

Many school reformers today focus their efforts not on integration, but on making high-poverty, high-minority schools more effective. In an Education Next forum, Susan Eaton and Steve Rivkin debate the role racial desegregation should play in 21st-century school improvement.

Eaton, research director at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, makes the case for refocusing school reform on creating integrated schools. Rivkin, professor of economics at Amherst College, questions whether desegregation efforts fulfilled their promise and points out complexities to the issue that researchers have barely begun to examine.

-Education Next