Most US cities failing on school integration

Most of America's major cities have made little to no progress reducing racial segregation in public schools over recent decades, with many sliding backward and becoming more polarized than at the turn of the century.

Hannah-Jones's daughter fell behind in segregated schools

Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote in the New York Times Magazine in September about sending her daughter to poor, intensely segregated public schools in New York City to fix them, but her child fell behind and demanded a change to a more selective school.

DC is a rare exception to segregation trends

Washington, DC is one of the few standout exceptions to national segregation trends. During the two thousands and twenty tens, its public schools underwent dramatic reforms that improved teaching and student achievement while reducing segregation.

DC's segregated schools dropped dramatically

The number of white students in DC public schools leapt up, and the share of schools that had been almost uniformly Black or Hispanic plummeted by about twenty percentage points, the largest drop among the country's fifty biggest cities.

Henderson never made integration a goal

Kaya Henderson, DC's former top schools official, said integration was never the point. She focused on giving citizens of the district a high-quality school system, regardless of where they came from or what they looked like.

“For me, integration was never the point. Giving our citizens of the district, no matter where they come from or what they look like, a high-quality school system, that was the point.”

Hannah-Jones calls for explicit desegregation plans

Hannah-Jones has argued that cities cannot fix deep-seated education problems unless they end de facto segregation. She called for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to produce a plan to address and dismantle school segregation in the city.

“Nothing can help the working class change its material condition more than actually having access to an equal and quality education.”

DC suggests a different order of operations

DC's example suggests the most realistic way to desegregate schools today might be to focus on improving their results first. School administrators and teachers can deliver gains without waiting for explicit integration policies.

Segregation driven by district boundaries

Most modern-day segregation is driven by differences between districts rather than within them. Well-to-do and white families move to wealthy suburbs for school, while Black and Hispanic families remain in cities or working-class suburbs.

Supreme Court blocked forced bussing between districts

In nineteen seventy-four, the Supreme Court ruled that court-issued integration orders requiring students to swap between districts were effectively unconstitutional, removing one of the few tools activists had to break through municipal boundaries.

DC had to attract families into the district

DC is bordered by wealthy suburbs like Arlington, Virginia, and Montgomery County, Maryland, where well-off professionals moved for schools. The only way to integrate DC's own schools was to lure more white or high-earning families into the district and keep them there.

Young professionals flooded DC after financial crisis

Starting in the early two thousands, DC's population ballooned with Gen X and millennial professionals of all races. Many flocked to the city after the financial crisis and Great Recession, since Washington was one of the few places where jobs remained plentiful.

White enrollment in DC schools quadrupled

White student share in DC public and charter schools jumped from three point nine percent in two thousand to thirteen point seven percent in twenty twenty-three. While white children in DC roughly doubled, those in public and charter schools more than quadrupled.

Intensely segregated schools dropped from ninety percent

In two thousand, ninety percent of DC's traditional public and charter schools were intensely segregated, where fewer than one in ten students are white. By twenty twenty-three, it had fallen to sixty-nine percent, leaving it in the middle of the pack.

Only five large cities saw any segregation decline

Over the same period from two thousand to twenty twenty-three, only five of the fifty largest cities saw any decline in intense segregation at all, making DC's progress exceptionally rare among major American urban school districts.

DC schools underwent major reform efforts

DC's reforms began with charter schools in the late nineteen nineties, which put competitive pressure on traditional public schools. After two thousand seven, Mayor Adrian Fenty introduced a pay-for-performance teacher system called IMPACT and stronger curriculum standards tied to Common Core.

DC became fastest-improving urban school district

DC became the fastest-improving large urban school district in the country on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, with both Black and white students seeing significant progress in reading and math scores.

Universal pre-K anchored professional families

DC's universal pre-K program, which began in two thousand eight, anchors professional families in the city when their children are young, then acts as a funnel into the public school system, helping retain diverse families in the district.

Atlanta also saw segregation decline through reform

Atlanta, one of the only other cities to see similar declines in segregation, put similar emphasis on education reform early in the century. Those efforts were eventually sidetracked by a cheating scandal but did notch real improvements on the NAEP.

Integration was never measured or tracked

Henderson emphasized that DC's integration gains were a side effect of education reform, not an explicit goal. She said integration never showed up on performance indicators and the city literally never had that conversation about measuring segregation.

“I don't even know if people collected that kind of data. We prided ourselves on 'what gets measured, gets done.' If integration was a goal, that would have showed up on some of my performance indicators. And we just literally never had that conversation.”