Are public schools as segregated today as in 1960s?

The United States is backtracking on integrating public schools, according to Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.). 

"Yesterday marks the 68th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education decision, which struck down the unlawful school segregation," Scott said during a May 18 meeting of the House Education & Labor Committee. "Yet we know public schools are now as segregated by race and class as they were as they were in the 1960s."

Scott represents Virginia’s 3rd Congressional District, which spans from Norfolk north through Newport News and west through Isle of Wight County. He’s chairman of the education committee and made the claim about segregation in comments supporting a bill he proposed that would authorize $130 billion in federal grants and loans to high-poverty areas to improve school facilities.

Have public schools resegregated to 1960 levels? A fact-check shows Scott is mostly right.

It’s important to note that modern school segregation is not the same as the government-ordered social system that the Supreme Court struck down in 1954. Segregation today refers to the level of isolation of nonwhite students or, conversely, the level of exposure students of different races have to one another in school. 

A problem with Scott’s claim is that it doesn’t hold true for the better part of the 1960s. Despite the Brown decision, Jim Crow laws remained in the South until the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In 1960, 0.1% of Black students in the South — 1 in 1,000 — attended a majority-white school, according to a study by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. That increased to 14% in 1967.  

Scott’s statement is on strong legs, however, if the measurement begins in 1968, when the U.S. Supreme Court — in a case involving New Kent County, Virginia — ruled that school district integration plans must meaningfully reduce segregation.

"School segregation is now more severe than in the late 1960s," says a 2020 UCLA report, the latest research we found.  

In 1968, 77% of Black students across the nation attended majority non-white schools, the UCLA report said. That sank to 63% in the 1980s but rose to 81% in 2018, the latest year available. 

A pair of 2020 studies found Central Virginia schools are becoming more segregated, too. 

A key reason for the backslide is a 1991 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that ended court-ordered desegregation, which often took the form of busing. The court ruled that school desegregation was a temporary remedy, not a permanent obligation.

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Another reason, according to UCLA researchers: "The White birthrate has fallen below the reproduction levels of about a half century ago; consequently, the share of the White population and their school enrollment has sharply declined."

In 1970, 79% of public school students were white. That fell to 47% in 2018. "This is not because of transfer to private schools, which have a declining share of total enrollment and have themselves become somewhat more diverse," the report stated. "The white decline reflects historically low birth rates and immigration patterns that are overwhelmingly nonwhite."

Black students have comprised about 15% of public school students since 1970. But they are no longer the second largest population of students, as they were until the turn of the century. Latinos grew from 5% of the public school population in 1970 to 27% in 2018. Asian Americans have increased from 0.5% to 6% in that same span.

School segregation is intrinsically tied to the racial gaps in housing and income. The end of court-ordered integration in 1991 led to the reemergence of color lines in school districts. 

"Whereas Black and Hispanic students are more likely to be concentrated in high-poverty schools, Asian students, like their white counterparts, are most frequently found in middle-class schools," researchers from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth wrote in a 2019 report.

Another team of UCLA researchers found that in 2010, half of the public schools that were 90% or more Black and Hispanic also had a student population that was 90% or more from low-income households. At the time, a low-income student was defined as one who qualified for a free or reduced-price school lunch. Since then, changes to the federal lunch program have made it impossible to know how many students are impoverished.

Scott said, "Public schools are now as segregated by race and class as they were in the 1960s."

Scott’s claim doesn’t hold up for most of the 1960s, when Jim Crow still breathed and Southern states circumvented the Supreme Court’s 1954 order to integrate public schools.

But he has a point, if we start in 1968, when 77% of Black students in the nation attended majority non-white schools. That dropped to 63% in the 1980s and then rose to 81% in 2019, the last year data is available. The ups and downs followed Supreme Court decisions that first toughened, then ended, integration mandates.

The Civil Rights Project at UCLA, which has extensively studied school integration, wrote in 2020, "School segregation is now more severe than in the late 1960s." 

So, we rate Scott’s statement Mostly True.