NC schools are struggling with segregation 70 years after Brown v. Board, new research shows

North Carolina schools remain segregated and often are more segregated now than they were just a few decades ago, according to two new studies that show similar trends across the nation.

Friday marks the 70th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in which the court ruled that laws racially segregating schools were unconstitutional and that separate facilities were inherently unequal.

While fewer North Carolina schools have overwhelmingly white student bodies, more Black students are attending schools that are overwhelmingly made up of students of color, according to a study released this month by researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of California, Los Angeles.

During the 2021-22 school year, about 25% of Black students in North Carolina attended a school where the student body was overwhelmingly made up of students of color. That’s up from less than 10% during the 1989-90 school year.

And while white students are still more likely to attend schools that are mostly white, fewer are likely to attend schools that are overwhelmingly white — perhaps a reflection of the state’s diversifying population. During the 2021-22 school year, about 1.9% of white students attended schools that were overwhelmingly white. That’s down from 21.6% in 1989-90.

The researchers looked at schools that were “intensely segregated,” defining them as schools with enrollments of at least 90% students of color or at least 90% white students.

The changes are in part because of continued residential segregation, rising choices outside of the traditional school system and waning efforts to desegregate in the traditional public school system, researchers say. “Resegregation” of schools, then, is in part because of the loss of white students to other types of schools, like public charter schools.

“What we see in North Carolina is consistent with what’s happening in other parts of the nation,” said Jenn Ayscue, an assistant professor at N.C. State who is a co-author of the study, which focused specifically on North Carolina. “… In this last decade, it’s gotten even worse.”

The causes of the problem are often also out of the control of schools alone.

“Residential segregation has not gone anywhere in this country,” said Jerry Wilson, director of policy and advocacy at the Center for Racial Equity in Education (CREED), a Charlotte-based organization. “It remains and that’s the one that policymakers just seem unwilling to do much about. We’ve tinkered around with schools as a means of desegregating. But ultimately, our society and policymakers have proven unwilling to really address the heart of it, which is residential segregation.”

How segregated schools are can affect academic outcomes for the students who attend them, Ayscue said.

One of the reasons racial integration matters is that race often correlates with other meaningful demographic statistics, Ayscue said. In schools that were “intensely segregated” with students of color in 2021, 82.6% of the students were recipients of free or reduced-price lunch.

Students of color statewide comprise about 55% of the student population.

Ayscue said students tend to do better in schools where household incomes tend to be higher, although there are always outliers. More affluent schools tend to have fewer needs, more experienced teachers and less employee turnover. Research also shows benefits, she said.

“Students who attend integrated schools have higher levels of academic achievement, they have higher graduation rates, lower dropout rates,” Ayscue said. “there are also a number of non academic outcomes associated with integrated schools. Things like improved critical thinking and communication skills, reduction in prejudice and stereotypes, increased friendships across racial groups.

“Students who have attended integrated schools are more likely to live and work in integrated environments later in life. They have higher status and better paying jobs, and they have better health outcomes. So there really are a lot of benefits associated with attending well structured, integrated schools.”

Integration is better in more rural school districts, where there aren’t as many schools. A single town might have only one school that all students attend, Ayscue said.

What can be done

Ayscue and her fellow researchers recommend expanding magnet school programs or other methods of offering a “controlled choice” for families. Magnet schools are essentially normal public schools with extra programming that outside families can apply to attend. They typically take neighborhood students and outside applicants. Because of that mix, they often are more diverse than other nearby schools.

Magnet schools are relatively rare, mostly concentrated in urban and suburban areas. North Carolina has 226 magnet schools, located in 17 school systems. Nearly all of the magnet schools are in Wake, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Durham, Guilford, Winston-Salem/Forsyth and Cabarrus county school systems. The state has 115 school systems and more than 2,600 schools.

N.C. State’s researchers found some school systems are working to reduce segregation at their schools. Durham Public Schools next year will start its “Growing Together” student assignment plan, a heavily debated overhaul that creates subdistricts in which students can attend a neighborhood or magnet school and limits choice options across the system.

Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools is studying its enrollment and attendance trends before creating a student assignment policy that would attempt to increase socioeconomic diversity at the district’s schools.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that school boards cannot consider race when forming student assignment plans.

But taking socioeconomic factors into account when assigning students to schools is allowed. The Wake County Public School System has done that in the past, although less so in recent years.

Researchers in the past have credited the Wake school system’s approach with improving academic outcomes for students. But the school system in the past decade has lost hundreds of bus drivers, reducing its capacity to bus students very far out of their neighborhoods. About 15 years ago, the board faced resistance to busing students out of neighborhood schools and frequent reassignments that families said were disruptive, leading to the temporary ouster of many board members who supported the diversity-focused assignment plan.

Policymakers can make decisions that help integrate schools, said Corina De La Torre, manager of policy, research and community engagement at CREED.

“We have the right to a quality education, and therefore our policymakers should be doing all that they can to support that, that constitutional right,” De La Torre said. “If we have diverse schools, it’s allowing students to, to integrate with, with different cultures, different races, and different backgrounds.”

A separate study from Stanford University and the University of Southern California pointed to charter schools as a reason for the resegregation. Charter schools can often be heavily segregated — attracting mostly white families in suburban areas or attracting mostly families of color in urban areas. In North Carolina, charter schools tend to be whiter than the statewide average.

The demographics of charter schools have been shifting for several years to close to statewide averages. That’s in part because more of them are using weighted lotteries to admit students. Those lotteries give applicants more weight — and a greater likelihood of getting into the school — if the applicant is “educationally disadvantaged.”

But most schools don’t have weighted lotteries and charter schools are still more concentrated in urban areas, said Kris Nordstrom, a senior policy analyst with the Education & Law Project at the North Carolina Justice Center, which has been critical of charter schools. From what Nordstrom has researched, the demographic disparities between urban charter schools and the counties they are located in are more stark than when simply comparing statewide averages.

Charter schools can be a solution to segregation the problem by offering parents a choice if they’re worried their child’s education is subpar, said Rhonda Dillingham, executive director for the North Carolina Association of Public Charter Schools.

“Charter public schools believe that every student should have the chance to go to a school that puts their needs first, regardless of their zip code, income, or ability level,” Dillingham said in a statement to WRAL. “And charter schools are doing this work in communities across the state, helping all students learn by offering the personal attention, creativity, and passionate teaching that our kids deserve.”

But Wilson said segregation is often driven by choice, even residential segregation. He said white families often leave neighborhoods or schools that diversify.

Segregation and diversity trends could be affected by the expansion of Opportunity Scholarships, which are private school vouchers paid by the state. Lawmakers recently put hundreds of millions more dollars into them, expanded eligibility to all income levels and current private school students, and are considering putting hundreds of millions more into the program next year.

The impact on segregation of the expansion of the voucher program will be hard to measure, Ayscue said. Individual private schools don’t report their demographic data publicly. Demographic data are available on voucher recipients only on a statewide basis.