After "Brown"

The United States Supreme Court's 1954 landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education, set into motion a process of desegregation that would eventually transform American public schools. This book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of how Brown's most visible effect - contact between students of different racial groups - has changed over the fifty years since the decision. Using both published and unpublished data on school enrollments from across the country, Charles Clotfelter uses measures of interracial contact, racial isolation, and segregation to chronicle the changes. He goes beyond previous studies by drawing on heretofore unanalyzed enrollment data covering the first decade after Brown, calculating segregation for metropolitan areas rather than just school districts, accounting for private schools, presenting recent information on segregation within schools, and measuring segregation in college enrollment. Two main conclusions emerge. First, interracial contact in American schools and colleges increased markedly over the period, with the most dramatic changes occurring in the previously segregated South. Second, despite this change, four main factors prevented even larger increases: white reluctance to accept racially mixed schools, the multiplicity of options for avoiding such schools, the willingness of local officials to accommodate the wishes of reluctant whites, and the eventual loss of will on the part of those who had been the strongest protagonists in the push for desegregation. Thus decreases in segregation within districts were partially offset by growing disparities between districts and by selected increases in private school enrollment.

ISBN 0691126372   Pages 216 ISBN13 9780691126371 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Princeton University Press   Weight (grammes) 428 Imprint Princeton University Press   Published in New Jersey Format Paperback   Height (mm) 229 Publication date 27 Feb 2006   Width (mm) 152 Library of Congress LC214.2   Spine width (mm) 18 DEWEY 379.263   Academic level Professional / Scholarly, Tertiary education DEWEY edition DC22

List of Illustrations ix List of Tables xi Preface xv Introduction 1 Chapter One Walls Came Tumbling Down 13 Chapter Two The Legacies of Brown and Milliken 44 Chapter Three Residential Segregation and "White Flight" 75 Chapter Four The Private School Option 100 Chapter Five Inside Schools: Classrooms and School Activities 126 Chapter Six Higher Learning and the Color Line 148 Chapter Seven So What? 178 Methodological Appendix 201 Notes 217 References 245 Index 263