How a Fifty-Year-Old Supreme Court Decision Fuels School Segregation Today
This spring marked the seventieth anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. For all of its shortcomings and still unfulfilled promises, Brown set off a wave of school desegregation and civil rights legislation and continues to serve as a cornerstone for educational equity.
This summer marked a gloomier anniversary, fifty years since the decision in a less well known but highly influential case that also continues to shape the landscape of educational equity: Milliken v. Bradley. Whereas Brown set forth a promise of integration and equal educational opportunity that continues to serve as a beacon, Milliken severely limited the federal role for advancing that vision in ways that continue to fuel school segregation.
The Milliken Decision and Segregation across School District Borders
In 1970, the NAACP sued Michigan state officials over school segregation in the Detroit metro area. The plaintiffs argued that, even though there was not an explicit policy separating students by race, the way school district boundaries had been drawn separating Detroit city from the surrounding suburbs had unconstitutionally segregated Black students. The circuit court ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor, finding that the state, Detroit city schools, and the surrounding suburban school districts were all responsible for remedying the segregation. The judge ordered that state and local officials must implement a two-way interdistrict integration program that would help students to cross these boundaries, enrolling Black students from Detroit in suburban schools as well as White students from the suburbs in city schools, resulting in more racially diverse schools in both the city and the suburbs.
The state of Michigan appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, however, and when the Supreme Court issued their ruling in 1974, they reversed the decision. The Supreme Court said that, although the school district boundaries had the effect of segregating students, because they were not drawn with explicitly racial intent, they were not unconstitutional, and there could not be a federal role in remedying the segregation across district boundaries.
Detroit Free Press headline from July 26, 1974, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Milliken v. Bradley. Image source: newspapers.com
The Milliken decision was a devastating blow to school integration efforts, particularly in regions of the country outside the South where there were high levels of de facto segregation in schools as a result of how district and school zone boundaries had been drawn but no explicitly racial enrollment policies that would constitute de jure school segregation. As the plaintiffs in Milliken pointed out, the de facto school segregation was a clear result of de jure housing segregation, through policies such as racially restrictive covenants that prevented Black residents from buying homes in certain areas and racially segregated public housing. Nevertheless, the Milliken decision meant that many of these communities would be off the hook for addressing segregation.
Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote an impassioned dissent in the Milliken case, in which he saw how harmful this decision would be for educational equity. “The Court today takes a giant step backwards,” he wrote. School district boundaries should not be sacrosanct, he argued: “Under established and frequently used Michigan procedures, school district lines are both flexible and permeable for a wide variety of purposes, and there is no reason why they must now stand in the way of meaningful desegregation relief.” The Court’s decision to cut off federal action to address integration across those district lines, Justice Marshall predicted, would be disastrous:
We deal here with the right of all of our children, whatever their race, to an equal start in life and to an equal opportunity to reach their full potential as citizens. Those children who have been denied that right in the past deserve better than to see fences thrown up to deny them that right in the future. Our Nation, I fear, will be ill served by the Court’s refusal to remedy separate and unequal education, for unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together.
Milliken’s Legacy and Interdistrict Segregation Today
Fifty years after Justice Marshall’s prescient warning, the level of racial segregation in U.S. schools remains high, and economic segregation is increasing. Data from the Segregation Explorer, an interactive website from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, shows that across the country’s 100 largest school districts, segregation between Black and White students increased 64 percent since 1988 and segregation between lower-income and higher-income students increased by 50 percent since 1991.
Across the country’s 100 largest school districts, segregation between Black and White students increased 64 percent since 1988 and segregation between lower-income and higher-income students increased by 50 percent since 1991.
Much of this segregation occurs across school district boundaries. Working with researchers Ann Owens and Sean Reardon of the Segregation Explorer, TCF published an analysis and interactive map of school segregation for every metro area across the country in 2022. The map provides a breakdown of what percentage of school segregation in a metro area occurs across school district lines, and the challenge looks different depending on the area. In some rare cases, such as the Las Vegas–Henderson–Paradise metro area in Nevada, or Casper metro area in Wyoming, there is no inter-district segregation because the entire metro sits within a single school district. In other metro areas, such as the Rochester metro area in New York or the Reading metro area in Pennsylvania, over 90 percent of school segregation is interdistrict.
TCF’s interactive map of school segregation provides data for every metro area across the country, including a breakdown of what percentage of school segregation in each metro area occurs between public school districts.
Nationwide, segregation between public school districts is the biggest factor, by far, contributing to racial school segregation. On average across the country’s 403 metro areas, segregation between school districts accounts for 54 percent of the segregation between White students and non-White students in schools (see Figure 1). This means that even if every individual school district put in place strong plans to promote diversity across their schools and also found a way to eliminate the segregation that occurs between private and public schools, most school segregation would remain because of the district boundaries that drive it.
Figure 1
Interdistrict segregation is particularly high in the Northeast and Midwest, where communities are often fragmented into many different school districts. On average, 76 percent percent of school segregation in the Northeast and 69 percent in the Midwest is due to interdistrict segregation. As a point of comparison, New York State and Florida have roughly similar population sizes and land masses; however, Florida has only about 70 school districts, while New York State has more than 700. As a result, New York has small districts and high interdistrict segregation. The Century Foundation has published case studies of communities in New York that illustrate this problem, where a confluence of school and housing policies result in highly segregated schools and neighborhoods. For example, within Westchester County, Scarsdale Public Schools serves a student body with, shockingly, no low-income children at all (0 percent of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch), compared to a student body that is 75 percent low-income students in nearby Port Chester–Rye Union Free School District.
Interdistrict segregation in the South and West is a somewhat smaller factor, at 41 percent, and 45 percent, respectively. This is due in part to the fact that more of these states (like Florida) have a norm of countywide school districts, and larger districts capture more diverse populations and result in greater differences among schools within districts rather than between. But interdistrict segregation is still a real concern in these areas. Where I grew up, in Central Virginia, for example, my school district, Albemarle County Public Schools, is a donut-shaped district with a hole carved out for Charlottesville City, which has more low-income students and Black students (see Map 1). As of 2022, 59 percent of Albemarle County’s students were White, 16 percent Hispanic, 12 percent Black, 6 percent Asian, and 33 percent low-income (eligible for free lunch), while Charlottesville City’s student body was 41 percent White, 27 percent Black, 13 percent Hispanic, 6 percent Asian, and 64 percent low-income. In the wake of the White supremacist violence in Charlottesville in 2017, inequities in Charlottesville City Schools and persistent opportunity gaps for Black students have come under increased scrutiny—but typically overlooked in this conversation has been the role that the decision to separate Charlottesville City Schools from the surrounding county plays in limiting the flow of students and resources.
The segregation between Charlottesville and the surrounding county is not an aberration—there are plenty of other examples across the country. In fact, in the report and interactive map released by New America highlighting the most segregating school district boundaries in the United States, Charlottesville doesn’t even make the top 100.
The Path Forward
After the Milliken decision, there is little that can be done at the federal level to force changes in school district boundaries to promote integration, so the onus for tackling this massive challenge has fallen to states and local communities. While there is not a long list of success stories, there are examples of successful interdistrict integration efforts that point toward successful models.
Interdistrict Magnet Schools and Interdistrict Transfer Programs
One of the most successful interdistrict integration efforts in the country has taken place in the Hartford metro area in Connecticut. While Milliken shut off federal remedies for interdistrict segregation, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled in a state desegregation case, Sheff v. O’Neill, that the urban–suburban school district boundaries in the Hartford area were unconstitutional because of this segregation they caused. The result over many years has been the creation of a robust network of interdistrict magnet schools as well as open choice enrollment across school district boundaries that together have expanded Hartford City students’ access to integrated schools from just 11 percent of students to nearly half of all students.
Students in Hartford magnet schools.
Interdistrict Charter Schools
Charter schools can also be tools for enrolling students across districts to promote integration. Blackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academy (BVP) in Rhode Island is a charter school network that was established with this purpose in mind, serving two urban and two suburban communities and creating a racially economically mixed school community that is more diverse than any of the sending districts. BVP was recently a recipient of the new federal Fostering Diverse Schools grant to further this work. While the federal government cannot force communities to change school district lines, this recently created grant program is an example of how the federal government can still use an incentive-based approach, offering funding for community-developed integration plans, with a competitive priority for interdistrict work.
Source: Blackstone Valley Prep. A classroom at Blackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academy, an intentionally integrated interdistrict charter school network in Rhode Island.
District Consolidation
Combining school districts is also an effective though rare way of promoting integration. In fact, one of the few examples of this strategy dates back to 1971—three years before the Milliken decision. In that year, the New Jersey state commissioner of education ordered the merger of two neighboring school districts with different demographics, Morris Township and Morristown, to create the combined Morris School District. To this day, Morris School District’s individual schools are highly reflective of the diversity of the overall community and the district has maintained a commitment to pushing on equity within its schools.
The Challenge of Local Action
School districts are the primary unit of decision-making for school enrollment decisions, but policy solutions are hard for school districts to enact on their own, by virtue of the fact that interdistrict integration requires coordination by multiple districts. The Milwaukee metro area is a prime example of this challenge. Metro Milwaukee has the number one highest level of White–Black segregation in its schools of any metro area in the country, and two-thirds of this segregation occurs between school districts. Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) joined The Century Foundation’s Bridges Collaborative, a group that brings together school districts, charter networks, and housing organizations to promote integration in their schools and communities, in large part because they were aware of the challenge that this interdistrict segregation poses. Bridges collaborative and MPS hosted a convening of district leaders from surrounding suburban school districts in 2022 to discuss strategies for promoting integration. While there was receptiveness among different districts, without a coordinating state role or resources to support work, getting an interdistrict integration plan off the ground still feels like a far-off goal.
In 2022, Milwaukee Public Schools and The Century Foundation’s Bridges Collaborative convened teams of leaders from MPS and surrounding suburban school districts to discuss strategies for addressing interdistrict segregation.
The Role for States
Given the need to coordinate across school districts, and the ways that Milliken has shackled the federal government, states ultimately hold the best power for addressing interdistrict segregation today. The Century Foundation’s Bridges Collaborative has joined other organizations and researchers in a community of practice hosted by the organization Brown’s Promise to develop a policy agenda for fulfilling the promise of Brown v. Board to both promote integrated learning spaces and ensure resource equity, with a particular focus on the role of states. States can implement programs, such as magnet schools and interdistrict transfer programs, that allow students to enroll across school district lines, but they also hold the power to change school district lines altogether, and to revise school funding formulas to promote regional or statewide revenue rather than local funding.
What would have happened if the U.S. Supreme Court had decided differently in Milliken? Maybe we would not have over 120 different school districts across just the two counties that make up Long Island, New York; or perhaps there would be a robust system for interdistrict enrollment and transportation so that students could easily enroll across district lines. Maybe the county where I grew up would not be a donut district with Charlottesville City carved out, but instead a unified city–county district sharing students and resources. It is frustrating that a promising federal lever for making these changes was taken off the table in Milliken, but the work of states as well as pioneering districts and schools can still make a difference—and we cannot afford not to try. If we merely take for granted the way that our district boundaries segregate schools, we are failing to address the biggest factor in school segregation today.
Halley Potter is a senior fellow and director of PK-12 education policy at The Century Foundation, where she researches public policy solutions for addressing educational inequality.
How a Fifty-Year-Old Supreme Court Decision Fuels School Segregation Today
This spring marked the seventieth anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. For all of its shortcomings and still unfulfilled promises, Brown set off a wave of school desegregation and civil rights legislation and continues to serve as a cornerstone for educational equity.
This summer marked a gloomier anniversary, fifty years since the decision in a less well known but highly influential case that also continues to shape the landscape of educational equity: Milliken v. Bradley. Whereas Brown set forth a promise of integration and equal educational opportunity that continues to serve as a beacon, Milliken severely limited the federal role for advancing that vision in ways that continue to fuel school segregation.
The Milliken Decision and Segregation across School District Borders
In 1970, the NAACP sued Michigan state officials over school segregation in the Detroit metro area. The plaintiffs argued that, even though there was not an explicit policy separating students by race, the way school district boundaries had been drawn separating Detroit city from the surrounding suburbs had unconstitutionally segregated Black students. The circuit court ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor, finding that the state, Detroit city schools, and the surrounding suburban school districts were all responsible for remedying the segregation. The judge ordered that state and local officials must implement a two-way interdistrict integration program that would help students to cross these boundaries, enrolling Black students from Detroit in suburban schools as well as White students from the suburbs in city schools, resulting in more racially diverse schools in both the city and the suburbs.
The state of Michigan appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, however, and when the Supreme Court issued their ruling in 1974, they reversed the decision. The Supreme Court said that, although the school district boundaries had the effect of segregating students, because they were not drawn with explicitly racial intent, they were not unconstitutional, and there could not be a federal role in remedying the segregation across district boundaries.
Detroit Free Press headline from July 26, 1974, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Milliken v. Bradley. Image source: newspapers.com
The Milliken decision was a devastating blow to school integration efforts, particularly in regions of the country outside the South where there were high levels of de facto segregation in schools as a result of how district and school zone boundaries had been drawn but no explicitly racial enrollment policies that would constitute de jure school segregation. As the plaintiffs in Milliken pointed out, the de facto school segregation was a clear result of de jure housing segregation, through policies such as racially restrictive covenants that prevented Black residents from buying homes in certain areas and racially segregated public housing. Nevertheless, the Milliken decision meant that many of these communities would be off the hook for addressing segregation.
Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote an impassioned dissent in the Milliken case, in which he saw how harmful this decision would be for educational equity. “The Court today takes a giant step backwards,” he wrote. School district boundaries should not be sacrosanct, he argued: “Under established and frequently used Michigan procedures, school district lines are both flexible and permeable for a wide variety of purposes, and there is no reason why they must now stand in the way of meaningful desegregation relief.” The Court’s decision to cut off federal action to address integration across those district lines, Justice Marshall predicted, would be disastrous:
We deal here with the right of all of our children, whatever their race, to an equal start in life and to an equal opportunity to reach their full potential as citizens. Those children who have been denied that right in the past deserve better than to see fences thrown up to deny them that right in the future. Our Nation, I fear, will be ill served by the Court’s refusal to remedy separate and unequal education, for unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together.
Milliken’s Legacy and Interdistrict Segregation Today
Fifty years after Justice Marshall’s prescient warning, the level of racial segregation in U.S. schools remains high, and economic segregation is increasing. Data from the Segregation Explorer, an interactive website from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, shows that across the country’s 100 largest school districts, segregation between Black and White students increased 64 percent since 1988 and segregation between lower-income and higher-income students increased by 50 percent since 1991.
Much of this segregation occurs across school district boundaries. Working with researchers Ann Owens and Sean Reardon of the Segregation Explorer, TCF published an analysis and interactive map of school segregation for every metro area across the country in 2022. The map provides a breakdown of what percentage of school segregation in a metro area occurs across school district lines, and the challenge looks different depending on the area. In some rare cases, such as the Las Vegas–Henderson–Paradise metro area in Nevada, or Casper metro area in Wyoming, there is no inter-district segregation because the entire metro sits within a single school district. In other metro areas, such as the Rochester metro area in New York or the Reading metro area in Pennsylvania, over 90 percent of school segregation is interdistrict.
TCF’s interactive map of school segregation provides data for every metro area across the country, including a breakdown of what percentage of school segregation in each metro area occurs between public school districts.
Nationwide, segregation between public school districts is the biggest factor, by far, contributing to racial school segregation. On average across the country’s 403 metro areas, segregation between school districts accounts for 54 percent of the segregation between White students and non-White students in schools (see Figure 1). This means that even if every individual school district put in place strong plans to promote diversity across their schools and also found a way to eliminate the segregation that occurs between private and public schools, most school segregation would remain because of the district boundaries that drive it.
Figure 1
Interdistrict segregation is particularly high in the Northeast and Midwest, where communities are often fragmented into many different school districts. On average, 76 percent percent of school segregation in the Northeast and 69 percent in the Midwest is due to interdistrict segregation. As a point of comparison, New York State and Florida have roughly similar population sizes and land masses; however, Florida has only about 70 school districts, while New York State has more than 700. As a result, New York has small districts and high interdistrict segregation. The Century Foundation has published case studies of communities in New York that illustrate this problem, where a confluence of school and housing policies result in highly segregated schools and neighborhoods. For example, within Westchester County, Scarsdale Public Schools serves a student body with, shockingly, no low-income children at all (0 percent of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch), compared to a student body that is 75 percent low-income students in nearby Port Chester–Rye Union Free School District.
Interdistrict segregation in the South and West is a somewhat smaller factor, at 41 percent, and 45 percent, respectively. This is due in part to the fact that more of these states (like Florida) have a norm of countywide school districts, and larger districts capture more diverse populations and result in greater differences among schools within districts rather than between. But interdistrict segregation is still a real concern in these areas. Where I grew up, in Central Virginia, for example, my school district, Albemarle County Public Schools, is a donut-shaped district with a hole carved out for Charlottesville City, which has more low-income students and Black students (see Map 1). As of 2022, 59 percent of Albemarle County’s students were White, 16 percent Hispanic, 12 percent Black, 6 percent Asian, and 33 percent low-income (eligible for free lunch), while Charlottesville City’s student body was 41 percent White, 27 percent Black, 13 percent Hispanic, 6 percent Asian, and 64 percent low-income. In the wake of the White supremacist violence in Charlottesville in 2017, inequities in Charlottesville City Schools and persistent opportunity gaps for Black students have come under increased scrutiny—but typically overlooked in this conversation has been the role that the decision to separate Charlottesville City Schools from the surrounding county plays in limiting the flow of students and resources.
The segregation between Charlottesville and the surrounding county is not an aberration—there are plenty of other examples across the country. In fact, in the report and interactive map released by New America highlighting the most segregating school district boundaries in the United States, Charlottesville doesn’t even make the top 100.
The Path Forward
After the Milliken decision, there is little that can be done at the federal level to force changes in school district boundaries to promote integration, so the onus for tackling this massive challenge has fallen to states and local communities. While there is not a long list of success stories, there are examples of successful interdistrict integration efforts that point toward successful models.
Interdistrict Magnet Schools and Interdistrict Transfer Programs
One of the most successful interdistrict integration efforts in the country has taken place in the Hartford metro area in Connecticut. While Milliken shut off federal remedies for interdistrict segregation, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled in a state desegregation case, Sheff v. O’Neill, that the urban–suburban school district boundaries in the Hartford area were unconstitutional because of this segregation they caused. The result over many years has been the creation of a robust network of interdistrict magnet schools as well as open choice enrollment across school district boundaries that together have expanded Hartford City students’ access to integrated schools from just 11 percent of students to nearly half of all students.
Students in Hartford magnet schools.
Interdistrict Charter Schools
Charter schools can also be tools for enrolling students across districts to promote integration. Blackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academy (BVP) in Rhode Island is a charter school network that was established with this purpose in mind, serving two urban and two suburban communities and creating a racially economically mixed school community that is more diverse than any of the sending districts. BVP was recently a recipient of the new federal Fostering Diverse Schools grant to further this work. While the federal government cannot force communities to change school district lines, this recently created grant program is an example of how the federal government can still use an incentive-based approach, offering funding for community-developed integration plans, with a competitive priority for interdistrict work.
Source: Blackstone Valley Prep. A classroom at Blackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academy, an intentionally integrated interdistrict charter school network in Rhode Island.
District Consolidation
Combining school districts is also an effective though rare way of promoting integration. In fact, one of the few examples of this strategy dates back to 1971—three years before the Milliken decision. In that year, the New Jersey state commissioner of education ordered the merger of two neighboring school districts with different demographics, Morris Township and Morristown, to create the combined Morris School District. To this day, Morris School District’s individual schools are highly reflective of the diversity of the overall community and the district has maintained a commitment to pushing on equity within its schools.
The Challenge of Local Action
School districts are the primary unit of decision-making for school enrollment decisions, but policy solutions are hard for school districts to enact on their own, by virtue of the fact that interdistrict integration requires coordination by multiple districts. The Milwaukee metro area is a prime example of this challenge. Metro Milwaukee has the number one highest level of White–Black segregation in its schools of any metro area in the country, and two-thirds of this segregation occurs between school districts. Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) joined The Century Foundation’s Bridges Collaborative, a group that brings together school districts, charter networks, and housing organizations to promote integration in their schools and communities, in large part because they were aware of the challenge that this interdistrict segregation poses. Bridges collaborative and MPS hosted a convening of district leaders from surrounding suburban school districts in 2022 to discuss strategies for promoting integration. While there was receptiveness among different districts, without a coordinating state role or resources to support work, getting an interdistrict integration plan off the ground still feels like a far-off goal.
In 2022, Milwaukee Public Schools and The Century Foundation’s Bridges Collaborative convened teams of leaders from MPS and surrounding suburban school districts to discuss strategies for addressing interdistrict segregation.
The Role for States
Given the need to coordinate across school districts, and the ways that Milliken has shackled the federal government, states ultimately hold the best power for addressing interdistrict segregation today. The Century Foundation’s Bridges Collaborative has joined other organizations and researchers in a community of practice hosted by the organization Brown’s Promise to develop a policy agenda for fulfilling the promise of Brown v. Board to both promote integrated learning spaces and ensure resource equity, with a particular focus on the role of states. States can implement programs, such as magnet schools and interdistrict transfer programs, that allow students to enroll across school district lines, but they also hold the power to change school district lines altogether, and to revise school funding formulas to promote regional or statewide revenue rather than local funding.
What would have happened if the U.S. Supreme Court had decided differently in Milliken? Maybe we would not have over 120 different school districts across just the two counties that make up Long Island, New York; or perhaps there would be a robust system for interdistrict enrollment and transportation so that students could easily enroll across district lines. Maybe the county where I grew up would not be a donut district with Charlottesville City carved out, but instead a unified city–county district sharing students and resources. It is frustrating that a promising federal lever for making these changes was taken off the table in Milliken, but the work of states as well as pioneering districts and schools can still make a difference—and we cannot afford not to try. If we merely take for granted the way that our district boundaries segregate schools, we are failing to address the biggest factor in school segregation today.
Tags: school diversity, segregation, school segregation