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

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

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.

The state and nation are more diverse now than in the 1990s. But while white students are now a minority of the state’s student traditional public school population, most white students still attend schools that are mostly white. At the same time, the average Black student attends schools that are disproportionately Black.

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 note. “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 North Carolina State University and co-author of one of the new studies that focused specifically on North Carolina. The study was done in partnership with the University of California-Los Angeles. “We did a similar report 10 years ago, and found that schools at that point were becoming more segregated. So 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, 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 recipient of free or reduced-price lunch.

Intensely segregated refers to schools that enrolled 90% to 100% students of color. 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.

During the 1989-90 school year, less than 10% of Black students attended a school that was intensely segregated with students of color. But during the 2021-22 school year, just under 30% of Black students did.

But white students are less likely now to attend schools that are intensely segregated with white students. During the 1989-90 school year, 21.6% of schools were intensely segregated with white students. But by 2021-22 school year, that was 1.9% of 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 can take shape a few different ways but 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 this year, 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.

NC State’s researchers found some school systems are working to reduce segregation at their schools. Durham Public Schools next year will start is “Growing Together” student assignment plan, a heavily debated major overhaul that creates sub-districts 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.

A national study from Stanford University and the University of Southern California pointed to charter schools are a reason for the resegregation. Charters 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 fo getting into the school — if the applicant is “educationally disadvantaged.” Charter schools create their own rules for weighted lotteries but must include more weight for low-income students.

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 left-learning 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.

The impact on segregation of the expansion of private school vouchers 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.