Housing and the justification of school segregation.

• Author: Orfield, Gary
• Position: Symposium - Shaping American Communities: Segregation, Housing & the Urban Poor

The intense attack on court-ordered busing rests largely on the public belief that the courts are artificially interfering with normal neighborhoods and communities. A central premise in the early Supreme Court decisions was, however, that the courts were attempting to correct violations with deep roots in both school and housing discrimination. When the Court later decided to limit and then to permit termination of desegregation, however, fundamentally different conclusions about housing were relied on--that housing segregation simply happened for some unknowable reason or that it was a natural force, separate from schools, that courts could do nothing about. The changing conception of housing, often reached with little or no empirical basis, has provided a principal grounds for judicial acceptance of segregated education.

To determine whether or not court-ordered desegregation in urban areas is needed, justifiable, and feasible, courts must reach decisions about urban residential segregation and its relationship to schools. The radical change in the Supreme Court's understanding of the relationship between school and housing segregation between the early 1970s and the 1974 Milliken v. Bradley(1) decision, which brought an end to significant increases in desegregation and locked in the isolation of minority students in the metropolitan North, provided a key element in the justification of a constitutional policy that made desegregation a right without a remedy in the metropolitan North, where virtually all major cities have large majorities of nonwhite students who attend segregated and inferior schools.

The Milliken decision, blocking desegregation in the North, and the 1991 and 1992 decisions, Board of Education v. Dowell(2) and Freeman v. Pitts,(3) permitting resegregation of southern school districts, rest to a considerable degree on court findings about housing segregation, theories that changed drastically as the courts moved from requiring all-out urban desegregation within school districts to approving local decisions to send children back to segregated schools. The changing description of housing and its relationship to schools provided a central intellectual justification for a sweeping reversal of legal conceptions.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s the Supreme Court set the clear policy that where there was unconstitutional segregation there must be full and immediate desegregation. This was the primary and urgent goal. In Milliken the Court provided no remedy or, worse, a counterproductive and very limited remedy for a clear constitutional violation, futilely trying to desegregate black children in an overwhelmingly black and rapidly changing city school district. The primary constitutional value became the autonomy of the suburban school districts rather than the correction of unconstitutional segregation. This shift was made possible by a theory of suburban innocence that excluded all discussion of how the Detroit suburbs came to be among the nation's most rigidly segregated in terms of housing and, therefore, in terms of schools.

Segregated urban school systems are built on a base of housing segregation. The vast differences between inner-city and suburban schools help determine where families with choices will live, as people moving to a new metropolitan area will almost immediately discover from realtors and relocation services. In many ways, the struggle over urban desegregation has been an effort to reverse some of the educational inequalities growing out of a comprehensive system of urban segregation including schools, housing, and employment. The system was rooted in a variety of public and private forms of discrimination that operated for many decades and have not been fundamentally changed by weak and very thinly enforced fair housing laws.

The Supreme Court's change in fundamental understanding of the role of housing in desegregation cases appeared suddenly between 1973 and 1974, and was consolidated in the decisions of the early 1990s. The new conclusions about housing radically oversimplify the issues. The previous findings were actually closer to the truth.

One of the most frequent findings in city school desegregation cases is that the school districts have located schools and drawn their attendance boundaries in ways that intensify segregation and undermine integrated schools and neighborhoods. The Supreme Court recognized the interaction of school and housing decisions in its first urban desegregation case, the 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education(4) decision:

The construction of new schools and the closing of old ones...