DECATUR, Ark. — When Ashlyn Siebert started looking last year for teaching jobs near Decatur — her rural hometown — she knew she wouldn’t make as much as a first-year teacher would 16 miles away in Bentonville, home to Walmart’s headquarters.

The story was the same in dozens of other small towns across Arkansas. If teachers wanted to earn more, they had to move to a bigger school district. In Decatur, teachers with a bachelor’s degree made a starting salary of $36,000. Even if they taught in schools for 25 years, they would still earn less than teachers right out of college in Bentonville, who were making $48,755 a year.

But Siebert’s timing was good. In the span of 15 days in early 2023, the state legislature passed a massive education bill, which went into effect that fall. When Siebert ultimately signed a contract to teach in Decatur for the 2023-24 school year, the starting salary had jumped to $50,000. It’s been a huge help at a time when the cost of living has swelled, Siebert said.

“I think it’s a good way to draw people into the profession, especially if it’s something they already knew they wanted to do but were held back by the salary,” she said.

But the new law has had a mixed reception.

School leaders said the pay jump has made it much easier to attract teachers to small rural school districts like Decatur, where salaries had not kept up with inflation. However,  the law — called the LEARNS Act —  also got rid of mandated annual raises. And it’s caused tension among veteran teachers, many of whom had to work for two decades to come close to making $50,000 annually. Because of the new law, in more than half of the state’s school districts, every teacher made the same salary this year, regardless of years of experience.

It is the largest state investment in teacher salaries in Arkansas history, a big deal in a state that ranked 48th in the country for starting pay up until this year. The law in Arkansas is one of nearly two dozen similar measures in states around the country that have been proposed or passed in the last few years. Most, like the Arkansas law, aim to address staffing shortages. Just north of Arkansas, Missouri passed its own version of the LEARNS Act this year. The state boosted teacher pay to $40,000 among other, more controversial provisions, including an expansion of its voucher program.

Decatur sits in the northwest corner of Arkansas, surrounded by farmland and in the heart of poultry country. Outside of the school system, most people in Decatur work either in the chicken processing plant a few minutes out of town or they raise chickens to sell to the plant, Siebert said. About 80 percent of the nearly 600 students in the school district qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a federal measure of poverty.

Decatur is near some of the state’s biggest school districts: Springdale, Fayetteville and Bentonville. A year ago, schools in those cities could afford to pay a first-year teacher between $48,000 and $50,282, depending on the district.

Because of that pay gap, between 30 and 40 percent of teachers in Decatur were leaving each year, Decatur School District Superintendent Steven Watkins said.

“We would hire new teachers out of college and keep them three years, until they weren’t novice anymore, and then the bigger schools would hire them,” Watkins said. “There was a huge discrepancy in the money.”

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This year, teacher turnover in the district dropped to about 10 percent. Watkins credits the salary increase and the district’s decision to move to a four-day school week next year. “I can say out of the ones we’ve lost this year, none of them have been because of the money,” Watkins said.

Since the passage of the LEARNS Act, the district’s applicant pool has been larger and of higher quality, Watkins said. A high school teaching position in Decatur that would have received one or two applicants in the past had more than a dozen this year. The same was true in similar districts. Guy-Perkins, a small school district in central Arkansas with just over 300 students, typically saw three to four applicants depending on the position. This year, the district received 15 applications for a single teaching position at the elementary school.

It’s still too soon to say how much the law will impact future teacher recruitment and retention, according to researchers at the University of Arkansas. A study of teachers entering and exiting schools just before the 2023-24 school year showed modest improvements, at best, but that could be because the law passed in March, when many teachers had likely already made up their mind about the next school year. Because of legal challenges to the LEARNS Act that have since been dismissed, there was also a degree of uncertainty about whether it would actually be implemented, the researchers said. An important litmus test will be the law’s impact on teachers with several years of experience, which research has shown is correlated with classroom effectiveness.

“We cannot say conclusively,” said Gema Zamarro, a professor at the university who co-authored the study. “We have to wait and see.”

But there have already been some unexpected consequences to the new law. While the pay boost may have helped the front-end of the teacher pipeline in small rural schools, the effect on veteran teachers at the top end of salary schedules was less pronounced. The law guaranteed that educators who made close to or more than $50,000 could receive a $2,000 one-time salary increase. That meant in 55 percent of the state’s school districts this year, there was no reward for years of experience or, in many of those districts, advanced degrees. Educators with two decades in the classroom are earning the same salary as their peers who just graduated college. Before the law, teachers made less money but were guaranteed a raise of a few hundred dollars a year for at least 15 years, and teachers with advanced degrees had a higher pay scale.

Related: When schools experimented with pay hikes for teachers in hard-to-staff areas, the results were surprising

“It’s a little frustrating when the guy next door to you has a year and he’s making the same amount as you are,” said Decatur teacher Rebecca McElhannon, who has a master’s degree and 17 years of experience. “Any recognition that we need more pay is amazing, but it could have been more fair.”

A single mother with a teenager, McElhannon occasionally drives for DoorDash and picks up shifts doing concessions at the Fayetteville ballparks to make a little extra money. But she did see some benefits from the law. After the raise, her salary went from a little more than $48,000 to just over $50,000 this year — a pay boost that would have taken her four years to get on the previous salary model.

In Mayflower, a small school district of just under 1,000 students between Little Rock and Conway, kindergarten teacher Kristin Allbritton and third grade teacher Karen Wilson know their years of experience have made them better teachers. The legislation sent them a different message.

“I know I’m valued here,” said Allbritton, who has taught in Mayflower for 15 years. “But feeling, as a professional, valued from this legislation? Yeah, no.”

According to the district’s current salary schedule, both Allbritton and Wilson will continue to make $50,000 until they retire.

“No one has ever become a teacher to gain financially,” said Wilson, who has taught in Mayflower for 19 years, “but at the same time, financial gain is why you work, period. Right? It’s why you work. We can’t put teachers in a box and say, ‘Well, you don’t do it for the money.’ You still have to earn money; you still have to live. It’s hard to watch when teachers are trying to balance all of those feelings and make decisions for what’s best for them.”

From a strategy perspective, it makes sense for a state to focus on improving pay for early career teachers, said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research.

“The attrition rate for first-year teachers in some districts can be 20 or 30 percent, and the attrition rate for somebody who has been teaching for 10 or 15 years is going to be very low — more like 3 or 4 percent,” Goldhaber said. “So, if you’re trying to change salaries to affect teacher attrition, you’re working off a much larger number at the beginning of a career.”

To try and offer some level of raises above $50,000, some small schools have added tiny increases to their budgets. Guy-Perkins approved a $150 annual raise for its teachers every year for up to 16 years. In Mayflower, a teacher with a bachelor’s degree and 15 graduate credit hours could increase their salary by $500 in their 22nd year of teaching.

Because the LEARNS Act funding is only guaranteed for the next two years and only pays for the current teacher workforce, leaders in smaller school districts are cautious about adding annual raises to their own budgets. According to a University of Arkansas survey, most school leaders said they were somewhat or very likely to increase pay by a flat percent in the next few years. But uncertainty over state funding was the top reason superintendents gave for why their district might not change salaries.

Related: Arkansas schools hire untrained teachers as people lose interest in the profession

The LEARNS Act does include a merit-based bonus for “effective” teachers at the end of the school year, but the rules have yet to be finalized on what “effective” looks like or exactly how much teachers will get. And district leaders have concerns about that, too, fearing that providing meaningful evaluations for every teacher each year will be too time-consuming, according to the Arkansas Times.

Some districts, like Mayflower, include small steps after several years for teachers with advanced degrees, but others don’t. The law is likely to impact graduate teaching programs throughout the state, said April Reisma, president of the Arkansas Education Association. “If you’re not going to get rewarded for going to get advanced degrees, why would you bother?” Reisma said.

Will Benight, a special education teacher in Guy-Perkins, put it this way in emails he sent to legislators: When is the state going to refund him for his master’s degree?

“I mean, seeing as how it’s pointless now, I think it would be fair to know,” said Benight, who said he would return the $6,000 raise he got this year if it meant getting rid of the LEARNS Act.

Along with de-incentivizing advanced degrees, teachers and administrators have raised concerns about other provisions in the wide-ranging law, which spans 144 pages and touches on almost every corner of education policy, including a private school voucher program, a third grade reading retention requirement and a ban on critical race theory and “indoctrination.” The legislation also made it easier for districts to fire teachers, among other changes.

The costs of some of the new policies are not covered by the state, heightening school leaders’ concerns about the long-term sustainability of funding these changes. Teachers whose salaries are paid with federal money didn’t factor into the state’s calculations. Schools with higher levels of students in poverty typically have more federally funded positions such as school social workers and early intervention specialists. Guy-Perkins had to cover the cost of the pay bump to $50,000 for positions such as dyslexia specialist and school counselor.

“I’m just trying to get my bearings straight. There is so much change all at once,” said Joe Fisher, superintendent of Guy-Perkins.

And while the salary raises gave rural schools an edge that has enabled them to better compete for teachers, larger districts have already responded with their own updated salaries. In Springdale next year, a first-year teacher will make $53,600. In Bentonville, the starting salary is $54,424. The pay gap between districts will likely grow wider over time.

Andy Chisum, the Mayflower superintendent, isn’t optimistic. “In 10 years,” he said, “you’re probably going to have that $10,000 gap again.”

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Linda Brown was a third grader in Topeka, Kansas, when her father, Oliver Brown, tried to enroll her in the white public school four blocks from her home. Otherwise, she would have had to walk across railroad tracks to take a bus to attend the nearest all-Black one.

When she was denied admission, Oliver Brown sued.

The case, and four others from Delaware, the District of Columbia, South Carolina and Virginia were combined and made their way to the Supreme Court. All of them involved school children required to attend all-Black schools that were of lower quality than schools for white children.

While the Supreme Court found in 1954 in Oliver Brown’s favor, years would pass before desegregation  of American schools began in earnest. And for many Black students now, 70 years since the nation’s highest court held unanimously that separate is inherently unequal, educational resources and access remain woefully uneven.

Here are some of the racial realities of American public education today:

25: That’s the percentage increase in Black-white school segregation between 1991 and 2019, according to an analysis of 533 districts by sociologists Sean Reardon at Stanford University and Ann Owens at the University of Southern California. While school segregation fell dramatically beginning in 1968 with a series of court orders, it began to tick up in the early 1990s because of the expiration of court orders mandating integration, school choice policies, and other factors. Still, schools remain significantly less segregated than they did before and immediately after the Brown decision.

10: That’s the proportion of Black students learning in a school where more than 90 percent of their classmates were also Black, according to 2022 Department of Education data. That figure is down from 23 percent in 2000. Even as Black-white school segregation has increased slightly since the early 1990s, the number of extremely segregated schools has shrunk, in part because of an increase in the Hispanic student population. Meanwhile, from 2000 to 2022, the percentage of white students attending a school that is 90 percent or more white fell from 44 percent to 14 percent.

6: This is the percentage of teachers in American public schools who are Black. By comparison, Black students make up about 15 percent of public school enrollment. One legacy of Brown v. Boardis the dearth of  Black teachers: More than 38,000 Black educators lost their jobs after the decision came down, as white administrators of integrating schools refused to hire Black professionals for teaching roles or pushed them out. Yet research suggests that more Black teachers in the classroom can help boost Black student outcomes such as college enrollment.

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2014: That’s the year that Wilcox County High School, in rural Georgia, held its first school-sponsored, racially integrated prom. After desegregation, parents in the community, like many across the South, began organizing private, off-site proms to keep the events exclusively white. That practice persisted in Wilcox County until 2013, when high schoolers organized a prom for both white and Black students. The next year, the school made it official, finally holding an integrated event.

$14,385: This is the average amount spent per Black pupil in public school, compared with $14,263 per white student, according to a 2022 analysis of 2017-18 data by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The researchers found that while school district spending was very similar for Black and white students, the sources of funding differed somewhat, with Black students receiving more federal funding and white students receiving more local funding. The amount of money spent on instruction per pupil, meanwhile, was slightly lower for Black students – $7,169 – than for white students ($7,329). The researchers attributed that to a number of small, predominantly white districts that spent far above average on their students.

7: That’s the share of incoming students at the University of Mississippi who were Black in 2022 — even though nearly half the state’s public high school graduates, 48 percent, were Black that year. That gap between Black students graduating from high school in Mississippi and those enrolling at the state flagship university has grown over the past decade, according to a Hechinger analysis. Similar trends are playing out elsewhere in the country: In 2022, 16 state flagship universities had a gap of 10 percentage points or more between Black high school graduates and incoming freshmen. And at two dozen flagships, the gap for Black students stayed the same or grew between 2019 and 2022. Yet public flagships were created to educate the residents of their states, and most make that explicit.

700: That’s roughly how many high schools are offering the College Board’s Advanced Placement African American Studies course this school year, more than 10 times as many that offered it a year earlier, when it debuted. The course was created in part in response to longstanding concerns that African American history has been downplayed or left out of K-12 curriculum. But the A.P. course, an elective, became ensnared in politics. The content has evolved after criticism that it introduced students to “divisive concepts,” among other reasons; it has been banned or restricted in some states. Nevertheless, about 13,000 students are enrolled in this second year of the pilot course, which took more than 10 years to develop. Forty-five percent of students taking the class had never previously taken another AP course, which can earn them college credit.

This story about Brown v. Board of Education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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Seventy years ago this month, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, rejecting legal racial segregation of public schools. The decision appeared to pave the way for equal educational opportunities for every child and integrated classrooms where students from all backgrounds could prepare to thrive in their communities, careers and lives.

Yet our progress toward integration stalled and is now backsliding, even as our communities and workforce grow evermore diverse. And we’ve failed to achieve equity on just about every metric of access to educational opportunity.

In the 1954 decision, the justices declared that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” They also called education “the most important function of state and local governments,” the “very foundation of good citizenship” and “a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values [and] in preparing him for later professional training.”

Seven decades later, those words ring truer than ever. The link between education and economic opportunity has only increased. And our democracy is desperately in need of shared knowledge and understanding across cultural, racial, economic and geographic lines.

But the tragic reality is that our schools are still segregated, and separate is still unequal. Educational resources remain correlated to the whiteness of a school or district’s student body. I spent nearly two decades of my career working to change that equation: to shift funding and other crucial resources toward schools that disproportionately serve Black and Latino students, students from lower-income communities and other groups of students who have historically been denied equal opportunity.

Now I’ve come to believe that in a country shaped by centuries of systemic racism and structural inequality, we will never find the political will to achieve true funding equity at scale so long as schools remain highly segregated.

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It’s a hard truth that, in America, green still follows white. So, until our children all sit together, the odds are long that we’ll fairly fund allour schools.

One thing we have seen work at scale? Integration. In the wake of Brown, court-ordered desegregation increased high school graduation rates for Black students by 30 percent and decreased poverty rates by 22 percent. Integration works for Latino students too. Due to desegregation after Mendez v. Westminster, a different lawsuit in California, Mexican American students’ graduation rates rose by over 19 percent.

These were big, life-changing results with intergenerational effects for families.

None of this is to say that the early attempts at integration were perfect; far from it. Too often, the brunt of those efforts was borne by Black communities in the form of long commutes, isolation, discrimination, educator job losses and outright racist intimidation.

The political backlash against desegregation left a lasting impression on a generation of leaders and advocates; that backlash at least partially explains why so many in the education field have turned their backs on integration as an equity strategy.

But while we must not repeat the mistakes of past desegregation efforts, we cannot afford to turn our backs on integration.

Our understanding of what makes for successful and inclusive integration has evolved tremendously since the early days of desegregation. We know now, to take just one example, that a truly integrated school must include both diverse students and diverse educators.

The political landscape is shifting. In a recent nationwide poll, our nonprofit, Brown’s Promise, found that 71 percent of American adults — including strong majorities across racial groups — favor “re-organizing school districts to have more racially and economically diverse student bodies and providing more resources to the school districts that serve students who need the most help.”

Just 12 percent oppose.

The overwhelming and, for some, surprising support reflects a growing realization that diverse classrooms benefit all children by preparing them for the real world and the workplaces they will face as adults.

And it reflects what we are hearing at Brown’s Promise when we revisit this 70-year-old conversation with community-based partners in states across the country: curiosity about the way invisible district lines segregate children and lead to unfair school funding practices and interest in what we can do differently.

As we approach this milestone anniversary, I am feeling inspired by these conversations with families and community leaders.

Our task now is to harness that support and recommit to real action toward realizing Brown’s promise by rethinking school and district lines that have separated children from each other for far too long.

The specifics of that action will vary from community to community based on local context, but some examples include: creating interdistrict transfer programs; investing in magnet schools to attract students of all racial, ethnic, linguistic and socioeconomic backgrounds; fostering school pairings, in which two highly segregated neighborhood elementary schools unite to create a single, integrated school; and consolidating small, gerrymandered school districts into larger, more diverse, countywide districts.

Related: PROOF POINTS: 5 takeaways about segregation 70 years after the Brown decision

Any of these actions must be paired with additional measures to fully and fairly fund public schools and to ensure positive student experiences for all students — especially for students of color in primarily white environments.

None of this will be easy; it never has been. But there are clear paths forward that we can forge together. And if we don’t try, we’ll still be sitting here in another 70 years reflecting on the lack of progress since Brown.

Ary Amerikaner is co-founder and executive director of Brown’s Promise, an organization housed at the Southern Education Foundation and dedicated to achieving educational equity. She served as deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education from 2015 to 2017

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Even as we approach the 70th anniversary of Brown vs. Board this May, key parts of its history remain buried. Reporting has begun to engage with some of the lost, and often complex, aspects of Brown’s legacy, such as the mass firing of Black educators following the Brown decision.

At least one critical piece, however, still remains largely unknown: NAACP lawyers submitted a letter with evidence about segregation’s impact on white students as well as Black students.

In the letter, signed by more than 30 social scientists, Thurgood Marshall and his team at the NAACP warned that, in addition to its more well-known harms to Black educational opportunity, segregation also has detrimental effects on white children.

If school integration is going to reach its full potential — for schools and for democracy in general — we should take a close look at this neglected letter and its chilling resonances with contemporary society. The letter notes that “segregation imposes upon individuals a distorted sense of social reality” that can take shape in different ways for white students.

As we approach a milestone for Brown, let’s seize this opportunity to recommit to one of its primary goals: integrated public schools as “the very foundation of good citizenship.”

This requires thinking about Brown more expansively than we have in the past. Thinking of school integration not as an individual benefit for one group of students but as an essential component of a healthy multicultural democracy.

Related: Any educational reform that ignores segregation is doomed to failure

Indeed, research clearly illustrates that white students in diverse schools gain social awareness and intercultural understanding among other benefits. In a recent study, my colleagues at the University of Massachusetts and I compared white students in segregated white schools with those in racially diverse schools. We found that the latter reported higher levels of civic engagement and a sense of belonging.

This is just one example in a long history of social science research that connects racial contact to enhanced participation in a diverse democracy — including increased sociocultural empathy and reduced belief in stereotypes.

The NAACP letter warns that those on the top of a social hierarchy can experience “confusion, conflict [and] moral cynicism” when trying to reconcile a contradiction between the stated “importance of justice and fair play by the same persons and institutions who, in their support of racial segregation and related practices, seem to be acting in a prejudiced and discriminatory manner.”

It notes that those majority members, in their effort to make sense of this apparent paradox, may “develop patterns of guilt feelings” or embrace “rigid stereotypes.”

Others may “attempt to resolve this conflict by intensifying their hostility toward the minority group,” the letter notes.

And in perhaps its most prophetic line, the letter warns that racial hostility is often accompanied by an “uncritical idealization of all authority figures” and “the development of a social climate within which violent outbreaks of racial tensions are likely to occur.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s for good reason. And it’s deeply troubling. Consider the recent steady rise of hate incidents that the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled the “Trump effect.”

The former president’s current campaign is even more explicit in its embrace of racial stereotypes and dictatorial rule.

Surely, part of Trump’s support is connected to those “feelings of hostility” the letter described.

We see this today in efforts to ban curriculum on the history of school desegregation or even to outlaw any analysis of racism that inspires feelings of “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress.”  

Our current political climate might look different if the court had emphasized the benefits for all students in its final Brown ruling; of course, it did not.

Related: OPINION: Why segregation and racial gaps in education persist 70 years after the end of legal segregation

Segregation’s impact on white students is noticeably absent from one of the decision’s most iconic lines: “Segregation of white and colored children in the public schools hasa detrimental effect upon the colored children.”

Taking its cues from the court ruling, our country pursued Brown’s mandate narrowly, as an often one-way form of desegregation. Families of color bore a disproportionate burden — long bus rides, the white mobs — because it was presumed that desegregation was for their benefit only.

Thankfully, there are vibrant existing venues for a more expansive conception of school integration, much of which is organized by the National Coalition on School Diversity.

In some cities, youth organizers are carrying forward the similarly forgotten legacy of student protest for school integration. The student organizing operates according to a reimagined notion of Brown’s mandate, described as the 5 Rs of real integration: race and enrollment, resources, relationships, restorative justice and representation.

There are also efforts underway across the country to organize white and/or affluent parents — of course, the chief opponents of desegregation — to choose racially diverse schools for their children.

Research gives us reason to feel hopeful that these kinds of efforts can usher in a new era of school integration. Recent polling illustrates that white parents opposed to school integration are likely to change their opinions after learning more about the impact of segregation on white children: the exact results the NAACP letter warned us about 70 years ago.

We need to address segregation as a collective challenge and create a new approach that breaks from the one-sidedness of the past. Even as Brown turns 70, it’s not too late.

The seeds were planted long ago, and our current moment gives us plenty of motivation to help them grow.

Peter Piazza is a research assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an associate director of the university’s Beyond Test Scores Project.

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It was one of the most significant days in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court. On May 17, 1954, the nine justices unanimously ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that schools segregated by race did not provide an equal education. Students could no longer be barred from a school because of the color of their skin. To commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Brown decision, I wanted to look at how far we’ve come in integrating our schools and how far we still have to go. 

Two sociologists, Sean Reardon at Stanford University and Ann Owens at the University of Southern California, have teamed up to analyze both historical and recent trends. Reardon and Owens were slated to present their analysis at a Stanford University conference on May 6, and they shared their presentation with me in advance. They also expect to launch a new website to display segregation trends for individual school districts around the country. 

Here are five takeaways from their work:

1. The long view shows progress but a worrying uptick, especially in big cities

Not much changed for almost 15 years after the Brown decision. Although Black students had the right to attend another school, the onus was on their families to demand a seat and figure out how to get their child to the school. Many schools remained entirely Black or entirely white. 

Desegregation began in earnest in 1968 with a series of court orders, beginning with Virginia’s New Kent County schools. That year, the Supreme Court required the county to abolish its separate Black and white schools and students were reassigned to different schools to integrate them.

This graph above, produced by Reardon and Owens, shows how segregation plummeted across the country between 1968 and 1973. The researchers focused on roughly 500 larger school districts where there were at least 2,500 Black students. That captures nearly two-thirds of all Black students in the nation and avoids clouding the analysis with thousands of small districts of mostly white residents. 

Reardon’s and Owens’s measurement of segregation compares classmates of the average white student with the classmates of the average Black student. For example, in North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg district, the average white student in 1968 attended a school where 90 percent of his peers were white and only 10 percent were Black. The average Black student attended a school where 76 percent of his peers were Black and 24 percent were white. Reardon and Owens then calculated the gap in exposure to each race. White students had 90 percent white classmates while Black students had 24 percent white classmates. The difference was 66 percentage points. On the flip side, Black students had 76 percent Black classmates while white students had 10 percent Black classmates. Again, the difference was 66 percentage points, which translates to 0.66 on the segregation index.

But in 1973, after court-ordered desegregation went into effect, the average white student attended a school that was 69 percent white and 31 percent Black. The average Black student attended a school that was 34 percent Black and 66 percent white. In five short years, the racial exposure gap fell from 66 percentage points to 3 percentage points. Schools reflected Charlotte-Mecklenberg’s demographics. In the graph above, Reardon and Owens averaged the segregation index figures for all 533 districts with substantial Black populations. That’s what each dot represents.

In the early 1990s, this measure of segregation began to creep up again, as depicted by the red tail in the graph above. Owens calls it a “slow and steady uptick” in contrast to the drastic decline in segregation after 1968. Segregation has not bounced back or returned to pre-Brown levels. “There’s a misconception that segregation is worse than ever,” Reardon said.

Although the red line from 1990 to the present looks nearly flat, when you zoom in on it, you can see that Black-white segregation grew by 25 percent between 1991 and 2019. During the pandemic, segregation declined slightly again.

It’s important to emphasize that these Black-white segregation levels are tiny compared with the degree of segregation in the late 1960s. A 25 percent increase can seem like a lot, but it’s less than 4 percentage points. 

“It’s big enough that it makes me worried,” said Owens. “Now is the moment to keep an eye on this. If it continues in this direction, it would take a long time to get back up to Brown. But let’s not let it keep going up.”

Even more troubling is the fact that segregation increased substantially if you zero in on the nation’s biggest cities. White-Black segregation in the largest 100 school districts increased by 64 percent from 1988 to 2019, Owens and Reardon calculated.

2. School choice plays a role in recent segregation

Why is segregation creeping back up again? 

The expiration of court orders that mandated school integration and the expansion of school choice policies, including the rapid growth of charter schools, explains all of the increase in segregation from 2000 onward, said Reardon. Over 200 medium-sized and large districts were released from desegregation court orders from 1991 to 2009, and racial school segregation in these districts gradually increased in the years afterward. 

School choice, however, appears to be the dominant force. More than half of the increase in segregation in the 2000s can be attributed to the rise of charter schools, whose numbers began to increase rapidly in the late 1990s. In many cases, either white or Black families flocked to different charter schools, leaving behind a less diverse student body in traditional public schools. 

The reason for the rise in segregation in the 1990s before the number of charter schools soared is harder to understand. Owens speculates that other school choice policies, such as the option to attend any public school within a district or the creation of new magnet schools, may have played a role, but she doesn’t have the data to prove that. White gentrification of cities in the 1990s could also be a factor, she said, as the white newcomers favored a small set of schools or sent their children to private schools. 

“We might just be catching a moment where there’s been an influx of one group before the other group leaves,” said Owens. “It’s hard to say how the numbers will look 10 years from now.”

3. It’s important to disentangle demographic shifts from segregation increases

There’s a popular narrative that segregation has increased because Black students are more likely to attend school with other students who are not white, especially Hispanic students. But Reardon and Owens say this analysis conflates demographic shifts in the U.S. population with segregation. The share of Hispanic students in U.S. schools now approaches 30 percent and everyone is attending schools with more Hispanic classmates. White students, who used to represent 85 percent of the U.S. student population in 1970, now make up less than half. 

The blue line in the graph above shows how the classmates of the average Black, Hispanic or Native American student have increased from about 55 percent Black, Hispanic and Native American students in the early 1970s to nearly 80 percent Black, Hispanic and Native American students today. That means that the average student who is not white is attending a school that is overwhelmingly made up of students who are not white.

But look at how the red line, which depicts white students, is following the same path. The average white student is attending a school that moved from 35 percent students who are not white in the 1970s to nearly 70 percent students who are not white today. “It’s entirely driven by Hispanic students,” said Owens. “Even the ‘white’ schools in L.A. are 40 percent Hispanic.” 

I dug into U.S. Department of Education data to show how extremely segregated schools have become less common. The percentage of Black students attending a school that is 90 percent or more Black fell from 23 percent in 2000 to 10 percent in 2022. Only 1 in 10 Black students attends an all-Black or a nearly all-Black school. Meanwhile, the percentage of white students attending a school that is 90 percent or more white fell from 44 percent to 14 percent during this same time period. That’s 1 in 7. Far fewer Black or white students are learning in schools that are almost entirely made up of students of their same race.

At the same time, the percentage of Black students attending a school where 90 percent of students are not white grew from 37 percent in 2000 to 40 percent in 2022. But notice the sharp growth of Hispanic students during this period. They went from 7.6 million (fewer than the number of Black students) to more than 13.9 million (almost double the number of Black students). 

4. Most segregation falls across school district boundaries

This bar chart shows how schools are segregated for two reasons. One is that people of different races live on opposite sides of school district lines. Detroit is an extreme example. The city schools are dominated by Black students. Meanwhile, the Detroit suburbs, which operate independent school systems, are dominated by white students. Almost all the segregation is because people of different races live in different districts. Meanwhile, in the Charlotte, North Carolina, metropolitan area, over half of the segregation reflects the uneven distribution of students within school districts.

Nationally, 60 percent of the segregation occurs because of the Detroit scenario: people live across administrative borders, Reardon and Owens calculated. Still, 40 percent of current segregation is within administrative borders that policymakers can control. 

5. Residential segregation is decreasing

People often say there’s little that can be done about school segregation until we integrate neighborhoods. I was surprised to learn that residential segregation has been declining over the past 30 years, according to Reardon’s and Owens’s analysis of census tracts. More Black and white people live in proximity to each other. And yet, at the same time, school segregation is getting worse.

All this matters, Reardon said, because kids are learning at different rates in more segregated systems. “We know that more integrated schools provide more equal educational opportunities,” he said. “The things we’re doing with our school systems are making segregation worse.”

Reardon recommends more reforms to housing policy to integrate neighborhoods and more “guard rails” on school choice systems so that they cannot be allowed to produce highly segregated schools. 

This story about segregation in schools today was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters. 

The post PROOF POINTS: 5 takeaways about segregation 70 years after the Brown decision appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

BOCA RATON, Fla. – It doesn’t take much searching to spot the fallout from the newest Florida law seeking to erase DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion, from public campuses.

Several weeks ago, for example, staff offices at Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Inclusion, Diversity Education and Advocacy in Boca Raton were vacant, with name plates blank and abandoned desks, plus LGBTQ+ flags, posters and pamphlets left behind.

Elsewhere on the palm-tree-framed campus, a sign for the “Women and Gender Equity Resource Center” remained, but a laminated paper on the door offered a new identity, “Women’s Resource and Community Connection Division of Student Affairs.”

In Florida, which, along with Texas, has the most extreme anti-DEI laws in the country, virtually all DEI staff have been fired or reassigned and offices shuttered — but that’s not the only story. There is also mounting resistance to the laws.

Students have devised workarounds, like camouflaging FAU’s annual homecoming drag show as “Owl Manor,” nodding to the school mascot. Mary Rasura, a senior, launched an LGBTQ+ newspaper, “Out FAU,” saying, “It just seemed like a no-brainer. You know, we are still a community. Like, we’re still here.”

And while some wary faculty members have recast their lectures, others have boldly not done so. Prof. Robert Cassanello at the University of Central Florida in Orlando — one of the nation’s largest campuses with 70,000 students — warned in red ink on the syllabus for his graduate seminar on the Civil Rights Movement (as for all courses he teaches) that he “will expose you to content that does not comply with and will violate” anti-DEI laws.

Cassanello feels compelled to object. “My area of research is Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement,” he said. Being told not to discuss institutional, structural racism, “that’s like, what would be the point of me teaching? You know, I might as well just go home.”

Related: Student Voice: Bill targeting DEI offices in public universities has a chilling impact on students

The anti-DEI pressure in higher education has caught on — the Chronicle of Higher Education’s DEI tracker identifies 85 anti-DEI bills introduced in 28 states since last year, with 13 becoming law — but it is hardly something that colleges and universities came to on their own. Rather, it is a campaign led by the conservative activist Christopher F. Rufo and other far-right influencers seeking to make “DEI” as scary and repulsive a term as “CRT” (Critical Race Theory). Rufo has said as much.

And while Rufo frames DEI as an affront to colorblind meritocracy, Brendan Cantwell, a professor at Michigan State University who studies politics and policy in higher education, argues that there is nothing ideological in how DEI offices operate.

“The DEI movement as it manifests in colleges and universities is not radical,” he said. “It’s very bureaucratic and institutional.”

Cantwell said DEI shows up in tasks such as student advising or ensuring that databases accommodate gender identities and meet federal regulations — efforts that have arisen over the past decade as a direct response to campuses growing more diverse, racially and in other ways. DEI also covers veterans, first-generation students, international students, members of the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities and people of different faiths. The aim has been to institute policies and practices that allow all students to feel accepted.

But now anti-DEI laws are reaching beyond attacking such functions and seeking to control what may be taught in college courses.

“We are fighting over whether or not political parties that are in control of state government, in control of Congress, can control higher education,” Cantwell said. This is not about regulating funding or financial aid, but “what people learn” and “how colleges and universities can serve their students and staff.”

That was apparent in January when the Board of Governors for Florida’s state university system, in approving regulations for the new anti-DEI law, also removed sociology from the list of courses that meet general education requirements. (On the social platform X, Education Commissioner Manny Diaz berated sociology as “woke ideology.”)

For Prof. Michael Armato, the sociology undergraduate director at UCF, the elimination of general education credit for his discipline was upsetting enough; introductory sociology enrolls 700 to 800 students per semester. But more disturbing, he said, “was the absolute silence on behalf of our administrators” who failed to defend the field or challenge state “meddling” in campus curriculum.

“What’s next?” he said, noting that fields like literature, anthropology and psychology also grapple with issues of race, gender and sexuality. “There is this sort of fear hovering over us,” said Armato, raising concerns “for what we can teach, for what we can advise students about.” As a result, his department now allows faculty who are assigned to teach potentially hot subjects like race and ethnicity to bow out. “It is their neck on the line,” he said.

Yet he is not backing down himself. He is preparing to teach a graduate course that includes Critical Race Theory.* “I refuse to kowtow to attempts to have me not teach what is the accepted and documented evidence within my field,” he said. Last semester, he taught a course, “Beyond the Binary.” Still, Armato wonders, “Is this going to blow up on me?”

Related: Culture wars on campus start to affect students’ choices for college

Certainly, it’s easy to spot worry on campuses. At UCF, the student government counts on staff members to run an annual diversity training. The staffer responsible for it said he was unsure if it could happen — “we are waiting on guidance” — then ignored all follow-up emails. Across the state, more than a dozen campus leaders, including administrators, faculty representatives, staffers and student leaders who were contacted, declined to be interviewed about DEI or even to answer questions via email. Some apologized, as one did after initially agreeing to an interview, that “this is a very sensitive subject for state employees.” Some spoke only on background.

In teaching, Cassanello has a latitude that others don’t, because he has tenure. “If I were a lecturer, and I see what’s going on in Tallahassee,” he said, “I would say, ‘Maybe I don’t teach that concept.’”

Marissa Bellenger, one of Cassanello’s graduate students, was warned by a visiting professor teaching a lecture course on American history for which she is a teaching assistant. “He said, ‘You know, be careful of students asking you questions to get a rise out of you, to get you to say something that will get you in trouble,’” she said when we met outdoors in a shaded spot on campus. “I mean, if he’s worried about you, that says a lot.”

Bellenger, from Tampa, is studying for her Ph.D. at UCF, and has weighed leaving the state but would want to “come back and teach here. But then, it’s like, what is there to teach? You know, I’m going to be censoring myself.”

Such calculations are shaping Grace Castelin’s plans. Castelin, a senior and the president of the UCF chapter of the NAACP, sees professors avoiding certain discussions; they offer comments like, “Oh guys, you know, so the law, I can’t really say too much on this,” she said, or, as another did, add a disclaimer about “not trying to impose any beliefs on you guys.”

“It’s frustrating. It’s like we’re not getting the full course content,” Castelin said. She plans to go out of state to attend graduate school in public policy. “I applied to seven schools. None of them are in Florida,” she said. “If I stay here, I’m not going to learn the content that I need to know without it being censored.”

It is this kind of worry that spurred Michael H. Gavin, the president of Delta College in Michigan, a two-year institution, to start Education for All a year ago. The group gathers some 175 higher education leaders, many of them community college presidents, to monitor attacks on DEI and coordinate support through an online discussion list and regular meetings.

Gavin, who wrote a book on white nationalism and politics in higher education, said it is critical for leaders in states not facing anti-DEI laws to speak up for those who cannot. “Let’s not get tricked into this notion that we have to somehow be quiet about things that are right in our domain,” like restricting curriculum topics and banning books, he said.

He added that anti-DEI attacks are particularly damaging to students in community colleges, many of whom are from marginalized groups, “because the rhetoric is about their very identity.”

Related: One school district’s ‘playbook’ for undoing far-right education policies

Conservative activists cast the anti-DEI movement as a sober pursuit, but opponents say it appears bent on chasing certain people from view or halting efforts to acknowledge and serve them. This, despite the fact that high-quality research shows the value of “belonging” to student success.

But even as home pages for DEI offices are redirected or show error messages, services may still exist. For example, the University of North Florida in Jacksonville dissolved DEI-related offices, but OneJax, which had run UNF’s Interfaith Center for 11 years, became an independent nonprofit. Elizabeth Andersen, the executive director, said the group hired the same leader who is “continuing to serve youth in an interfaith capacity on campus.”

Severing campus ties left them without office space or supports, like HR and IT, however. “It’s been a difficult nine months,” she said.

Andersen finds the anti-DEI landscape absurd. “The idea that diversity, equity and inclusion have been co-opted to be bad words is bizarre to me,” she said.

A sense of outrage fuels Carlos Guillermo Smith, a policy adviser for Equality Florida and a former state representative now running for the state senate. Smith, a UCF graduate, helped lead a large protest on campus last spring. Smith is campaigning to support abortion rights, affordable housing and college affordability — and to hold DeSantis’s administration “accountable.”

Despite the clampdown in Florida, Smith said he sees no choice but to speak up and push back. “Resistance, public pressure and litigation are the only paths” to counter “the far-right’s extreme agenda of censorship and control,” he said.” I am committed to that fight for as long as it takes.”

*Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify the course that Prof. Michael Armato is teaching this fall.

This story about the anti-DEI movement was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

The post  Amid clampdown on DEI, some on campuses push back appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Last April, an email went out to families in the Troy School District outside Detroit. Signed by unnamed “concerned Troy parents,” it said that a district proposal to end “basic” and “honors” math classes for sixth and seventh graders was part of a longer-term district plan to completely abolish honors classes in all of its schools.

Superintendent Richard Machesky and his team were stunned. The district was indeed proposing to merge separate sixth- and seventh-grade math tracks into what it said would be a single, rigorous pathway emphasizing pre-algebra skills. In eighth grade, students could opt for Eighth Grade Math or Algebra I. But the district had no plans for changes to other grades, much less to do away with high school honors classes.

Earlier that month, Machesky and a district team of curriculum specialists and math teachers had unveiled the plan during a series of meetings with parents of current and incoming middle schoolers. Parents had largely expressed support, said Machesky: “We thought we were hitting the mark.”

No matter. The email blast spurred opponents to show up at a board workshop and a town hall, and a petition demanding that the middle-school plan be scrapped got more than 3,000 signatures. At a packed board meeting that May, more than 40 people spoke, nearly all opposed to the plan, and the comments got personal. “Are you all on drugs?” parent Andrew Sosnoski asked the members.

It’s part of the skirmish over “detracking,” or eliminating the sorting of kids by perceived ability into separate math classes. Since the mid-1980s, some education experts have supported such moves, citing research showing that tracking primarily serves as a marker of race or class, as Black and Hispanic students, and those from lower-income families, are steered into lower-track classes at disproportionate rates. In the last 15 years, a handful of school districts around the country have eliminated some tracked math classes.

While there’s been ample research on tracking’s negative effects, studies of positive effects resulting from detracking are scant. In perhaps the only attempt to summarize the detracking literature, a 2009 summary of 15 studies from 1972 to 2006 concluded that detracking improved academic outcomes for lower-ability students, but had no effect on average and high-ability students.

Related: Data science under fire: What math do high schoolers really need?

Proposals to curtail tracking often draw fiery opposition, sometimes scuttling the efforts. The Portland school district in Oregon planned to compress two levels of middle school math into one starting in 2023, but after criticism, said the issue needed more study. Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, a Republican, won office in 2021 on an education platform that included protecting tracking, after an outcry over a state department of education plan that included language about “improving math equity,” which some interpreted as limiting tracking. The San Francisco Unified School District, which in 2014 detracked math through ninthgrade, recently announced that it’s testing the reintroduction of a tracked system, following a lawsuit from a group of parents who alleged that detracking hurt student achievement.

The pushback, often from parents of high-track students with the time and resources to attend school board meetings, is part of why tracking, especially in math, remains common. In a 2023 survey of middle-school principals by the Rand Corporation, 39 percent said their schools group students into separate classes based on achievement.

But some places have changed their math classes with minimal backlash, and also ensured course rigor and improved academic outcomes. That’s often because they moved slowly.

Evanston Township High School, in Illinois, started detracking in 2010, collapsing several levels in two freshman-year subjects — humanities and biology — into one.

Then, for six years, the school made no other changes. That allowed leaders to work out the kinks and look at the data to make sure there were no negative effects on achievement, said Pete Bavis, the district’s assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction.

Teachers liked the mixed-ability classes and asked to expand them to other subjects, so in 2017 the school began detracking sophomore and junior English, Geometry and Algebra II.

At South Side Middle School and High School on Long Island, detracking went even slower, taking 17 years to fully roll out. The district started in 1989 with middle-school English and social studies, and progressed to high school math and chemistry by 2006.

The pace let parents see it wasn’t hurting their children’s achievement, said former South Side High Principal Carol Burris. During that period, the proportion of students earning New York’s higher-level Regents diploma climbed from 58 percent in 1989 to 97 percent by 2005. “I always told parents, when we started moving this through the high school, ‘Look, if this isn’t working, I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to hurt your kid,’” she said.

Related: How one district diversified its math classes – without the controversy

Those slow rollouts contrast with what happened in the Shaker Heights City School District in Ohio in 2020. That summer, school leaders needed to simplify schedules to accommodate a mix of online and onsite students because of the pandemic. They saw an opening to do something that had long been in the district’s strategic plan: end tracking in most fifth- through ninth-grade subjects.

But teachers complained last spring that it had gone too quickly, saying that they didn’t get enough training on teaching mixed classrooms, and that course rigor has suffered. Even supporters of detracking suggested it had happened so fast that the district couldn’t lay the groundwork with parents.

Shaker Heights Superintendent David Glasner said he understands those concerns. But he said he also heard from parents, students and instructional leaders in the district who say they’re glad the district “ripped the Band-Aid off.”

In Troy, despite the pushback from parents, the school board ultimately voted 6-1 for the change, noting that the district had spent four years studying options and that teachers and outside experts largely supported the plan.

Machesky said if he had it to do over, he’d communicate with parents earlier. The anonymous email took advantage of an information void: The district had communicated the proposal only to parents of current and upcoming middle schoolers. Most who turned out to oppose it had younger kids and hadn’t been told, he said.

Leaders in Evanston and South Side both say they also framed detracking as a way to create more opportunities for all students. As part of getting rid of tracks, Evanston created an “earned honors” system. All students enroll in the same classes, but they can opt into honors credit — which boosts their class grade by a half-point, akin to extra credit — if they take and do well on additional assessments or complete additional projects.

School leaders in South Side also ensured that detracked classes remained as challenging as the higher-level classes had been previously, Burris said. To make sure students succeeded, the school arranged for teachers to tutor struggling students in a support class held two or three times a week and in a half-hour period before school, changing the bus schedules to make that work. Teachers also created optional activities for each lesson that would push higher-achieving students if they mastered the material being covered.

“You have to make sure you’re not taking something away from anyone,” said Burris.

To prepare for pushback, Evanston also formed a “rapid-response team” that answered parent questions about the new system within 24 hours and developed dozens of pages of frequently updated FAQs. That took the pressure off teachers, letting them focus on the classroom, said math department chair Dale Leibforth. By the end of the first year of detracking, the school had gotten just three complaints, all requests for fixes to narrow technical problems rather than wholesale critiques, said Bavis.

“We imagined a catastrophe,” he said. “We asked, ‘what could go wrong?’” and mapped how to handle each scenario.

Related: Inside the new middle school math crisis

In response to continued critiques of its detracking effort, last fall Shaker Heights pioneered another idea: an evening immersion experience that lets parents sit through detracked classes. The four mock sessions — two in literature and two in math — were followed by questions and answers.

Parents were respectful but probing: How do teachers work together to make the new system work? Do kids know when they’re grouped with others who are struggling in a skill? Are the books we worked with really at sixth-grade level? While there’s no data on the session’s effects, Glasner says they “absolutely did move the needle” on community opinion.

Research from the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, suggests that districts should focus on how detracking helps all students, rather than emphasizing that the efforts are aimed to advance equity and benefit students in lower tracks, said senior fellow Halley Potter. That approach gives parents of higher-track kids the idea that their own child’s academics are being sacrificed to help others.

That fits with what Machesky thinks happened last spring in Troy. “We kind of got caught up with the equity arguments that were raging in districts nationally at the time,” he said.

After last May’s board vote, opponents launched a recall petition against three board members who’d voted in favor of the change. To get on the ballot, it needed 8,000 signatures but got fewer than half that.

Since then, the opposition there has gone silent.

Last fall the district held “math nights” to talk about the new system and let parents ask questions. The students have settled in. “I have received zero negative communication from parents — no emails, no phone calls — zero,” said Machesky. 

Related: How can schools dig out from a generation’s worth of lost math progress?

Whether detracking spreads may depend on the experience of parents and students. Back on Long Island, parent Mindy Roman’s three children graduated from South Side High in 2009, 2012 and 2018, and she said she’s glad they were in classes with diverse groups of students. Her children didn’t have classes with a Black student until middle school because of the way elementary school lines were drawn, she said. And all three did well in the district’s detracked courses.

But Roman said she’s heard from current parents with the opposite experience. “It’s not ‘oh my God, my child is getting access to these unbelievable opportunities,’ but more like, ‘my kid is gonna get a 70 in a class when they could get a 90. I don’t want them to be put under that much pressure.’”

John Murphy, who was principal at South Side High from 2015 to 2023, said he started hearing around 2018 from people worried about the effects of the workload on their children’s mental health, and the school responded by giving less homework. Even so, “students are working way harder than they did 20 years ago,” said Murphy, now an assistant for human resources to Superintendent Matthew Gaven.

Still, academic outcomes at South Side have improved since the district eliminated tracking. In 2021-22, 89 percent of South Side graduates earned the highest-level diploma the state offers — the advanced Regents diploma — compared with 42 percent in New York state as a whole. Another 9 percent earned the Regents diploma.

That said, the district recently made an accommodation. Post-Covid, a small group of parents of middle schoolers told the district they didn’t think their children were ready for Algebra I because of the pandemic-era learning interruptions. So South Side Middle School retracked eighth-grade math starting in the 2023-24 school year, offering parents the choice of Algebra I or a grade-level math course. Gaven said that only around 7 percent of parents of eighth graders asked for that option, and that demand for it might taper as schools return to normal.

It’s an opt-in model far different from those that direct students into lower-level courses because of test scores or teacher recommendations, said Gaven. “We know our kids can handle algebra, but we respect our parents as partners and wanted to give them a voice and an option.”

This story about detracking was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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SAN FRANCISCO — It was two days before the start of the school year, and Lauren Koehler shrugged off her backpack and slid out of a maroon hoodie as she approached the blocky, concrete building that houses the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) Enrollment Center. Koehler, the center’s 38-year-old executive director, usually focuses on strategy, but on this August day, she wanted to help her team — and the students it serves — get through the crush of office visits and calls that comes every year as families scramble at the last-minute for spots in the city’s schools. So when the center’s main phone line rang in her corner office, she answered.

“Good morning! Thank you for waiting,” Koehler chirped, her Texas accent audible around the edges. “How can I help you?”

On the line, Kelly Rodriguez explained that she wanted to move her 6-year-old from a private school to a public one for first grade, but only if a seat opened up at Sunset Elementary School, near their house on San Francisco’s predominantly white and Asian west side. Koehler told her the boy was fourth on the waitlist and that last year, three children got in.

“We will keep our fingers crossed,” Rodriguez said, sounding both resigned and hopeful.

Stanford professor Thomas Dee predicted this. Not this specific conversation, of course, but ones like it. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, public school enrollment in the United States had been trending downward, thanks to birth-rate declines and more restrictive immigration policies, but the decreases rarely exceeded half a percentage point. But Dee said, between fall 2019 and fall 2021, enrollment declined by 2.5 percent.

At the leading edge of this national trend is San Francisco. Public school enrollment there fell by 7.6 percent between 2019 and 2022, to 48,785 students. That drop left SFUSD at just over half the size it was in the 1960s, when it was one of the largest districts in the nation.

Related: A school closure cliff is coming. Black and Hispanic students are likely to bear the brunt

Declining enrollment can set off a downward spiral. For every student who leaves SFUSD, the district eventually receives approximately $14,650 less, using a conservative estimate of state funds for the 2022–23 school year. When considering all state and federal funds that year, the district stood to lose as much as $21,170 a child. Over time, less money translates to fewer adults to teach classes, clean bathrooms, help manage emotions and otherwise make a district’s schools calm and effective. It also means fewer language programs, robotics labs and other enrichment opportunities that parents increasingly perceive as necessary. That, in turn, can lead to fewer families signing up — and even less money.

It’s why Koehler is trying everything she can to retain and recruit students in the face of myriad complications, from racism to game theory, and why educators and policymakers elsewhere ought to care whether she and her staff of 24 succeed.

Answering calls in August, Koehler had a plan — lots of little plans, really. And she hoped they’d move the needle on the district’s enrollment numbers, to be released later in the year.

Koehler arrived at SFUSD in May 2020, which also happens to be when most believe the story of the district’s hemorrhaging of students began. During Covid, the district’s doors remained closed for more than a year. Sent home in March 2020, the youngest children went back part-time in April 2021; for the vast majority of middle and high school students, schools didn’t reopen for 17 months, until August 2021. In contrast, most private schools in the city ramped up to full-time, in-person instruction for all grades over the fall of 2020.

It was the latest skirmish in a long-standing market competition in San Francisco — and the public schools lost. The district’s pandemic-era enrollment decline was three times larger than the national one.

Related: A school created a homeless shelter in the gym and it paid off in the classroom

“My husband and I are both a product of a public school education, and it’s something we really wanted for our children,” said Rodriguez, the first caller. But her son ended up in private school, she explained, because “we didn’t want him sitting in front of a screen.” It was a conversation that has played out repeatedly for Koehler these past few years. But public schools staying remote for longer is not the whole story, not even close.

Remote schooling accounted for about a quarter of the enrollment decline nationally, Stanford’s Dee estimates. The bigger culprit, especially in San Francisco, is population loss. Even before the pandemic, the city had the fewest 5-to-19-year-olds per capita of any US city, about 10 percent of the population, which is roughly half the national average.

Then, starting around the time Koehler arrived, fewer new kids came than usual and more residents moved to places like Florida and Texas. A recent Census estimate found 89,000 K-12 students in San Francisco, down from about 93,000 in 2019. That decline represents more than half of SFUSD’s pandemic-era drop.

It’s difficult to pinpoint how many children migrated to private school in response to SFUSD’s doors’ staying closed, since many did, but at the same time, some private school students also moved away. But Dee’s research shows that private schooling increased by about 8 percent nationally. (Homeschooling numbers also grew, although the number of kids involved remains small.)

And these aren’t the only reasons Koehler’s task can seem Sisyphean.

“You guys should be able to find out how many spots are open!” a father sitting outside Koehler’s office said, frustrated after visiting the enrollment center once a week all summer.

Koehler nodded sympathetically and told him his son was sixth on the waitlist for Hoover Middle School and that three times that many got in last year.

Since 2011, families have been able to apply to any of the city’s 72 public elementary schools, submitting a ranked list of choices. The same goes for middle and high school options. When demand exceeds seats, the enrollment center uses “tiebreakers,” mandated by the city’s elected school board, that try to keep siblings together, give students from marginalized communities a leg up, and let preschoolers stay at their school for kindergarten. After that, living near a school often confers priority. A randomized lottery for each school sorts out the rest, which leads to the entire system being referred to locally as “the lottery.”

OPINION: Public school enrollment losses are a big problem

Sixty percent of applicants got their first choice in the lottery’s “main round” in March 2023. Almost 90 percent were assigned to one of their listed schools. That makes for a lot of happy campers. It also makes for parents like the father with a wait-listed son, holding out for a better option.

Though she responded to him with unwavering calm, Koehler was frustrated too. She knew a seat would be available for his son, but state law prohibited her from letting the boy sit in it until an assigned student told the enrollment center they wouldn’t attend or failed to show up in the first week of school.

“I appreciate your patience,” she said, scrawling her cell number on a business card.

To avoid this bind, Koehler and her team have been experimenting with over-assigning kids, the way airlines overbook flights. New, too, is Koehler’s transparency about wait-list standing. In fact, at the beginning of August, every wait-listed family received an e-mail sharing its child’s standing, plus how many kids on the list got in last year. Koehler and her staff hope promising data will encourage parents to hang in there, while a disappointing forecast will open their minds to another school in SFUSD.

Overbooking and transparency represent incremental change. “I annoy some people on my team to no end by being like, ‘Well, I don’t know if we’re ready for this really large step, but let’s take a small step,’” Koehler said. “Let’s put as many irons in the fire as we can.”

Koehler’s next caller said, “The students are not getting their schedules until 24 hours before school starts, which is completely absurd!” Her voice fraying, the mother shared her suspicion that this was true only for kids coming from private middle schools, like her son. Koehler explained that the policy applied to all ninth graders, but still, she said, “I’m sure that’s stressful and annoying.”

Another caller had her heart set on Lincoln High School, down the block from the family’s home. But her son had been assigned to a school lower on the family’s list and an hour-long bus ride away. Koehler suggested several high schools that would have been a short detour on the woman’s way to work south of the city, but the mother began to cry. She had no interest in “Mission High or whatever,” even when Koehler pointed to Mission’s having the highest University of California acceptance rate in SFUSD.

Related: Dallas students flocking to schools that pull students from both rich and poor parts of town

Family and friends are most influential in shaping people’s attitudes about schools, research specific to SFUSD shows. So if they’ve heard bad things, Koehler’s singing a school’s praises often does little to change their minds. Parents also turn to school-ratings websites, which studies say push families toward schools with relatively few Black and Hispanic students, like Lincoln, which currently scores a 7 on GreatSchools.org’s 1-10 scoring system, while Mission rates a 3.

As the mother on the phone grew increasingly distressed, Koehler responded simply, “I hear you.” And then, “I know this is really hard.”

She learned these lines from her therapist husband. Before they met, Koehler was an AmeriCorps teacher at a preschool serving kids in a high-poverty community. By her own admission, Koehler was “a totally hopeless teacher,” and she couldn’t stop thinking about “all these systems-level issues.” When her pre-K class toured potential kindergartens, she said, “The schools were just so different from each other.” She realized, “Where you are assigning kids — and what their resourcing level is — matters.”

After getting a master’s in public policy at Harvard, Koehler took a planning job with Jefferson Parish Public School System in New Orleans and then became a director of strategic projects with the KIPP charter school network in Houston. She moved to the Bay Area in 2018 to work for a different charter network, and that’s when she met the handsome, “uncommonly honest” school counselor. When she joined SFUSD in 2020, her husband struck out into private practice. “I feel like I get training every day,” quipped Koehler of his reassurances at home.

Now, she has her staff role-play parent counseling sessions, practicing skills picked up during trainings on de-escalation, listening so that people feel heard, and other forms of “nonviolent communication.” They try to make families feel understood and give them a sense of autonomy and control.

Often, they succeed. Often, they fail.

When phone lines quieted, Koehler began to call parents from the waiting area back to a sunny conference room featuring two massive city maps dotted by district schools.

The first family told her they live in Mission Bay, a rapidly redeveloping area where a new elementary school isn’t scheduled to open until 2025. They were excited about a school one neighborhood over, until they tested the two-bus commute with a preschooler. Then they realized that the city’s recently opened underground transit line goes straight from their home to Gordon J. Lau Elementary. Koehler wasn’t optimistic about there being openings; it’s a popular school.

When the computer revealed one last spot, she squealed à la Margot Robbie’s Barbie, “You are having the luckiest day!”

But the next parent, Kristina Kunz, was not as lucky. “My daughter was at Francisco during the stabbing last year,” she told Koehler. The sixth grader didn’t witness the March 2023 event, but when the school was evacuated, she thought she was about to die in a mass shooting. Once home, she refused to go back. Kunz told Koehler the family would have left the district, but they’d already been paying Catholic school tuition for her brother after he’d felt threatened at another middle school a few years earlier. “That was literally the only option,” Kunz said, “and we absolutely can’t afford it this year.”

Related: Fewer kids are enrolling in kindergarten as pandemic fallout lingers

Koehler read Kunz the list of middle schools with openings, all in the city’s southeast, which has a higher percentage of Black and Hispanic residents than other parts of the city. “Huh uh,” Kunz said, “none of those.” She’d take her chances waiting for a spot to open at Hoover on the west side.

The next parent, a woman who’d recently sent a vitriolic e-mail to the superintendent, said, “There’s no seats open in middle schools.” When Koehler rattled off the schools in the southeast that still had openings, the mother shrugged, as if those didn’t count.

Koehler closed her eyes and quickly inhaled. What she didn’t get into, but was perpetually on her mind, is what she’d read in “Class Action: Desegregation and Diversity in San Francisco Schools,” by Rand Quinn, a political sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

San Francisco segregated its schools from its earliest days. In 1870, students with Asian ancestry were officially allowed in any school, but often weren’t welcome in them, leaving most Asian American kids to learn in community-run and missionary schools. In 1875, the district declared schools open to Black students too, but nearly a century later, in 1965, 17 schools were more than 90 percent white and nine were more than 90 percent Black. A large system of parochial schools thrived alongside a handful of nonreligious, exclusively white private schools.

Public school desegregation efforts began in earnest in 1969 with the Equality/Quality plan, which, though modest, involved busing some students from predominantly white neighborhoods. An uproar followed, and the district, which had more than 90,000 students at its 1960s zenith, saw its numbers drop by more than 8,000 students between the spring and fall of 1970 as families fled integration. Over the next dozen years, SFUSD’s rolls decreased by more than 35,000, owing to white flight and also to the last of the baby boomers aging out and drastic public school funding cuts in the wake of a 1978 state proposition that largely froze the property tax base.

After 1980, enrollment bounced back a little, but then for years it plateaued at roughly 52,000 students. During the 1965–66 school year, more than 45 percent of the district’s students were white. By 1977, just over 14 percent were. Today, that number is just under 14 percent. All of which is to say, when white families left in droves, they never really came back.

There have been about half a dozen similar initiatives since Equality/Quality — with names like Horseshoe and Educational Redesign — and each time, some west-side parents mounted opposition. Quinn quoted a former superintendent, Arlene Ackerman, who said at the outset of one of those “neighborhood schools” campaigns in the early 2000s: “They’ve said racist things I hadn’t heard since the late ’60s…talking about ‘in that neighborhood, my child might be raped!’”

It’s not just white families who object to their kids being educated alongside a significant number of Black children, said longtime Board of Education Commissioner Mark Sanchez. “You see that in the Latinx population and Asian population as well.”

In nearby Marin County, home to some of the nation’s most affluent suburbs, private schools opened one after the other in the 1970s. At least another 10 independent schools popped up in San Francisco proper, stealing market share from both SFUSD and the city’s parochial sector and pushing overall private school enrollment above 30 percent for the first time. Today, approximately 25 percent of San Francisco’s school-aged children attend private school, compared to 8 percent in the state of California and similar shares in many large cities. A November San Francisco Chronicle investigation found that at least three independent schools have applied for permits to expand or renovate their campuses in order to make room for more students. At one private school, enrollment is projected to more than double.

When Americans think of segregation academies, they think of the South, said Sanchez, but San Francisco has long had its own. In part because the city didn’t offer quality schooling to children of color. “You’ll see a lot of second-, third-, fourth-generation Latinos that will just only put their kids in Catholic school.”

These personal decisions have a ripple effect beyond decreasing SFUSD’s budget. Research has shown that advantaged, white families’ turning away from public schools sends a signal to others about their quality. Other studies reveal that when private schools are an option, recent movers to gentrifying neighborhoods are more likely to opt out of public schools. And it is well-established that segregated environments breed people who seek comfort in segregated environments.

“It’s kind of a chicken-and-the-egg thing,” Sanchez said: Private schools are there in part because of racial fear, and racial fear is perpetuated in part because private schools are there.

In 2015, in the southeast part of the city, SFUSD opened Willie Brown Middle School, a state-of-the-art facility that includes a wellness center, a library, a kitchen, a performing arts space, a computer lab, a maker space, a biotech lab, a health center, and a rainwater garden, in addition to light-filled classrooms. With small class sizes, bamboo cabinets, few staff vacancies, and furniture outfitted with wheels, it could easily be a private school.

Related: For some kids, returning to school post-pandemic means a daunting wall of administrative obstacles

But Willie Brown remained under-enrolled, year after year, even after the school board passed a policy giving its graduates preference for Lowell High School, known as the “crown jewel” of SFUSD. Last year, enrollment jumped when Koehler’s Enrollment Center overbooked the school in the first round, parents decided to give it a shot, and kids ended up happy. About 20 percent of the student body is now white, yet still, spots remained open two days before the start of school this past fall.

To some observers, Willie Brown is just the latest iteration of a failed “if you build it, they will come” narrative in San Francisco. In the second half of the 1970s, the district created new programs and “alternative schools,” akin to other cities’ magnet schools, to attract back families that had fled. Later, Superintendent Ackerman promised a flood of investment in schools in the southeast, including new language programs. There was a small effect on enrollment, Quinn said, but only on the margins.

So when the parent said, “There’s no seats open in middle schools,” Koehler understood that lots of factors influence which schools work for a family and which don’t. But there was also an echo of 1960s anti-integration parent groups. 

“I’m sorry,” she replied, “I know this is really stressful.”

A 17-year-old newcomer to the US entered the Enrollment Center and sat across the conference room table from Koehler. She asked when he’d arrived in San Francisco.

“Domingo.”

“Ayer?” Koehler asked. (Yesterday?)

“No, domingo pasado.” (Last Sunday.)

In New York City and other large cities, an increase in asylum-seeking families has been credited with stopping public school enrollment declines. Migrant children have come to San Francisco too, and Koehler’s team has tried to reduce the paperwork hurdles they and other families face when trying to enroll.

But Koehler would need to meet many more kids like this one to stave off school closures.

She’d also need charter school enrollment to stop increasing.

The next parent, also a recent immigrant, stepped into the conference room with a stack of papers issued by the Peruvian government and the conviction that her son needed to be placed in a different grade than the one specified by his age. She made it clear to Koehler that the family would jump at the first appropriate placement offer: SFUSD’s or at Thomas Edison Charter Academy. Koehler scrambled to get the boy assessed and recategorized.

Charter schools were first authorized in San Francisco in the 1990s. Though their share of the education market is smaller here than in places like New Orleans, charter enrollment has steadily increased, with new schools often inhabiting the buildings of schools SFUSD had to close. Now, approximately 7,000 students attend charter schools rather than district ones.

On August 30, 2023, SFUSD families received an e-mail from the superintendent saying, “We are going to make some tough decisions in the coming months and all the options are on the table.”

Each time a student leaves the district, SFUSD has less money to operate that student’s old school. But the heating bill does not go down. The teacher must be paid the same amount. A class of 21 first graders — or even a class of eight — is no cheaper than a class of 22.

Related: In a segregated city, the pandemic accelerated a wave of white flight

It stands to reason that closing under-enrolled schools and reassigning their students and the funds that go with them to different schools, as many districts across the country are currently poised to do, should produce better educational outcomes for all. But it often doesn’t, as experiences in Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans illustrate. Sally A. Nuamah, a professor at Northwestern University, has described school closures as “reactive” and urged policymakers to focus instead on the root causes of declining enrollment, like the lack of affordable housing that drives families out of cities.

Koehler can control those things about as readily as she can dig a new train tunnel or decrease school-shooting fear. But she might be able to improve the district’s reputation.

Her team started by modernizing marketing efforts, like going digital with preschool outreach, producing a video about each school, and rebooting the annual Enrollment Fair, a day when principals and PTA presidents sit behind more than 100 folding tables. Parents used to push strollers through the throngs to grab a handout and snippet of conversation; now, schools play videos and offer up QR codes too.

For two years, SFUSD has also worked with digital marketing companies. One “positive impression campaign” included social media posts pushed out by the San Francisco Public Library and the Department of Children, Youth, and Their Families. Images feature photos of smiling students alongside the names of the SFUSD schools and colleges they attended: For example, “Jazmine – Flynn Elementary School – Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 – O’Connell High School – Stanford University.” In addition to online ads, the district has purchased radio spots and light-pole ads. It’s mailed postcards.

Koehler would like to increase the current outlay of about $10,000 a year, but it’s hard to spend on recruitment when instruction remains underfunded, even if increased enrollment would more than offset the cost. Especially since, at some point, marketing becomes futile. With a finite number of kids in the city, initiatives to increase market share become “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Dee likes to say. (Private school-board members and admissions directors in San Francisco are also expressing alarm at population declines.)

And in San Francisco, any PR campaign contends with two major sources of bad PR: the press and parents. Koehler understands why journalists report on what’s going wrong in SFUSD: It’s their job. But she sees loads of negative headlines and very few accounts of the many things that are going right. Readers are left with the impression that private schools in the city are objectively better at serving students, which just isn’t true.

Some parents have left SFUSD or refused to enroll their kids because of substantive complaints, like with the district’s decision not to offer Algebra I in eighth grade (starting in 2014). There is also some real scarcity in the process, as in Rodriguez’s case: There simply isn’t enough room on Sunset’s small campus for everyone who wants to be there. And individual families have unresolvable logistical constraints, and in very rare cases, truly legitimate safety concerns. But a lot of it has to do with timing — and fear.

When David, a father of two, rang the Enrollment Center, it was with the air of a man who just wanted to do the right thing.

After touring SFUSD’s George Peabody Elementary, David and his wife decided the school would be a great fit for their incoming kindergartener. There was something special about it, and they wanted her to learn in a diverse setting.

But they also wanted a backup plan, having heard horror stories of the lottery’s vagaries. “We had two number-one choices,” he said: Peabody and a Jewish private school. They applied to both. In March, their daughter was offered a spot at the private school — and one at a different SFUSD school they liked less. “If we got into Peabody in the first round, we would have gone to Peabody,” said David, who asked that his full name be withheld to protect his privacy. Instead, they signed a contract with the private school. “We put our daughter on the waitlist” for Peabody, he said, “and then kind of forgot about it.”

When the family got an e-mail offering a spot, on the Saturday before school started, they were excited enough to click “accept,” even though they would have lost their private school deposit. Then they learned that Peabody’s after-school program was full. “There was just no way that we could have made it happen without aftercare,” David said. So he called the Enrollment Center to offer the spot to another family.

Hearing David’s story, Koehler sighed. If she had been able to place his child at Peabody in the first round, aftercare would have been available there, but in August the only programs with openings were located offsite. Because that didn’t work for David’s family, Koehler was left with a seat sitting open at a high-demand school.

Private schools can require open houses, interviews, and a tuition deposit to help screen out all but the most interested families and reveal information about their likelihood of accepting an offer. But SFUSD has tried to do away with hurdles like that, since they disadvantage the already disadvantaged. With no way of gauging intention to attend, Koehler has to hold seats from March until August for thousands of students who ultimately won’t use them. And she can’t just overbook aggressively, because there are always outliers. This year, one of the city’s biggest middle schools saw every single child who was assigned in March, save one, show up in August. Private schools can more easily absorb extra kids if they overdo it with admissions a little, but Koehler risks a massive fiscal error under the district’s union contract. And overbooking risks leaving other SFUSD schools under-enrolled, something single-campus private schools don’t have to worry about.

It leaves SFUSD an unpredictable mess able to enroll fewer families than it otherwise would. And because the process is a mess, more families apply to multiple systems to hedge their bets and end up holding on to multiple seats, making it all more of a mess.

But change is coming. In 2018, the school board passed a resolution to eventually overhaul SFUSD’s school assignment system. Starting in 2026, citywide elementary school choice will be replaced by choice within zones tied to students’ addresses. The task of sorting out the details has fallen to Koehler’s team, along with a group at Stanford co-led by Irene Lo, a professor in the school of engineering who has been trained to design and optimize “matching” markets like this one.

Related: Gifted education has a race problem. Can it be fixed?

If Lo could start anywhere, she’d centralize the application process so that families would rank their true preferences: public, private, and charter. One algorithm could then assign the vast majority of seats in a single pass, largely eliminating delays like the one David’s family experienced. But private schools stand to lose ground by agreeing to that, and many public school supporters would argue that this condones and uplifts private and charter schools. So instead of centralization, Lo will start with prediction.

She’ll use AI and other modern modeling tools to anticipate what parents will like. Then there’s “strategy-proofing,” a term from game theory. Essentially, it means trying to set up a system that incentivizes parents to be truthful. Over the decades, families have taken advantage of loopholes allowing students to attend a different school than the one designated by their address. And not just a few families. In the late 1990s, it was more than half. To gain an advantage, they’ve also lied about their student’s ethnicity, “race-neutral diversity factors” such as mother’s education level, and their zip code. Any way each system could be gamed, it was gamed.

Lo said the new six or seven zones will be drawn so each comes close to reflecting the district’s average socioeconomic status. Layered on top of that will be “dynamic reserves” at each school, basically set-asides giving lower-income students first dibs on some seats to make sure diverse zones don’t segregate into schools with wealthier students and others with concentrated poverty. City blocks will be used as a proxy for students’ level of disadvantage.

It all sounds great. It also all sounds familiar. In the early 1970s, Horseshoe featured seven zones and assignment to schools so as to create racial balance. Educational Redesign relied on quotas to make sure no ethnic group exceeded 45 percent. The current lottery uses “microneighborhoods” to capture disadvantage.

What makes Koehler and Lo think the outcome could be different this time?

Lo admitted that they’re trying “another way of putting together the same ingredients.” It’s still guesswork, but with her cutting-edge tools it should be more accurate than the guesswork of the past. And while parents still won’t have complete predictability, they’ll have more than before.

“I understand this is really difficult,” Koehler said to the last parent of the day.

With the waiting room empty and back offices quiet, Koehler approached each member of her staff: “Go home, because I know this is going to be a really long week.”

It’s likely to be a very long year—and decade—for the enrollment center.

San Francisco was 40 percent white as of the last Census, but only 13.8 percent of its public school enrollment was. Even if Lo works the unprecedented miracle of getting schools to reflect the district’s diversity, there is no hope that they will reflect the city’s without a major change in the way parents have behaved for decades. The data is clear: Without a critical mass of white students in a school, a significant number of parents won’t consider it.

Still, many families are choosing SFUSD, including some of those Koehler talked to in August. Kunz’s daughter got into Hoover off the waiting list. A few months into the school year, her mother said, she is thriving. Her older brother, the one who was pulled out of public middle school, chose SFUSD’s Ruth Asawa School of the Arts over a well-regarded Catholic high school.

Rodriguez, the mother who wanted to send her first grader to Sunset, learned a few days after her call with Koehler that everyone assigned had shown up, and her son wouldn’t be offered a spot. But Koehler’s team had another suggestion near the family’s home: Jefferson Elementary School. Rodriguez almost rejected it in favor of private school, but she’s relieved she didn’t.

“The community’s been very, very welcoming,” she said in October. “His teacher’s wonderful; she has almost 20 years of experience. It has a beautiful garden. The principal is really involved.” A few months later things were still going well: “Jefferson is just fantastic,” she said in December: “We’ve been really, really pleased.”

Related: New data: Even within the same district, some wealthy schools get millions more than poor ones

But Rodriguez said she’s still “recovering” from the enrollment process. “I also worry about the future of it, as we hear potential school closures, budget deficits,” she said. The family is considering selling their house, in favor of a place somewhere else in the Bay Area “where there aren’t so many of the issues that SFUSD is running into.”

In October, David said he and his wife wouldn’t necessarily send their second child to the Jewish private school: “I think we probably will look at Peabody again.” And if that happened, he said, they may even move their oldest over to SFUSD. But by December, his outlook was different. David said his family has been very happy with the private school experience.

Koehler knew about each of these outcomes and thousands more like them, and she hoped they would amount to a turned tide, with enrollment starting to creep up rather than down.

This fall, she and her team learned of SFUSD’s preliminary numbers: Enrollment increased from 48,785 to 49,143. That said, hundreds of those kids are 4-year-olds, sitting in “transitional kindergarten” spots newly added to a statewide specialized pre-K program. In essence, enrollment had flatlined.

Koehler felt nonetheless undaunted. The stable numbers mean “that our outreach is working,” she said. “We are not losing people at the rate that we otherwise might.”

And not all of her plans, her incremental tinkering, have come to fruition yet. “One of my random dreams is that we could do aftercare at the same time as we do enrollment,” she said. She also pointed to SFUSD’s efforts to realign program offerings with what parents want most, spread more success stories, better compensate teachers, and get a bond measure on an upcoming ballot. For the 2025–26 application cycle, her team would like to automatically assign families to multiple waiting lists, “which we hope will make at least the process seem less cumbersome and frightening,” she said. Add in Lo’s changes, Koehler said, and “we’ll draw people back who right now are frustrated by our process.”

“I have a sense that the future will be positive.”

This story about public school enrollment was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Pleasantville is a mostly Black and Hispanic community located between two major freeways, the I-10 and the 610, in Houston, Texas. This placement is no accident, said Bridgette Murray, a retired nurse and local community leader: “The highway plan in the 1950s was used to divide communities of color.” Today, an estimated 300,000 vehicles stream by on a daily basis, she said. The neighborhood is also close to the Houston Ship Channel, exposing it to heavy industrial pollution.

But state air monitoring stations aren’t placed to capture all the hazards concentrated in that small area. So Murray’s group, ACTS (Achieving Community Tasks Successfully), has been partnering for almost a decade with urban planning expert Robert Bullard at Texas Southern University, to do their own air quality monitoring. ACTS just won a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to expand the program.

Bullard has been called the father of the environmental justice movement. His 1990 book “Dumping in Dixie” documented the systemic placement of polluting facilities and waste disposal in communities of color, as well as those communities fighting back. He said scientists and communities need each other.

“Our climate scientists are great at science, but not good translators when it comes to taking that data to people,” he said. “We need the principle of environmental justice embedded in our climate policies. The overarching principle is that the people who are most impacted must speak for themselves and must be in those rooms and at those tables when decisions are being made about their lives.”

“It’s a mutual respect,” Murray said of the relationship between her group and the Texas Southern researchers. “You have to have a partner that respects the ideas you are bringing to the table and also allows you to grow.”

Bullard is co-founder, with Beverly Wright, of the HBCU Climate Change Consortium, which brings together historically black universities and community-based organizations in what Wright has termed the “communiversity” model. There are partnerships like the one in Houston all over the South: Dillard and Xavier Universities, in New Orleans, working on wetlands restoration and equitable recovery from storms; Jackson State is working in Gulfport, Mississippi, on legacy pollution; and Florida A&M in Pensacola on the issue of landfills and borrow pits (holes dug to extract sand and clay that are then used as landfill).

Bullard said it’s no accident that so many HBCUs are involved in this work. “Black colleges and universities historically combined the idea of using education for advancement and liberation, with the struggle for civil rights.”

When these partnerships go smoothly, Bullard said, universities provide community-based organizations with access to data and help advocating for themselves; students and scholars get opportunities to do applied research with a clear social mission.

“We need the principle of environmental justice embedded in our climate policies. The overarching principle is that the people who are most impacted must speak for themselves and must be in those rooms and at those tables when decisions are being made about their lives.”

Robert Bullard, demographer, Texas Southern University

A lot of growth is happening in environmental justice right now. ACTS’ $500,000 EPA grant is part of what the White House touts as “the most ambitious environmental justice agenda ever undertaken by the Federal Government.” Notably, President Biden’s Justice40 initiative decrees that 40 percent of all federal dollars allocated to climate change, clean energy, and related policy goals flow to communities like Pleasantville: marginalized, underserved, and systematically overburdened by pollution.

Expanding on this model, the EPA has allocated $177 million to 16 “Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers” — a mix of nonprofits and universities that will help groups like ACTS get federal grants to achieve their goals.

But, warned Bullard, all the new funding might cause a gold rush, raising the danger of attracting bad actors. Sometimes, he said, universities act like “grant-writing mills,” exploiting communities without sharing the benefits. “You parachute in, you mine the data, you leave and the community doesn’t know what hit them. That is not authentic partnership.”

Murray, at ACTS, has seen that kind of behavior herself. “A one-sided relationship where they came in to take information,” she recalled. “The paper was written, the accolades [for researchers] happen, and the community is just like it was, with no ability to address anything.”

“Our climate scientists are great at science, but not good translators when it comes to taking that data to people.”

Robert Bullard, demographer, Texas Southern University

It takes sensitivity and hard work to overcome what can be a long history of town-gown tensions between universities and local communities. “You have to earn trust,” said Bullard. “Trust is not given by a memorandum of understanding.” One way to break down barriers is to make sure that all participants — whether they have a GED or a PhD — share the air equitably at meetings between researchers and community leaders. And those meetings might be held in the evenings or on weekends, because community groups are often run by volunteers. 

Denae King, a PhD toxicologist, works with Bullard as an associate director at the Bullard Center. She said she’s always looking for a chance to give space to community partners like ACTS, and reduce or equalize any power dynamic.

“I just ended a meeting where someone was asking me to put together a proposal to showcase environmental justice at a conference,” she said. “Before I would be willing to do that, I want to make sure it’s OK to showcase community leaders in this space. I might split my time in half and we co-present. Or it may look like me helping the community leader to prepare their presentation. I might be in the room and say nothing, but my presence says, I’m here to support you.”

This column about the ‘communiversity’ was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Next year will mark seven decades since the U.S. Supreme Court declared racially segregated public schools to be unconstitutional. Even the current Supreme Court’s conservatives have embraced that Brown vs. Board of Education decision.

Yet, 70 years after Brown, a key obstacle to racial equality in education continues to be white resistance to racial integration and to adequate funding for the education of Black and Latino children.

In the 1950s and 1960s, white resistance took the form of a revolt against integration and busing.

Private “white academies” — also known as segregation academies — sprang up to preserve the advantages held by the previously white-only public schools.

Today, one form of ongoing resistance is what scholars label “hoarding opportunities.” By using zoning and districting to create and perpetuate overwhelmingly white spaces and declining to share resources with Black and Latino children, white Americans limit the reach of integration and perpetuate inequality.

Related: Reckoning with Mississippi’s ‘segregation academies’

Not surprisingly, in 2022, the Government Accountability Office declared that school segregation continues unabated. The agency reported that even as the nation’s student population has diversified, 43 percent of its schools are segregated, and 18.5 million students, more than one-third of all the students in the country, are enrolled in highly segregated schools (75 percent or more of the students identify as a single race or ethnicity).

The Midwest — with 59 percent of all schools classified as segregated — is the leader in segregation.

The same GAO study showed that when new school districts are formed, they tend to be far more racially homogeneous than the districts they replace.

A key obstacle to racial equality in education continues to be white resistance.

Direct evidence of white resistance to racial equity in education can be seen in a survey experiment my co-authors and I conducted in 2021 that closely replicated findings from earlier periods. The study shows that white Americans continue to be reluctant to support increased funding for schools for Black children.

In our experiment, 552 white Americans were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The first group was asked: “Do you favor or oppose expanding funding for pre-kindergarten programs so that it is available for poor children nationwide? The $24 billion a year cost would be paid for by higher taxes.”

The second group was asked the same question, except that “poor children” was replaced by “poor Black children.”

About 75 percent of respondents in the first group said they favor spending tax dollars for such a program. However, in the group asked about “poor Black children,” just 68 percent were in favor. This is a significant gap in support.

The experiment suggests that among white Americans, support for public education funding for poor children is robust. But less so for poor Black children.

White resistance to desegregation and school funding for Black students has severe consequences for racial equality and the economy.

Related: OPINION: Our education system is not setting up students for success

Research published this month shows that Black students who attended Southern desegregated schools in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s experienced positive lifelong cognitive effects.

And data from the U.S. Department of Education still shows “substantial” racial gaps in reading and math competencies, high school graduation rates and, inevitably, college entry.

A recent Brookings report estimated that if the racial gap in education and employment had been eliminated, the U.S. GDP from 1990 to 2019 would have been $22.9 trillion larger. This would benefit us all.

The great promise of Brown was one of equal access to high-quality education. The hope was that income and other social disparities among white, Black and Latino people would dissipate over time. White resistance contributed to America not keeping this promise.

Policymakers, funders and education advocates must overcome white resistance to strengthen support for programs geared toward Black and Latino children.

This will help America’s quest to fulfill the promise of Brown. It’s time.

Alexandra Filindra is an associate professor of political science and psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago and a Public Voices Fellow through The OpEd Project. She is also the author of “Race, Rights and Rifles.”

This story about segregation in education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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