Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Why Resegregation Happens—And How School Choice Can Fix It
Why Resegregation Happens—And How School Choice Can Fix It
Apr 5, 2025 11:32 AM

With its decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ended systemic racial segregation in public education. Now, sixty years later, courts have released hundreds of school districts from enforced integration—with the result being an increase in “resegregation” of public schools.

Numerous media outlets have recently picked up on a story by the investigative journalism nonprofit ProPublica about schools in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. According to the report:

In recent years, a new term, apartheid schools—meaning schools whose white population is 1 percent or less, schools like Central—has entered the scholarly lexicon. While most of these schools are in the Northeast and Midwest, some 12 percent of black students in the South and nearly a quarter in Alabama now attend such schools—a figure likely to rise as court oversight continues to wane. In 1972, due to strong federal enforcement, only about 25 percent of black students in the South attended intensely segregated schools in which at least nine out of 10 students were racial minorities. In districts released from desegregation orders between 1990 and 2011, 53 percent of black students now attend such schools, according to an analysis by ProPublica.

Why has this resegregation occurred? A forty-year-old experiment on racial diversity might just hold the answer.

In the 1960’s, the Harvard economics professor Thomas C. Schelling devised a simple model to test his intuitions about segregated neighborhoods. Shelling found that most neighborhoods in America were mostly or prised of black or white families. Only a handful of neighborhoods where found where neither race made up more than three fourths of the total. Racism seemed to be the obvious culprit for the lack of diversity, but Schelling thought something else might be involved.

His model showed how even tolerant people can behave in ways that can lead to segregated neighborhoods. It consisted of a checkerboard with 64 squares representing places where people can live. Two types of actors (representing, for example, whites and blacks) are placed at random among the squares, with no more than one per square. Schelling provided a “rule” that an actor will be content if more than one-third of its immediate neighbors (those in adjacent squares) are of the same type as itself. For example, if all the eight adjacent squares were occupied, then the actor is content if at least three of them are the same type itself as itself. If an actor is content, it stays put. If it is not content it moves. In Schelling’s original model, it would move to one of the nearest squares where it would be content.

Not surprisingly, Schelling found that the board quickly evolved into a strongly segregated pattern if the agents’ “happiness rules” were specified so that segregation was heavily favored. What was unexpected, though, was that initially integrated boards tipped into full segregation even if the agents’ happiness rules expressed only a mild preference for having neighbors of their own type.

Figure 1 on the right shows four stages in a simulation run by The Atlantic in 2002. As they note in their article:

Schelling’s model implied that even the simplest of societies could produce es that were simultaneously orderly and unintended: es that were in no sense accidental, but also in no sense deliberate. “The interplay of individual choices, where unorganized segregation is concerned, is plex system with collective results that bear no close relation to the individual intent,” he wrote in 1969. In other words, even in this extremely crude little world, knowing individuals’ intent does not allow you to foresee the social e, and knowing the social e does not give you an accurate picture of individuals’ intent.

If Schelling’s model is correct, we should find similar racial groups clustered together in neighborhoods. Now take a look these maps of 21 highly segregated cities in America. Schelling’s model predicts almost perfectly the results we find.

You don’t need Jim Crow laws, or even racial animus, to cause racial segregation in housing. All it takes is for people to have a “mild preference” for neighbors who share their race or ethnicity. In the majority of school districts in America, children are sent to local schools based on their address. When neighborhoods are racially homogenous, we should expect to find the same lack of diversity in the schools.

Assuming it’s a problem, what’s the solution to this “resegregation” of public education? One answer may be to support school choice.

Attitudes toward racial diversity (whether for or against) doesn’t appear to be an important factor in parents choosing private schooling for their kids. Likewise, it is unlikely to be a significant factor in the decision to use a voucher program to send a child to another public school.

When parents are allowed to send their children to the school of their choice, they are more likely to base their decision on factors that are related to educational concerns. Because this reasoning is shared by parents of all races, the effect can be a mitigation of racial segregation. For example, a study on Louisiana schools found that vouchers programs improved racial integration in public schools in 34 districts under desegregation orders.

“Micromotives,” as Schelling calls them, can lead to strikingly peculiar “macrobehavior.” The micromotive of seeking a better education for one’s child may just have the macrobehavior of improving racial diversity in public schools—but only if parents are given the freedom to choose their child’s school.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
G.K. Chesterton on the work of mothers
Our discussions about faith-work integration often focus on paid labor, yet there is plenty of value, meaning, and fulfillment in other areas where the market may assign little to no direct dollars and cents. I’ve written about this previously as it pertains to fatherhood, but given the ing holiday, the work of mothers is surely worthy of some pause and praise. My wife stays at home full-time with our three small children, and I can’t count the number of times...
Bob Woodson and ‘The Poverty Industry’
The Center for Neighborhood Enterprise in Washington is led by Robert Woodson who founded it in 1981 to help neighborhoods where what he calls “the poverty industry” doesn’t seem to help much. He’s torqued that many fellow African Americans have abandoned their poor brothers except to exploit them noting that 70 cents of every welfare dollar goes to social workers, counselors and others. His organization has trained 2,500 field workers in 39 states. He believes that instead of more government...
Samuel Gregg: Indivisibility Of Religious Liberty, Economic Freedom
Sam Gregg, Acton’s director of research, makes the case that limiting religious liberty also infringes upon economic growth in The American Spectator. Gregg uses history to illustrate the point. Unjust restrictions on religious liberty e in the form of limiting the ability of members of particular faiths to participate fully in public life. Catholics in the England of Elizabeth I and James I, for instance, were gradually stripped of most of their civil and political rights because of their refusal...
7 Figures: The Shifting Religious Identity of Latinos in the U.S.
Religious polarization is taking place in the munity, with the shrinking majority of Hispanic Catholics holding the middle ground between two growing groups (evangelical Protestants and the unaffiliated) that are at opposite ends of the U.S. religious spectrum, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center. Here are seven figures you should know from that report: 1. Because of the growing Hispanic population, a day e when a majority of Catholics in the United States will be Hispanic,...
Should We Ban Farm Tractors to Save Jobs?
America could have saved more jobs if, prior to the Industrial Revolution, politicians had banned the use of tractors. But that would have made everyone (especially those of us living in 2014) much worse off. Many Americans understand this point and yet still believe that when workers lose their jobs, we automatically e worse off. Economist Bryan Caplan explains the problem with this ‘make-work’ bias, and why we are better off because of 19th century workers who lost their farm...
Obamacare: Less Choices, Fewer Doctors And You’re Gonna Like It
We Americans like choices. Go to any large grocery store and stand in awe at the vast array of cereals: everything from regular old oatmeal to some sort of toasted rainbow sprinkles of joy. The market economy is built upon choice: not only does the consumer have a choice in what she wants, she can stay away from things she doesn’t want, like bad service or poorly prepared food. Yes, we like choices. Obamacare is built on fewer choices, however....
Tolkien, Hobbits, Hippies and War
Jay Richards and I have an Ignatius Press book on mitment to ing out soon, so we’ve been following developments in the Hobbit film trilogy more closely than we might otherwise. A recent development is director Peter Jackson announcing a subtitle change to the third film—from There and Back Again, to Battle of the Five Armies. That’s maybe a bit narrow for a novel that’s also about food, fellowship and song, but I think it’d be going too far to...
The Dignity of Chickens and the Character of God
After a farmer in Australia had a change of heart about keeping his chickens in battery cages, he freed all 752 hens. The video below (via Rod Dreher) shows the chickens taking their first steps on soil, and feeling sunshine for the first time. What is your initial reaction on seeing the video? Did you roll your eyes at the liberal-leaning, anti-business, vegetarian-loving motive that surely inspired the clip? Did you automatically assume the “animal rights” nuts (the video was...
Want To Change A Nation? Give A Girl A Book
I don’t know any terrorists, but they seem to be very fearful people. They are afraid of new ideas, other religions, air strikes, and bathing. Nicholas Kristof, of The New York Times, says that what terrorists are really afraid of are educated women. Kristof points out that the Boko Haram did not choose to bomb a church or go after politicians. They targeted a girls’ school. The biggest threat to a terrorist is a woman who can read, write, work,...
Kishore Jayabalan: ‘Say “No” to Government Expansion’
Kishore Jayabalan, director of the Istituto Acton in Rome, recently wrote an article at Aleteia, titled ‘Freedom, Truth, & State Power: The Case for Religious and Economic Freedom.’ He begins his piece with a statement Gerald R. Ford made soon after ing president: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.” Jayabalan continues: Trust in our political leaders increased around the time of the September 11,...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved