An acclaimed economist reveals that school integration efforts in the 1970s and 1980s were overwhelmingly successful -- and argues that we must renew our commitment to integration for the sake of all Americans We are frequently told that school integration was a social experiment doomed from the start. But as Rucker C. Johnson demonstrates in Children of the Dream, it was, in fact, a spectacular achievement. Drawing on longitudinal studies going back to the 1960s, he shows that students who attended integrated and well-funded schools were more successful in life than those who did not -- and this held true for children of all races. Yet as a society we have given up on integration. Since the high point of integration in 1988, we have regressed and segregation again prevails. Contending that integrated, well-funded schools are the primary engine of social mobility, Children of the Dream offers a radical new take on social policy. It is essential reading in our divided times.

This report looks at the past two decades and the impact of the growth of Hispanic and Asian populations and how they are being affected by school segregation, desegregation, and resegregation. School segregation of Hispanics has increased dramatically during a period in which the nation's Hispanic enrollment has also soared. Segregation has also grown slowly and steadily for blacks in the inner cities that have been desegregated under policies that left the suburbs unchanged. Data demonstrate that Hispanics are now significantly more segregated than Blacks. In spite of increased segregation in some cities, statistics for blacks across the United States show that the widely expected increase of segregation during the Reagan years did not occur either on a national basis or in the South where most blacks live. Reagan administration policies had no overall effect on the integration of southern black students by 1988. Data in this report do not reflect the impact of recent and pending court decisions that may affect urban school desegregation. A modest increase in the nation's residential desegregation, driven by a large increase in Black and Hispanic suburbanization, has helped offset the resegregation caused by the continuing decline of white residents in central city school systems. Twenty years of data on the 17 states that enforced mandatory segregation until 1954 show that the school desegregation accomplishments of the 1960s and the early 1970s were neither fragile nor transient. Different forms of desegregation plans have different effects on the level and persistence of desegregation and on the ability of a school district to retain white enrollment. Data in this report show that county-wide desegregation plans that include both city and suburbs are more effective on both fronts. There is no evidence that the problem of school segregation will go away, however, and a new definition of segregation will probably be needed as racial composition and suburban desegregation change. An appendix presents trends in school segregation and a chart of extreme segregation. (Contains 21 tables.) (SLD)

The United States Supreme Court's 1954 landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education, set into motion a process of desegregation that would eventually transform American public schools. This book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of how Brown's most visible effect--contact between students of different racial groups--has changed over the fifty years since the decision. Using both published and unpublished data on school enrollments from across the country, Charles Clotfelter uses measures of interracial contact, racial isolation, and segregation to chronicle the changes. He goes beyond previous studies by drawing on heretofore unanalyzed enrollment data covering the first decade after Brown, calculating segregation for metropolitan areas rather than just school districts, accounting for private schools, presenting recent information on segregation within schools, and measuring segregation in college enrollment. Two main conclusions emerge. First, interracial contact in American schools and colleges increased markedly over the period, with the most dramatic changes occurring in the previously segregated South. Second, despite this change, four main factors prevented even larger increases: white reluctance to accept racially mixed schools, the multiplicity of options for avoiding such schools, the willingness of local officials to accommodate the wishes of reluctant whites, and the eventual loss of will on the part of those who had been the strongest protagonists in the push for desegregation. Thus decreases in segregation within districts were partially offset by growing disparities between districts and by selected increases in private school enrollment.