It has been 72 years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. While there has been some success in integrating schools across the South through enforcement mechanisms such as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (1964), which gave the federal government the authority to withhold funding from schools that did not comply, progress in much of the country has actually reversed since 1974. That’s when the Milliken v. Bradley ruling declared cross-district busing could not be mandated by the courts unless a specific district had shown intentional racial discrimination.
The root of segregation between school districts across the United States can largely be traced to a long history of discriminatory zoning practices by federal, state, local, and private authorities. Racially restrictive covenants that prohibited people of color from buying or leasing land in particular areas were not ruled completely illegal until the Federal Fair Housing Act of 1968, and mortgage redlining by the Federal Housing Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs channeled loans toward white suburbs while denying them to black families until the 1960s.
While explicit racially discriminatory legislation no longer exists in America, exclusionary zoning practices are maintained in many majority-white suburbs through bans on multi-family homes and minimum lot sizes, creating an economic threshold that disproportionately affects people of color who are less likely to have built generational wealth through homeownership.
Since a large portion of funding for public schools in America comes from local property taxes, districts with lower property values and higher percentages of economically disadvantaged and minority students often have lower per-pupil funding than more affluent, majority-white districts, creating disparities across district lines that appear to be both separate and unequal.
Although many Americans associate school segregation with the Jim Crow South, today the school systems with the highest levels of segregation between districts are often found in the Northeast and the Midwest, where de facto (in practice) segregation was used in lieu of de jure (by law) segregation.
According to a recent analysis by Brown’s Promise and the Segregation Tracking project, Connecticut is tied with New Jersey for having the highest percentage of racial segregation between districts in the country.
I am from Columbia, Connecticut, an upper-middle-class, predominantly white (~90%) town, but following eighth grade, I enrolled at Windham High School in Willimantic, where 71% of students were minorities. It was there that I received a cultural understanding of the world that cannot be measured through state-issued exams. The integration between college-bound white students from Columbia and economically disadvantaged minorities from Willimantic proved beneficial to everyone.
One of my close friends, a Hispanic from Willimantic, had not considered college until playing sports and becoming friends with Columbia students who came from highly educated households. Today, he is a doctor at an Ivy League Medical Center. His educational outcome is not unique, as countless studies, including one by the University of California, Berkeley, show that students in integrated schools have better educational outcomes than students in more segregated schools.
Unfortunately, in 2012, the town of Columbia, after multiple failed attempts, decided to remove Windham High School as an option for graduating eighth-grade students, sending them instead to schools with similar demographics.
While there is no available data that show a meaningful change in educational outcomes for Columbia students since this decision was made, Windham High School has become racially and economically isolated; 88% of students are now minorities and 75% are economically disadvantaged, and the college enrollment rate at Windham High School has declined from 53.9% in 2010 to 37.9% in 2024, which can only partly be attributed to the 9%-10% of students who were previously from Columbia.
With the Columbia students now enrolled at other schools, Windham High School is forced to rely more on local property taxes, which carry a proportionately larger tax burden than residents in affluent towns, such as Greenwich, while failing to achieve similar per-pupil spending.
There is, however, legislation in Connecticut’s Constitution that is unique in its enforcement against de facto segregation and could be a remedy for situations like that between Columbia and Windham High School.
Sheff v. O’Neill, the 1996 Connecticut Supreme Court decision, holds that the state has an affirmative constitutional obligation to prevent racial, ethnic, and economic isolation in public schools, and that school districting based on town boundary lines can itself be unconstitutional when it produces that isolation. While this decision has only been enforced at Hartford-area magnet schools, it is an interpretation of the state constitution and thus should apply statewide.
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Civil Rights groups in New Jersey and Minnesota have also brought cases before the courts, hoping to create legislation against de facto school segregation, but so far, Connecticut is the only state in the country where intent of racial discrimination is not necessary to prove to remedy the effect of racial isolation; yet the recent findings by Browns Promise and the Segregation Tracking Project show that legislation without comprehensive enforcement does little to address a startling problem.
Columbia is not unique; towns across the country have continued to secede from integrated schools, worsening disparities in the classroom. With very few enforcement mechanisms available, it is difficult to imagine this problem going away anytime soon.
Tyler Kania is an Independent Author Network Book of the Year finalist from Columbia, Connecticut.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
