The Resegregation of Schools in Small Towns and Rural Areas of North Carolina

While a great deal of attention has been directed toward increasing segregation of schools in large metropolitan areas, relatively little research has focused on small towns and rural areas. Have the public schools of a state like North Carolina become more or less segregated in the past decade? This simple question sounds strangely out of focus today given the time that has elapsed since the civil-rights movement placed it high on the national policy agenda. In the 1960s there was considerable satisfaction that the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision had resulted in considerable change in de jure segregation, especially in the South, where the region had shifted from the most segregated districts in the nation to the least segregated. What was not immediately evident was that the positive changes had occurred within school districts rather than between school districts. By the 1970s it was clear that as some school districts desegregated, others were showing signs of increased segregation. White populations, for a variety of reasons, were moving to the suburbs and America's largest cities were becoming more segregated. In 1975 during testimony before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, James S. Coleman reported, ...the emerging problem with regard to school desegregation is the problem of segregation between central city and suburbs.I By the 1980s this cloud of concern had become an accepted American tragedy. Reynolds Farley summed up the demographic evidence saying, Unless there are changes in the current policies that separate city and suburban students into different school

Geography · Political science · Socioeconomics · Sociology · School Choice and Performance

• Interdistrict Transfers, Latino/White School Segregation, and Institutional Racism in a Small California Town

  Esther Prins•Journal of Latinos and Education•2007

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