Abstract
Despite the potential for increased integration as our nation’s student enrollment becomes increasingly racially diverse, school segregation has intensified since the peak of desegregation in the 1980s (Frankenberg et al. 2019). Deepening school segregation can be attributed to numerous causes, including changes in case law that influence student assignment policies (Orfield and Eaton 1996; Siegel-Hawley and Frankenberg 2011), school districts having been released from court-ordered desegregation (Reardon et al. 2012), residential segregation (Denton 2001; Frankenberg 2013), and shifting educational priorities from equity and access to excellence, competition, and choice (Petrovich and Wells 2005). A lack of political will, and in some cases an outright hostility toward integration, also contribute to intensifying segregation. This chapter explores how the national sociopolitical context, largely driven by former President Donald Trump and Michigan-native, former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVosBetsy DeVos, undermines school integrationintegration efforts, and in doing so, makes these efforts even more imperative. A cornerstone of the Trump Administration, unregulated choice in the form of charter schools, tends to stratify and segregate students along the lines of race, class, and achievement (Cobb and Glass 2009). An examination of charter school segregationsegregation trends at various levels, including national, state (Michigan), and local (Detroit), confirms that, in general, charter schools tend to be more segregated than traditional public schoolspublic schools, barring students and communities from accessing the benefits of desegregated schooling that have been documented through decades of social science research. Finally, suggestions are offered regarding how state and local leaders could pursue school desegregation efforts, despite the broader context in which the proliferation of charter schools inhibits school desegregation efforts.
Unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever begin to live together.
—Justice Thurgood Marshall, Milliken v. Bradley, 1974
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Notes
- 1.
At the local level, Detroit’s charter sector is not reflective of the state’s charter sector. As will be discussed later in this chapter, Detroit’s charter sector is predominantly Black.
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Ayscue, J.B. (2022). Charter School Segregation in Detroit. In: Ivery, C.L., Bassett, J.A. (eds) Detroit and the New Political Economy of Integration in Public Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99796-0_4
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