U.S. Chief Justice Earl Warren in Washington, Aug. 14, 1964. PHOTO: CHARLES TASNADI/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Warren’s claim that segregated schools produced inferior educational results was wrong when he wrote it in 1954. That year, an all-black high school within walking distance of the Supreme Court building sent a higher percentage of students to college than any white public high school in Washington. The same institution, Dunbar High, also had been known to outperform white high schools on standardized tests…
Nor were blacks the only ethnic group that had attended high-achieving segregated schools. “The most casual knowledge of history shows that all-Jewish, all-Chinese, or all-German schools have not been inherently inferior,” the scholar Thomas Sowell has noted. “Chinese and Japanese school children were at one time segregated both de facto and de jure in California, yet they outperformed white children—and largely still do.”
[On] the 70th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision… new research confirms a startling trend: School segregation has been getting steadily worse over the last three decades.
Researchers at Stanford University and the University of Southern California found that racial segregation in the country’s 100 biggest school districts, which serve the most students of color, has increased by 64 percent since 1988. Economic segregation, or the division between students who receive free or reduced lunch and those who do not, increased by 50 percent since 1991.