Title: Impact of Classroom Segregation on Student Education | American University
Headings: Classroom Segregation: History and Current Impact on Student Education
Classroom Segregation: History and Current Impact on Student Education
A Brief History of Classroom Segregation
Resistance to Integration
Busing
Benefits of Desegregation
Integrated Schools and Achievement
Resegregation in Today’s Classroom
Effects of Resegregation
Strategies to Address Segregation
Transform Education Through Leadership
Recommended Readings

Content: A Brief History of Classroom Segregation
As early as the 1930s, members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) were looking for strategies to desegregate schools through lawsuits targeting the legal doctrine of “separate but equal.” However, not until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 did the US Supreme Court unanimously outlaw state-sanctioned school segregation, ruling it unconstitutional. From their inception, schools serving students of color received significantly less funding than schools serving white students and faced overcrowding, inadequate supplies, and insufficiently paid teachers. Such disparities resulted in gaps in the educational opportunities available to Black and white communities. In 1950, only 1 in 10 Black adults graduated from high school compared to 4 in 10 white adults. Especially hard hit were people living in states with a history of Jim Crow laws—Black adults in Mississippi, Georgia, and other Southern states having an average of only about five years of schooling. Resistance to Integration
Once efforts to integrate schools began, campaigns directed by white community leaders and elected officials to resist and defy the Brown v. Board of Education ruling followed. One of the most famous examples occurred in 1957, when Arkansas governor Orval Eugene Faubus called upon the state’s National Guard to block nine newly enrolled Black students from entering Little Rock’s Central High School. Another defiance of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling took place in Cleveland, Mississippi, where local officials devised schemes to stop desegregation by building schools in locations that kept Black students in all-Black schools, and created “dual residencies” that allowed the school district to continue sending students to particular schools based on their race. Busing
Nonetheless, proponents of integration pressed on, introducing programs and strategies to address the issue.