Educational Leadership

racially segregated school districts and metropolitan areas not only have permission, but also a constitutional obligation, to integrate.

That obligation cannot be fulfilled by school districts alone. Many ghettos are now so geographically isolated from white suburbs that voluntary choice, magnet schools, or fiddling with school attendance zones can no longer enable many low-income black children to attend predominantly middle-class schools.

Narrowing the achievement gap will require housing desegregation, which history also teaches cannot be a voluntary matter but is a constitutional necessity—that is, voiding exclusionary zoning laws, placing low- and moderate-income housing in predominantly white suburbs, and ending federal subsidies for communities that fail to reverse policies that led to racial exclusion.

Relearning our racial history, however, should be the first step. EL

1Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 551 U.S. 701 (2007).

2Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974).

3Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948).

4Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983).

References

Blum, S. H. (2006). Race, housing, and the making of twentieth-century Louisville, Kentucky. Doctoral dissertation, University of Kentucky, Lexington.

Bryk, A. S., Sebring, P. B., Allensworth, E., Luppescu, S., & Easton, J. O. (2010). Organizing schools for improvement: Lessons from Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

City of Seattle. (2012, April 25). City of
Seattle: 2011 Fair housing testing. Seattle,
WA: Seattle Office for Civil Rights.
Retrieved from www.seattle.gov/civil
rights/Documents/2011FairHousing
TestingReportfinal.pdf
Davis, K. (2005). Housing segregation in
Seattle. Seattle, WA: Seattle Office for
Civil Rights. Retrieved from www.seattle
.gov/civilrights/documents/housing_seg_
in_seattle-2005.pdf
Guryan, J. (2004). Desegregation and black
dropout rates. American Economic Review,
94( 4), 919–943.

newsletters/novdec2012.pdf Rubinowitz, L. S., & Perry, I. (2002).

Richard Rothstein ( rrothstein@epi.org) is research associate at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., and senior fellow of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California (Berkeley) School of Law.