Blackwell Reference Online

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The United States has a long history of providing racially segregated and unequal public education to its children. Racially separate and unequal public education was not an accident; it was created by public laws and policies enacted and enforced by state governments and local school systems. After a series of Supreme Court decisions eliminated the formal legal foundation for segregation, it was recreated through racially discriminatory practices in federal housing policies, lending for home purchases, employment, wages, and school assignment practices. Desegregation is the process that removes the formal and informal barriers preventing students from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds from learning in the same classrooms and schools. Since the middle of the twentieth century, various desegregation policies have been widely used to remedy de jure (by law) and de facto (by practice) segregation. Among the policies employed were mandatory and voluntary busing, pairing of white and minority schools, using magnet programs to attract diverse students to segregated schools, redrawing of school attendance boundaries, and siting new schools in areas between minority and white neighborhoods. Desegregation also involved creating racially diverse faculty and staff, employing multicultural curricula, and nurturing diversity in extra and cocurricular activities. These processes ensure ... log in or subscribe to read full text