In Pursuit of a Dream Deferred: Linking Housing and Education Policy

285 Pages·2001·1.252 MB·English

by  John A. Powell, Gavin Kearney, Vina Kay (eds.)

In Pursuit
of a Dream
Deferred
PETER LANG
New York • Washington, D.C./Baltimore • Bern
Frankfurt am Main • Berlin • Brussels • Vienna • Oxford
In Pursuit
of aDream

Deferred
Linking Housing
and Education Policy
E D I T E D B Y
john a. powell, Gavin Kearney, & Vina Kay
PETER LANG
New York • Washington, D.C./Baltimore • Bern
Frankfurt am Main • Berlin • Brussels • Vienna • Oxford
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
In pursuit of a dream deferred: linking housing and education policy / edited by
john a. powell, Gavin Kearney, and Vina Kay.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Discrimination in education—United States. 2. School integration—United
States. 3. Education and state—United States. 4. Discrimination in
housing—United States. 5. Housing policy—United States. I. powell, john a.
(john anthony). II. Kearney, Gavin. III. Kay, Vina. IV. Series.
LC212.2 .I52 379.2’6’0973—dc21 2001029038
ISBN 0-8204-3943-6
Die Deutsche Bibliothek-CIP-Einheitsaufnahme
In pursuit of a dream deferred: linking housing and education policy
/ edited by john a. powell, Gavin Kearney, and Vina Kay.
−New York; Washington, D.C./Baltimore; Bern; Frankfurt am Main;
Berlin; Brussels; Vienna; Oxford: Lang.
ISBN 0-8204-3943-6
Cover design by Lisa Dillon
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability
of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
of the Council of Library Resources.
© 2001 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York
All rights reserved.
Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.
Printed in the United States of America
In loving memory of my mother Florcie Mae Powell
—j.a.p.

Acknowledgments
The editors would like to thank the following members of the Institute on
Race & Poverty for their hard work and insight in helping to produce this
anthology: Rachel Callanan, Tinisha Davis, Susan Hartigan, Jennifer Holt,
Lisa Jabaily, and Colleen Walbran.

Contents
Introduction 1
Gavin Kearney
Chapter 1 Beyond Brown v. Board of Education:
Housing and Education in the Year 2000 11
Kenneth B. Clark
Chapter 2 Living and Learning: Linking Housing
and Education 15
john a. powell
Chapter 3 Combating School Resegregation Through
Housing: A Need for a Reconceptualization of
American Democracy and the Rights It Protects 49
Meredith Lee Bryant
Chapter 4 The Persistence of Segregation: Links Between
Residential Segregation and School Segregation 89
Nancy A. Denton
Chapter 5 Metropolitan School Desegregation: Impacts
on Metropolitan Society 121
Gary Orfield
Chapter 6 The Current State of School Desegregation Law:
Why Isn’t Anybody Laughing? 159
Drew S. Days III
X Contents

Chapter 7 Segregation Misunderstood: The Milliken
Decision Revisited 183
Charles R. Lawrence III
Chapter 8 Discrimination: A Pervasive Concept 209
Michael H. Sussman
Chapter 9 The Boundaries of Race: Political Geography
in Legal Analysis 229
Richard Thompson Ford
Chapter 10 Equality and Educational Excellence:
Legal Challenges in the 1990s 257
Theodore M. Shaw
Conclusion Drawing a Blueprint for Linking Housing
and Education 269
Vina Kay
Contributors 283

Introduction
Gavin Kearney
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
—Langston Hughes “Harlem”, Selected
Poems of Langston Hughes
The Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota Law
School brought together some of the nation’s leading scholars and advo-
cates around issues of race, housing, and education to discuss the persis-
tent and interrelated segregation of America’s residential markets and
educational systems to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Brown
v. Board of Education decision. A collection of articles emanating from
that forum was published in the University of Minnesota Law Review
the following year.1 The title of the forum, shared by this anthology, in-
vokes the plaintive language of Langston Hughes in the context of the
dream of educational integration articulated in the 1954 Supreme Court
decision Brown v. Board of Education.2 Forum participants critically
evaluated our failure to adequately account for the interconnection of
housing and education in carrying out the Brown mandate and explored
possible avenues for achieving a renewed and emboldened commitment
to an integrated society.
The central issues of this forum remain important today. As we begin
the twenty-first century it is clear that the “problem of the color line” of
which W. E. B. DuBois spoke has outlived the twentieth century.3 This
color line, which segregates African Americans from full participation in
American society, remains strong, albeit more subtle and insidious. More-
over, the problem of twenty-first century America may be that of color
lines. Although blacks may bear the brunt of racist exclusion in our society,
rapidly changing demographics and political backlash, as evidenced by
2 Introduction

recent political attacks against immigrants, suggest that future society
may be increasingly ordered along multiple lines of race and ethnicity.
Realizing the dream of Brown is as important as ever. If we are ever to
attain our democratic ideal of equality of opportunity, then we must rec-
ognize the central role that segregation plays in maintaining inequality
and denying communities of color key resources and opportunities. We
must resolve ourselves to the achievement of a fully integrated society in
which all members are empowered to fully participate in and construct
those institutions and structures that define our world and ourselves.
Recent Jurisprudential Developments
Much of the discussion at the forum critically focused on Supreme Court
jurisprudence in the area of educational segregation. As several of the
authors discuss, since the time of Brown a series of key Court decisions
have frustrated the goal of educational integration by narrowly construing
the harms of segregation and restricting the breadth of remedies that may
be employed to address them. A key component of this jurisprudence is
the refusal to account for the role that residential segregation plays in
creating educational segregation. Courts have increasingly relied on this
jurisprudence to relieve school districts of desegregation orders, even where
racial demographics reveal continued segregation. Tellingly, the Char-
lotte-Mecklenburg School District was ordered to end race-based student
busing in 1999, thirty years after it became the first to do so.4 This order
came over the objections of parents and administrators and despite gen-
eral consensus that the district’s desegregation plan was working. Unfor-
tunately, this episode is more the rule than the exception, and this trend
is closing the door on desegregation even as schools remain segregated
and racial achievement gaps persist.
Although there have been no new Supreme Court opinions dealing
directly with educational segregation since the forum proceedings were
published in 1996, there has been at least one noteworthy judicial devel-
opment. In 1995 the Court heard the case of Aderand v. Pena, in which
a white subcontractor brought an equal protection challenge against a
federal program designed to ensure that minority business enterprises
received federal highway contracts.5 In declaring the program unconstitu-
tional, the Court overruled its own earlier decision in Metro Broadcast-
ing and held that all racial classifications employed by governmental ac-
tors would be evaluated with the same strict level of scrutiny regardless of
whether their purpose was benign or remedial.6