Opinion

Sorry, Obama, America is not ‘re-segregated’

Hearing Obama administration officials commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision desegregating public schools, you’d think there wasn’t much progress to celebrate. They made it sound as if the nation’s schools are as racist today as they were under Jim Crow segregation.

Federal data tell a starkly different story.

National Education Association staff members from Washington join students, parents and educators at a rally at the Supreme Court in Washington on the 60th anniversary Brown v. Board of Education decision.AP Photo

The landmark 1954 case, Brown vs. Board of Education, may have “outlawed the notion of ‘separate but equal’ schooling or legal segregation, but it did not stop de facto segregation,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan argued on his blog. “Many school districts today are intensely segregated — as much as they have been at any time since after the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.”

His civil-rights chief, Catherine Lhamon, was equally downbeat about race relations: “We have slowly and very steadily slipped backward. All over the country we are seeing more and more racially segregated schools.”

First Lady Michelle Obama went further, arguing the country is re-segregating and reversing Brown’s advances. Speaking in Topeka, Kan., the city that gave rise to the case, she said: “Many communities have become less diverse as folks have moved from cities to suburbs.”

As a result, she argued, black students have been left behind by their white peers.

“Many young people in America are going to school largely with kids who look just like them,” the first lady added. “And too often, those schools aren’t equal, especially ones attended by students of color which too often lag behind, with crumbling classrooms and less experienced teachers.”

In fact, America has made remarkable progress in desegregation, while African-Americans have made great academic strides. According to Education Department data:

  • The share of black students in racially concentrated (90%-100% minority) Southern schools remains dramatically lower in 2011 (34.2%) than in 1968 (77.8%).
  • School segregation has fallen the most in the South, which today boasts the most desegregated schools in the country, while the North boasts the top five most segregated states (they’re all blue, or pro-Obama, states: New York, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan and New Jersey).
  • Blacks are 10 times as likely to attend majority-white schools as they were when the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed.
  • High-school graduation rates for black students, at 69%, are the highest ever.
  • The black dropout rate has fallen virtually every year since 1968 and now stands at 7%, just two points higher than the white rate.
  •  In big-city schools with large concentrations of low-income African-Americans, growth in student achievement is outpacing the rest of the country.
  • The black enrollment rate at US colleges has more than doubled since 1968 to more than 36%.

While overheated, the political rhetoric about re-segregation and academic oppression fits neatly into new housing policies designed to racially integrate the American suburbs.

The administration believes local zoning laws play a role in the “achievement gap” among blacks. It argues such ordinances discriminate against minorities by discouraging them from moving to majority white areas, which tend to have more resources and better-performing schools.

So it has tasked the Housing and Urban Development Department with drafting (and eventually enforcing) a proposed new regulation pressuring municipalities to ease building codes for affordable housing, including Section 8 rentals, in wealthy suburban areas with high-scoring schools.

The agency is tying removal of zoning “barriers” to future federal funding. Local officials must also “affirmatively market” suburban housing to low-income minorities under the rule, now being finalized. Failure to comply could also trigger discrimination charges. Call it affirmative-action zoning. To open suburban housing markets to more minorities in the meantime, HUD has increased the portability of Section 8 vouchers.

But America’s suburbs are not the islands of alabaster portrayed by administration officials in their push to integrate them. Even traditionally white neighborhoods are more diverse today.

In 2010, the average white person lived in a neighborhood where 77% of his neighbors were white, down from 88% in 1980, according to a 2011 Urban Institute study. Measured another way, in 1980 there were only seven big metro areas where the average white person’s neighborhood was more than a quarter minority versus 41 of the top 100 metros today. And the share of blacks in the average white person’s neighborhood climbed in 95 of those metro areas.

The study also found that blacks aren’t as clustered in inner cities, which have become far less racially segregated in recent decades.

The average black person’s neighborhood in 2010 was 48% black, down from 62% in 1980, the Urban Institute found. Meanwhile, the share of whites, Latinos and Asians in those neighborhoods grew.

The integration of neighborhoods and schools already is taking place organically, without federal engineering.

Urban planning expert Joel Kotkin says minorities — African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians — now make up more than 27% of the suburbs, further calling into question the administration’s concerns about such areas being exclusively white.

Census Bureau tracking of suburban counties, moreover, shows that minority families are flocking to the suburbs along with whites.

Take Gwinnett County outside of Atlanta. In 1980, minorities made up less than 10% of that suburban community. Today Gwinnett is a minority majority county.

Once regions of overwhelmingly white schools, big city suburbs are now on average only half white, and that ratio is steadily falling.

So don’t believe the gloomy reports from Obama officials. The country is in fact richly multiracial.

Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “The Great American Bank Robbery,” which exposes the racial politics behind the mortgage crisis.