School Integration and Segregation

This study examines college attendance patterns among graduates of Twin Cities high schools. It identifies huge disparities between the number of college-bound students in top and bottom college placement schools in Minnesota. 

Although the Court has only been asked to decide constitutional questions related to justiciability, those questions will determine whether and how Minnesota schoolchildren are able to vindicate their right to a desegregated education. This brief seeks to provide historical and factual context for the decision before the Court.

If there were a single central contribution that Minnesota has made to American history, it would be its leadership in civil rights, particularly advancing racial integration in schools and housing.  No other area of its activity has had such a profound, positive impact on the nation’s law, culture and politics.  Without Minnesota’s multiracial and bipartisan leadership, it hard to imagine the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights

The following report explains the paradox between the Twin Cities’ progressive politics and regional planning, and its relatively high levels of racial segregation.  In doing so, it shows how powerful special interests have worked with local, regional, and state government to preserve the segregated status quo, and in the process have undermined school integration and sabotaged the nation’s most effective regional housing integration program.

This Article highlights the evolution of school choice policies and their consequences, much of which has been negative in terms of increasing racial segregation.

This report updates the data underlying the 2008 report entitled Failed Promises: Assessing Charter Schools in the Twin Cities.

Data is compiled from various sources cited in the Journal of Law and Inequality article: "Regional Strategies for Racial Integration of Schools and Housing Post-'Parents Involved.'"

This research traces a group of inmates back to the neighborhoods where they lived when arrested and to the schools they attended to evaluate the relationship between segregation by race and income in neighborhoods and schools and incarceration.

This study examines reform in New Orleans public schools after Hurricane Katrina.

This combination policy brief and research paper shows a close relationship between segregation in schools and neighborhoods and argues that policy reform for schools and housing must be closely related and regionally coordinated.

This research paper details the prevalence of segregation in many Twin Cities schools.

This IRP report reveals the disturbing extent of school segregation in the Twin Cities region. However, the authors envision a brighter future if an already successful school choice program is expanded. The report describes how economic and racial segregation harm children and the region.

This article, published in the Fordham Urban Law Journal, recommends that land use and housing policies be marshaled to reduce residential racial segregation and concentrated poverty. Such policies should be statewide, or at least regional, in scope. Isolated policies encourage leap-frog development that in turn promotes both sprawl and racial segregation.

This article, published in the Vanderbilt Law Review, uses a New Jersey court case?In re Adoption of the 2003 Low Income Housing Tax Credit Qualified Allocation?to illustrate the tension between the FHA and the siting preferences in the LIHTC statute. It highlights a deep legal and philosophical contradiction in the United States between civil rights guarantees?particularly the duty to affirmatively further fair housing?and state and federal low-income housing policy.