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Background Data of EAC Equity Focus

The U.S. in 2008 is not the U.S. of 1954. Many of the appropriate actions taken to integrate our schools following the Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court ruling may not be useful now. The sweeping scope and breathtaking pace of today’s global economic, demographic, and technological changes have placed enormous challenges upon school districts, and many problems, including disproportional representation, inequitable access for LEP/ELL students to high-quality instruction, inequitable access to highly qualified teachers, the dropout crisis, and achievement gaps, cut across lines of race, sex, and national origin.
Race: On June 28, 2007 the Supreme Court struck down two voluntary desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville with a majority of the Justices holding that, even though diversity and avoiding racial isolation in schools is important, individual students may not be assigned or denied a school assignment on the basis of race even if the intent is to achieve integrated schools. Following upon this ruling and the earlier Grutter v. Bolinger case at the University of Michigan, race may be considered as a plus factor along with other individualized factors in the pursuit of diversity in the student body. Nonetheless, U.S. public schools today have re-segregated to greater extents than in the years before Brown (Orfield, 2007). 
Sex: Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments states that “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Title IX prohibits sexual harassment, for example, but with its decisions in Gesber v. Lago Vista Independent School District, 524 U.S. 274 (1998), and Davis v. Monroe, County, 526 U.S. 629 (1999), the U.S. Supreme Court made it far more difficult for individual students to bring lawsuits for monetary damages against school districts for the behavior of teachers.
In terms of student achievement, research shows that in states where girls do well on standardized tests, boys also do well, and in states where girls score lower, so do boys (Corbett, Hill, & St. Rose, 2008). And, although the widest and most persistent gaps in student achievement are between low- and high-income students and between racial/ethnic groups, gender gaps in educational outcome are a matter of concern. Girls consistently outscore boys on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading tests, especially at upper grade levels, while boys tend to outperform girls in math and science. At all grade levels, African American males score lower than African American females and white students. They’re also the most likely to be suspended or expelled from school; to be underrepresented in gifted programs/advanced placement courses; to underachieve or disengage academically; and to experience the most challenges in higher education settings (Jackson & Moore, 2006).
One response to patterns of gender inequity, which may vary from region to region, has been a renewed push for single-sex schools, which are permissible under NCLB. As of April 2006, at least 223 public schools in the United States were offering gender-separate educational opportunities, up from just four in 1998. Although most were coeducational schools with single-sex classrooms, 44 were wholly single-sex schools (Dee, 2006).
National Origin: In recent years, the majority of people immigrating to the U.S. have been from Mexico, South America, Asia, the West Indies, and Africa. The largest growth has been in the Latino immigrant population (U.S. DHS, 2008). One in five students in public schools today is Latino (Planty, Hussar, Snyder, et al., 2008). Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 require equal access of LEP/ELL students to standard curriculum programs in public schools. Title III of the 2002 NCLB Act mandates that schools must ensure that LEP/ELL students, including immigrant children and youth, “attain English proficiency, develop high levels of academic attainment in English, and meet the same challenging State academic content and student academic achievement standards as all children are expected to meet.” School districts are required to devise their own plans that affirmatively develop English language skills and educational services for LEP/ELL students.
Desegregation: The Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision followed eight years after the Mendez v. Westminster ruling, which posed the first constitutional challenge to segregation on behalf of Mexican American students, and has powerfully shaped U.S. public education for black and Latino students (Miller, 2004; Valencia, 2005). School desegregation has been shown to benefit students in short-term ways (academics and inter-group relationships) and long-term (increased social mobility, positive racial attitudes), while students in segregated schools are often denied the resources (including textbooks, curriculum, and technology), stability, support, social networks, and status they need for access to the best colleges and employment opportunities  (Oakes & Saunders, 2004; Peske & Haycock, 2006; Wells & Frankenberg, 2008). 
But today new challenges have emerged.  Over time the courts have established complicated legal standards for evaluating race-conscious policies. This can be seen by looking at some of the key Supreme Court school desegregation cases [see Appendix A (Table 1)]. Even as isolation and inequity among public school populations are increasing, the June 2007 Supreme Court ruling on two desegregation cases, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, declared it unconstitutional to take race into account in order to end segregation in schools. While the Justices have left some opening for districts to take steps to avoid racial isolation, under this recent dramatic reversal of civil rights-era rulings, most current voluntary desegregation actions by school districts will need to be changed or abandoned, even though researchers have found that in districts under “unitary status” (deemed by a judge to have done as much as was practical under a desegregation order), separation and inequality often continue and even intensify (Bhargava, Frankenberg, & Le, 2008; Orfield, 2007).
The June 2007 ruling is significant because re-segregation is occurring in urban and suburban schools across the nation. Between 1968 and 2005 the number of white students in U.S. public schools dropped by 20%, while the number of black students increased by 33% and the number of Latino students increased by 38%. The number of students qualifying for free/reduced-price lunch has also risen substantially. The majority of black and Latino students in public schools today are in this category and are isolated within under-resourced schools, segregated both from white students and from middle class students (Orfield, 2007). Latino and other immigrant students frequently face triple segregation by race, class, and language. Many segregated high-poverty black and Latino schools do not meet the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act’s Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) standards and account for what Balfanz and Letgers (2004) have called the “dropout factories” at the center of the nation’s dropout crisis (Orfield, 2007).