The change was triggered by a federal judge's release in 2000 of Tuscaloosa from the court-ordered desegregation mandate that had governed it for a single generation. The reasoning being that Tuscaloosa had successfully achieved integration, therefore, it could be trusted to manage that success going forward. this has happened now in hundreds of school districts, from Mississippi to Virginia.
Today in Tuscaloosa the citywide integrated high school is gone, replaced by three smaller schools. The high school is 99 percent black. Predominantly white neighborhoods adjacent to the high school have been gerrymandered into the attendance zones of other, whiter schools. Black children across the South now attend majority-black schools at levels not seen in four decades. Nationally, the achievement gap between black and white students, which greatly narrowed during the era in which schools grew more integrated, widened as they became less so.
The article quotes a 2014 STUDY CONDUCTED BY RUCKER JOHNSON, a public-policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley; the study was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, it
found desegregation's impact on racial equality to be deep, wide, and long-lasting. Johnson examined data on a representative sample of 8,258 American adults born between 1945 and 1968, whom he followed through 2011. He found that black Americans who attended schools integrated by court order were more likely to graduate, go on to college, and earn a degree than black Americans who attended segregated schools. They made more money: five years of integrated schooling increased the earnings of black adults by 15 percent. They were significantly less likely to spend time in jail. They were healthier.
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