The creeping re-segregation of Minneapolis and St. Paul schools
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Three decades ago, the public schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul were largely racially integrated.
- Today, students of color in both cities' districts are far less likely to share classrooms with white peers, researchers have shown.
The big picture: Friday is the 70th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling — meant to end legal school segregation in the U.S. Yet new reports show Minneapolis and St. Paul mirror a national trend: racial segregation in K-12 public schools has increased dramatically.
Why it matters: Researchers have found school segregation disproportionately hurts Black and Latino students since those schools tend to have fewer resources, higher teacher turnover, and fewer advanced classes.
Zoom in: In 1991, Minneapolis and St. Paul schools barely registered on an index of racial segregation published by researchers at Stanford and the University of Southern California.
- Today, segregation between white students and kids of color in both cities is comparable to levels that districts like New Orleans and Atlanta have seen for years, according to their index.
- In Minneapolis, the index shows Black students are particularly racially isolated from their white peers.
- In St. Paul, the rate of segregation between Asian and white students stands out in the numbers.
Zoom out: The data also show segregation creeping up in suburban districts like Osseo and Robbinsdale as non-white enrollment increases in schools across the Twin Cities.
State of play: School segregation is at the heart of an ongoing lawsuit a group of Minneapolis and St. Paul parents filed against the state in 2015.
Catch up quick: The parents argued school segregation violated their children's constitutional rights to an adequate education.
- Late last year, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that the mere existence of "racial imbalances" between schools isn't necessarily proof that children's rights had been violated.
- Next, plaintiffs will return to a lower court to offer evidence the high court demanded: that segregation is a "substantial factor" in educational harms to children.
Friction point: In a forceful dissent, Chief Justice Natalie Hudson — the court's only Black member — said the latest test score data should've been enough to prove that segregation "has gone hand in hand with depressed academic outcomes for students of color."
- Black, Latino, and Indigenous students were less likely to meet standards on state tests than white and Asian students.
What they're saying: "People became convinced that desegregation didn't work, and you couldn't do it. And so there's just a lack of attention to this," Patricia Gándara, co-director of UCLA's Civil Rights Project, told Axios' Russell Contreras.
Go deeper: Nationwide, school segregation surges 70 years after Brown ruling