Today in Labor History May 17, 1954: Brown v. Board of Education went into effect. In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal" public education was unconstitutional, and a violation of the 14th Amendment. The ruling reversed the 1896 "separate but equal" Plessy vs Ferguson decision. However, researchers at Stanford and USC have recently found that, in spite of this SCOTUS ruling, racial segregation in the nation’s 100 largest school districts has increased by 64% since 1988, while economic segregation increased by 50% since 1991. While residential segregation was a major driving force for school segregation in the past, the primary driving force for today’s segregation is the School Choice movement, which has allowed hundreds of charter schools to open up, many for-profit. During the 2021-2022 school year, 7.4% of all public-school students, 3.7 million kids, attended charter schools. And there tends to be much more segregation within charter schools. Additionally, there has been a decline in court oversight of segregation in schools, resulting from a number of lawsuits in the 1990s against affirmative action policies.

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