May 24, 2018

An Unusual Idea for Fixing School Segregation

Originally published in The Atlantic on May 23, 2018.
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Many proposals for addressing school segregation seem pretty small, especially when compared to the scale and severity of the problem. Without the power of a court-ordered desegregation mandate, progress can feel extremely far off, if not altogether impossible. Some even believe—understandably though mistakenly—that no meaningful steps can be taken to integrate schools unless housing segregation is resolved.

But a new theory from Thomas Scott-Railton, a recent graduate of Yale Law School, provides reason to believe there are still new ways to think about this issue. Railton’s approach does something that’s all too rare in education-policy debates: He takes what are normally viewed as discrete issue areas—K–12 segregation, college admissions, and the lack of diversity at top universities—and says, what if those can all be addressed together? What if, in fact, it’s impossible to address them apart? Scott-Railton’s proposal, which he published in the Yale Law & Policy Review, is to reduce K–12 segregation by reforming the college-admissions process.

Scott-Railton began thinking about this last fall, after listening to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s reporting on This American Life about school segregation in the St. Louis metropolitan area. The radio broadcast featured wealthy white parents in a St. Louis suburb distressed by the prospect of black students from a neighboring town enrolling in their public schools. The black children’s district had recently lost its accreditation due to poor academic performance. (It was the same district that Michael Brown, who was fatally shot by police in August 2014, had graduated from.) If a Missouri school district loses its accreditation, the state permits any student enrolled to transfer to a nearby accredited one.

Packed at a school-board meeting, white parents one after another spoke out about their fears of this new incoming student population—that they’d bring increased crime, violence, and disease. And, some parents feared how the black students’ test scores might threaten their own children’s academic standing. “Once [they come] in here, will that lower our accreditation?” asked one parent, to thunderous applause.

But Scott-Railton knew that the parents were right about one thing: Integrating the school could mean that the school’s rating would drop, and schools with lower ratings tend to pay a penalty in the highly competitive college process. Universities tend to give a leg up to affluent, high test-scoring suburban schools—which then incentivizes wealthier parents to seek out segregation. But what if those incentives could be changed?

And thus Scott-Railton’s idea was born: to take demographics of schools into account in college admissions—giving priority to applicants who attended schools with a certain threshold of low-income students (say, above 40 percent). In other words, admissions officers would look favorably on students who attended an economically integrated school, much as they do those who have had unusual travel experiences or outstanding extracurricular achievements.

In a nutshell, he argues, this idea would drive integration in three ways: It would create an incentive for middle class and wealthy parents to enroll their students in socioeconomically integrated schools, it would create countervailing considerations for white parents considering leaving currently integrated school districts, and it would provide an incentive for private schools to enroll more low-income students. Middle-class students would likely benefit more from Scott-Railton’s idea than low-income students, since his proposal doesn’t inherently change the financial barriers to attending college. But millions more would benefit from the increased K–12 integration, which decades of research show improves public schooling.

It wouldn’t be the first time colleges sought to change applicant behavior by altering admissions incentives. In 2016, deans and admissions officers from more than 50 elite universities signed on to a report—Turning The Tide—a first-of-its-kind effort led by Harvard’s Graduate School of Education to signal that going forward, colleges will work to de-emphasize resume padding and hyper-competitive achievement, and prioritize communal values and work taking care of others. The colleges recognized that they were powerfully positioned to transmit different cultural messages to applicants and their parents.

One strength of Scott-Railton’s proposal is that colleges and universities would not have to sacrifice much to make it work. It would be relatively cost-neutral to implement, and wouldn’t require schools to accept any particular students. As he puts it, the plan operates within higher education’s “existing institutional constraints.” But that also means it would be unlikely to substantially increase campus diversity, at least initially, and for that reason Scott-Railton says his idea should not be seen as an alternative to measures like affirmative action and Pell Grants.

Nevertheless, Lloyd Thacker, executive director of the Education Conservancy and an expert on college admissions, said one of the biggest challenges this kind of proposal faces is just institutional inertia. “A lot of this will come down to courage,” he said. “Universities get bogged down in political constraints, caught up in managing competing interests, and it can sometimes just be easier to do nothing, rather than try something new.”

But if colleges could work up the will to try it, another benefit of this idea would be that it seems to be on solid footing legally. In the wake of Supreme Court decisions that have challenged both K–12 desegregation plans and university-level affirmative-action policies, advocates for diversity have been wary of pursuing new strategies. Scott-Railton took that into account in crafting his proposal, which recommends that admissions boosts come primarily from taking the poverty level of a school—not its racial makeup—into account, and for this reason it is more likely to withstand any kind of constitutional challenge.

“My sense of his plan is that it probably threads the needle pretty effectively,” said Sam Erman, a law professor at the University of Southern California who has studied integration and affirmative action. “There are some ambiguities in the legal doctrine, but it’s hard to see how you would launch a successful attack on this idea.”

Fear that the Supreme Court would eliminate race-based affirmative action has led other scholars to propose a college-admissions focus on school or neighborhood demographics. For instance, in her 2014 book Place Not Race, law professor Sheryll Cashin proposed substituting race-based affirmative action with a geographically-based system that took segregation into account. Scott-Railton’s idea builds upon this sort of notion by focusing more explicitly on using admissions to transform the makeup of K–12 institutions.

As Erman told me, without some kind of new experiment, integration advocates shouldn’t expect much to improve. “Most of what we’ve seen implemented are ideas that nibble at the margins, that make relatively small adjustments to things that the court has already approved,” he said, noting that unless the court swings left, it’s reasonable to expect the legal constraints to narrow even more.

“This is a very smart and strategic way of dealing with what has been the overwhelming obstacle to school integration, which is white and middle-class resistance,” said Rick Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and a longtime scholar of segregation. Kahlenberg said he likes the idea not only because it creates incentives for hyper-competitive affluent families, but also because it creates a way for universities to have more students who arrive with experience navigating diverse environments. “Elite universities need more bridge-builders,” he said. “I think this is a win-win.”

While the idea remains in its infancy, some other researchers have launched efforts to develop it further. Ilona Arnold-Berkovits, an education researcher at Rutgers who also began thinking more deeply about these issues after listening to the same This American Life episode which inspired Scott-Railton, launched a website, schoolbonuspoints.org, to begin mobilizing other policy experts, researchers, and funders around this idea of voluntary incentives.

There may be room for additional development. Scott-Railton’s idea could offer a real bulwark against white flight, but it is ultimately focused on integrated schools more than the truly disadvantaged schools. If an incentive-based policy like this were to be truly successful, leaders would need to coordinate it with efforts that directly address schools where racial and economic segregation are far worse. A strategy that preserves integration in schools that are 40 percent low-income may have no impact at all in a school that’s 90 percent low-income.

Perhaps one of the strongest merits of Scott-Railton’s idea is that it advances a new way of thinking about some very old problems, and encourages thinking about two issues—K–12 integration and diversity in higher education—together, rather than apart.

“In reality, for students, it’s a seamless web,” said Kahlenberg. “One impacts the other, and it’s not really until this proposal that we’ve seen those two worlds come together.”

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Tagged affirmative action, college admissions, incentives, integration, school diversity, school segregation, this american life
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August 11, 2017

Under Trump, Liberals Rediscover School Segregation

Originally published in The American Prospect on August 11, 2017.
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At the American Federation of Teachers’ biannual TEACH conference in July, union president Randi Weingarten gave a provocative speech about school choice, privatization, and Donald Trump’s secretary of education. “Betsy DeVos is a public school denier, denying the good in our public schools and their foundational place in our democracy,” Weingarten declared. “Her record back in Michigan, and now in Washington, makes it clear that she is the most anti–public education secretary of education ever.”

But it was Weingarten’s remarks about choice and segregation that ultimately drew the most fire: She highlighted politicians who had used school choice as a way to resist integration following Brown v. Board of Education; she argued that the use of private school vouchers increases racial and economic segregation; and she emphasized that privatization, “coupled with disinvestment, are only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.”

Her speech came on the heels of a new Center for American Progress report, entitled “The Racist Origins of Private School Vouchers,” which presented similar historical arguments. CAP and the AFT—liberal institutions that sparred over education reform during the Obama years—held a joint event on the report the week before, emphasizing that voucher programs generally benefit the most advantaged students, lead to increasingly economically segregated schools, and divert needed resources from public education. With Trump in the White House, teachers unions and the influential liberal think tank have apparently found some common ground.

The backlash from conservatives and education reformers was swift and fierce. TheWall Street Journal editorial board argued that Weingarten’s speech demonstrated that she “recognizes that the public-school monopoly her union backs is now under siege, morally and politically, for its failure to educate children, especially minority children.” Rick Hess, the director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, called CAP’s report “misguided, misleading and historically inaccurate.” And Peter Cunningham, who runs an education reform advocacy group, wrote in response that Weingarten was just projecting the flaws of traditional public schools and unions onto her opponents.

While many of these critics have long championed dismantling much of the public sector, there is something conspicuous about American liberalism’s newfound focus on school segregation.

Though CAP and teachers unions regularly speak about educational “equity,” it’s no secret that neither have been very vocal about school segregation in the past few decades. CAP, which strongly touted charter schools during the Obama years, had nary a word to say then about charters’ impact on racial and economic isolation. Even now, as CAP takes a new outspoken stand on private school choice and segregation, it has stayed silent on the segregative risks of chartering.

The relationship between teachers unions and desegregation efforts has been complicated, too.

In some respects, teachers unions served as leaders for the pro-integration liberal establishment during the years following Brown v. Board. Historian Jonna Pereillo traces these dynamics in her book Uncivil Rights. Teachers unions joined forces with civil rights activists to push for integrated schools, reduced class sizes, increased health and social services, and improved school facilities. Charles Cogen, who served as the president of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers between 1960 and 1964, and then as AFT president from 1964 to 1968, took strong stances in support of rezoning and school integration. Pereillo notes that Cogen pushed his union “to fight the tendency of many Northern liberals to see both sides of the integration debate,” emphasizing that liberal teachers should “stand by a forthright and consistent decision” to push for integrated schools. The UFT’s highest ranking black officer, Richard Parrish, also filed an amicus curiae in the Brown case, and the AFT later expelled some Southern locals that refused to cooperate with the Supreme Court’s decision.

But while unions backed efforts to integrate and equalize public schools, they generally opposed initiatives that would have required transferring educators into schools they didn’t want to work in. Focused on the unequal work environments between black and white schools, unions argued that to transfer teachers against their will would represent yet another example of teachers’ lack of agency over their professional lives.

Put differently, the AFT and its affiliates played an important role pushing for integration, but when teachers were asked to make the same sacrifices as bused students, unions pushed back, firmly asserting that working conditions in black schools would have to be improved first.

By the late 1960s, many black parents grew increasingly frustrated with the teachers unions’ stance—one they felt was cowardly and racist, and an excuse to avoid serving their children. Many also grew increasingly disillusioned that public schools would ever actually integrate, and, as part of an ideological and strategic shift away from integration to black power, they began pushing for greater decision-making power over their local segregated schools, including who should be allowed to teach, and what subjects educators should be allowed to teach. Teachers, in turn, balked at having their job requirements dictated to them by non-educators, internalizing it as yet another sign that they lacked agency over their professional lives.

And as the teachers-union movement grew—UFT membership, for instance, soared 66 percent between 1965 and 1968—thousands of the newer members proved to be more conservative in political orientation. “Unionists who had once enacted progressive social and political works through their unions now found themselves at odds with a growing number of new members who wanted little to do with civil rights projects,” Pereillo writes about the period.

In the 1970s and 1980s, court decisions that mandated busing for integrational purposes became an explosive issue for many white parents of school-age children. In such presumably liberal bastions as Boston and Los Angeles, busing opponents won elections to school boards and other public offices, at times shifting public discourse and policy well to the right, and not only on education issues. The fierce political opposition to so-called “forced busing” led much of the liberal community, including teachers unions, to turn its attention, resources, and political capital elsewhere. Activists within the African-American community also began to focus less on integration and more on issues such as funding disparities and school discipline. While school desegregation had always been controversial, the busing backlash transformed it into a third-rail issue.

But beginning in 2014, issues of racial justice began to re-enter liberal rhetoric in a more overt way. Following a wave of high-profile police shootings and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, the public started to grapple more openly with the legacies and realities of American racism. Teachers unions were not immune to this reckoning.

In the summer of 2015, at the National Education Association’s annual meeting, members voted on a historic new resolution to fight institutional racism, which they defined as “the societal patterns and practices that have the net effect of imposing oppressive conditions and denying rights, opportunity and equality based on race.” That same summer, the AFT formed its own Task F orce on Racial Equity to outline how the union could move schools away from zero-tolerance policies, reform discipline practices, and create more supportive environments for young black men.

Yet despite powerful new cases against segregation from a diverse set of thinkers—including writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and researchers like Raj Chetty—neither the AFT nor the NEA had yet to tackle segregation head on, even with their increased focus on issues of race and discrimination. And elsewhere in the liberal community, fears of provoking more white backlash in a nation where white nationalism was on the rise put a damper still on discussions of desegregation.

This tension was illustrated last summer, at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, when I had the opportunity to interview NEA President Lily Garciaabout her views on education policy.

Rachel Cohen: There’s been a renewed national discussion around school integration since the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education two years ago. School segregation was notably absent from the Democratic Party’s K–12 platform. Why isn’t school segregation getting more attention, and do you think the NEA could play a bigger role in pushing desegregation forward?

Lily Garcia: If you take a look at the most highly segregated schools, if you’re looking at all Latino kids, or all African American kids, then you’re mostly looking at charter schools. Poor communities usually end up being described as “poor, minority” communities. Why do those words go together? Why do those two adjectives have to describe the same communities? You can’t just treat the school. You have to treat the entire community. You have to treat poverty.

Integrating schools will not cure the poverty that affects those students. What they’ve done to integrate schools in some places where I’ve been is that they’ve closed down the school in the black neighborhood, and put those kids on a bus, and shipped them for an hour to the white school. They usually broke up the community so that you wouldn’t have a majority-minority school. We’ve seen [integration] done so poorly. What we really want to focus on is equity.

Cohen: Do you draw a distinction between the movement to integrate schools and equity?

Garcia: When you talk about school integration, there’s so much more than let’s just have black, brown, and white children sit together in the same classroom. You can do that simply by assigning kids to different schools. But why are there deep pockets of poverty where black and brown children live? You have to be talking about the roots of what’s going on.

Garcia’s responses were emblematic of the union’s fraught position. They expressed an obvious concern with questions of racial justice, broadly defined, but a resistance to engaging the specific, narrower question of racial segregation. Indeed, Garcia’s criticism of busing, and especially her dismissal of integration as “hav[ing] black, brown, and white children sit together in the same classroom,” might strike civil rights advocates as akin to the talking points deployed by conservative defenders of segregation. This language is not unusual in certain education reform circles, but less common coming from a more progressive organization. And while AFT President Randi Weingarten had spoken more supportively about integration efforts than her NEA counterpart, she too had avoided directly answering questions about her union’s role in addressing segregation, and acknowledged that busing opposition has made integration advocacy difficult. As recently as last year, almost no one in the liberal establishment seemed inclined to tackle school segregation head on

Until now.

There is no question that the election of Donald Trump and his appointment of Betsy DeVos to lead the Department of Education has created a new political landscape for liberal organizations, including on the issue of school integration. The attacks on the Trump administration’s school choice agenda as segregationist have both reflected and led to a wave of liberal concern over segregation.

Over the past six months, the focus of liberals’ education policies has changed. DeVos was rightly skewered in February when she praised leaders of historically black colleges and universities for being the “real pioneers of school choice,” failing to recognize that HBCUs were created as a response to unabashed racial discrimination. Critics seized upon this blunder as evidence that the school choice movement does not care about or understand segregation.

Liberals and teachers unions have also jumped at the opportunity to assail school privatization as racist, a perspective many had long believed but far fewer had verbalized. Now, when attacking DeVos’s enthusiasm for tax credit scholarships and private school vouchers, progressives point to Trump’s support for such racist policies as immigrant deportations and police brutality; his administration’s enthusiasm for vouchers and charters, they say, must be understood as yet another extension of the president’s discriminatory agenda.

“Racism is unfortunately and undeniably part of the context through which policy proposals emerging from this administration must be considered,” wrote Catherine Brown, CAP’s vice president of education policy.

The Century Foundation, another influential liberal think tank, published research in March that emphasized the risks that private school vouchers pose for integration efforts. (CAP and the AFT relied on this research when crafting their recent talking points on school choice.) Century Foundation senior fellow Richard Kahlenberg wrote in The Atlantic that policies to promote school integration took “a significant hit” from the Trump administration when it recently killed a $12 million grant program to support local districts boosting socioeconomic diversity.

While these critiques are overdue and welcome, the timing sometimes seems politically convenient. For instance, the grant program Kahlenberg lamented was only months old at its time of death, established in the final days of Obama’s eight-year presidency. Prior to that, his administration by and large refused to promote desegregation in the bulk of its major education initiatives. In some instances, Obama’s education team even incentivized policies that exacerbated racial and economic isolation, in part by treating competitive grant applicants who served segregated populations more favorably than those targeting diverse ones.

Many liberal institutions have modified their rhetoric on issues of segregation since Donald Trump came to power, but some still only invoke it when referring to vouchers. CAP and the Century Foundation, for example, have directed their focus on the segregative effects of vouchers, but much less so on charters.

Political tribalism plays a role here.There was great pressure, both explicitly and implicitly, for progressive organizations to defer to the charter-friendly agenda of the Obama administration. And it’s simply easier for labor to politically oppose Trump and DeVos than to fight Obama and Arne Duncan (Obama’s education secretary), even when the latter could be relatively cold to teachers unions (and they to him).

But now, with Trump in office, the NEA has adopted its first new policy position on charter schools since 2001—and it’s far more harsh than its old one. Among other things, the new policy blasts charters for helping to create “separate and unequal education systems” that harm communities of color, language that clearly harkens back to the Brown decision. The AFT has long been more generally critical of charters than the NEA, in part because charters are more heavily concentrated in cities where AFT locals dominate. But now with Trump, the AFT has also begun incorporating sharper critiques of segregation into its criticism of school choice. (The latest comes this week in a Dissent article by Leo Casey, the executive director of the AFT’s Albert Shanker Institute.)

A longtime NEA staffer has noticed “a real uptick in interest” in discussions of segregation at union headquarters over the last year. For a very long time, the staffer said, unions have been influenced by the same political climate that affected other liberal institutions, viewing many earlier desegregation efforts as either abject failures or politically toxic. In recent years, though, as the union-friendly Economic Policy Institute has published more and more on the harm caused by racial and economic segregation, the NEA staffer says they can tell it’s having an impact internally within their union. “Having an organization like EPI, with its stature in the labor movement, focusing on this issue really does change the dynamics,” the staffer said. While for decades progressives have looked at desegregation as a political dead end, the calculus—at least in some ways—appears to be changing.

If unions and think tanks are recent arrivals to the reinvigorated movement to promote school integration, they’re still ahead of much of the country, and civil rights advocates will surely welcome their help. But they may also have an opportunity to learn from organizations that have been fighting these battles far longer. Notable among these is the NAACP, which has long focused on the intersections of school choice and racial segregation. Partly due to concerns about segregation, the organization approved resolutions in 2010 and 2014 raising issues about charter schools. This was followed by a resolution in 2016 calling for a moratorium on new charters until more research could be done, and last month the civil rights group published a new report outlining policy improvements they plan to push for in the charter sector going forward. The NAACP’s campaign against segregation more broadly has been central to its mission since its founding over a century ago.

It’s important to recognize the complicated factors that bring groups to the 21st century’s burgeoning civil rights movement, because right-wing critics will certainly not hesitate to cry hypocrisy or opportunism. But there’s opportunity here too: opportunity for labor and policy organizations to develop a stronger commitment to school integration, learning from the experience of civil rights veterans; and opportunity for those veterans, who need allies now more than ever, to hold newly vocal advocates accountable for long-professed commitments to integration and justice. Political coalitions are always imperfect at their start, but that’s never meant a powerful movement couldn’t be forged from them in the end.

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Tagged AFT, betsy devos, Center for American progress, charter schools, desegregation, NEA, private school vouchers, school segregation, segregation, teacher unions, unions, vouchers
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June 28, 2017

‘Parents Involved,’ A Decade Later

Originally published in The American Prospect on June 28, 2017.
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Wednesday marks the ten-year anniversary of legal conservatives’ last great effort to kill school integration in the Supreme Court. That effort failed—though few understood that at the time. To this day, misconceptions abound about whether voluntary school desegregation is constitutionally permitted in the United States.

The legal showdown came in a landmark decision called Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. Five Supreme Court justices rejected voluntary desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville, finding it unconstitutional for school districts to rely on the race of individual students when making student assignment decisions. But, it turned out, it was the opinion of just one of those justices that really mattered.

Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote a plurality opinion, co-signed by Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, concluding that the districts’ race-based desegregation plans were unconstitutional violations of students’ individual rights. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Roberts wrote, glibly.

Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a dissent, co-signed by Justices John Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and David Souter. The court’s four liberal judges called it “a cruel distortion of history” to compare the discrimination in 1950s Topeka, Kansas to Louisville and Seattle in 2007. The decision, they warned, was one “the court and the nation will come to regret.”

But there’s a frequently overlooked twist to the Parents Involved decision. Four justices voted broadly against race-conscious integration plans, and four voted broadly in favor of them. In the middle was Justice Anthony Kennedy, who agreed with Justice Roberts in certain respects, and with the dissenters in others. In the places where Kennedy agreed with the dissenters, he represents their fifth vote, and it’s those arguments that prevailed—not the chief justice’s.

Thus it is Kennedy’s concurring opinion that most dramatically shapes our modern legal landscape today on questions regarding school segregation. Kennedy agreed that Seattle’s and Louisville’s race-based integration plans were unconstitutional, insufficiently tailored to pass legal muster, but said his conservative colleagues were “too dismissive of the legitimate interest government has in ensuring all people have equal opportunity regardless of their race” and that it was “profoundly mistaken” to conclude that states and school districts “must accept the status quo of racial isolation in schools.” Kennedy even endorsed specific strategies that he felt could be used to foster school diversity—like drawing attendance zones that take into consideration the demographics of students’ neighborhoods, and “allocating resources for special programs” such as magnet schools.

Kennedy’s concurrence included a passionate defense of the value of school integration, arguing that “[t]he nation has a moral and ethical obligation to fulfill its historic commitment to creating an integrated society that ensures equal opportunity for all of its children.”

Ten years later, what happened at the Court that day is still regularly misunderstood and misrepresented. Just last week, The New York Times incorrectly stated that the Supreme Court “declared it unconstitutional to consider race as a factor when assigning students to schools.” Three months earlier, NPR wrongly claimed that the Parents Involved decision prohibits the use of race and ethnicity to foster school integration.

“To say you can’t use race after Parents Involved is really misleading, unnecessarily constraining, and may even make districts hesitant to do anything at all,” says Erica Frankenberg, an education policy researcher at Pennsylvania State University. “I think it can be a real disservice to furthering integration.”

Phil Tegeler, the executive director of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, describes Parents Involved as a major loss for civil rights. Looking at the race of individual students to help achieve racial balance, he says, had been “a very standard, basic tool” that school districts had used to promote voluntary integration, and a strategy that had been long-used in court-ordered desegregation plans.

“But the Supreme Court’s decision does not stand for the proposition that school districts can’t think about race, or plan for racial integration,” he says.

The court’s decision initially spooked school districts that were pursuing their own voluntary integration plans, and deterred others that were considering launching their own efforts. George W. Bush’s administration also contributed to the confusion; following Parents Involved, his Department of Education posted a federal guidance suggesting only race-neutral means of pursuing integration would be legal. A coalition of educators, policy advocates, and civil rights leaders joined together in 2009 and made urging the Obama administration to take down the Bush-era guidance their first priority.

They were successful. Obama’s DOE posted a new legal guidance in 2011, affirming that “educators may permissibly consider the race of students in carefully constructed plans to promote diversity or, in K-12 education, to reduce racial isolation.” The guidance, which remains in place today, also listed specific strategies school districts could use to pursue voluntary integration.

“Getting that correct interpretation, with some real practical guidance for school districts—I can’t even emphasize how important that was,” David Tipson, the executive director of New York Appleseed, told me in 2015. “There was a very deliberate effort to misconstrue the 2007 [Supreme Court] decision and put fear into many school officials across the country. Everything we’ve been able to do to promote school integration has come in the wake of getting that new federal guidance in place.”

Over the past few years, New York City has indeed seen a flurry of unprecedentedadvocacy around school integration. Just earlier this month, Mayor Bill de Blasio introduced his administration’s most ambitious effort yet to diversify public schools. Though the mayor has plenty of critics who say his plans still don’t go far enough, few could have imagined this proposal even five years ago.

Aside from the new federal guidance and a few modest measures implemented largely at the end of Obama’s tenure, the Obama administration by and large refused to promote desegregation in the bulk of its major education initiatives. In some cases, the Obama administration even incentivized policies that exacerbated racial and economic isolation. While The New York Times just this week criticizedthe Trump administration for eliminating a small socioeconomic diversity grant program launched in the final month of Obama’s presidency, civil rights advocates generally agree that even that program was much too little, too late.

Today, some argue that in light of the political and legal landscape wrought by Parents Involved, integration advocates should focus primarily on socioeconomic integration, and keep the more polarizing discussions of race to a minimum. Yet other civil rights leaders counter that the benefits of socioeconomic integration and racial integration are not interchangeable, and that a narrow focus on socioeconomic diversity threatens to strip the desegregation movement of much of its historical and moral power. Some advocates also suspect that too many school districts now hide behind the threat of litigation to avoid actively pursuing racial integration.

“A lot of school districts are being too risk-averse, when they actually have a lot of legal latitude,” says Tegeler. “I think it’s appropriate for lawyers to advise districts to avoid looking at the race of individual students, but looking at the racial composition of neighborhoods, the combined race and poverty characteristics of census tracts—that’s completely fine.”

To figure out where school integration may go over the next few years, it helps to consider how the country has changed over the last decade. When Barack Obama was elected in 2009, many Americans took his win as a sign that America had entered some new “post-racial” age. But these delusions were largely crushed by 2014, when a wave of high-profile police shootings and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement fundamentally challenged and changed the country’s politics and narratives around racism.

And with that, the conversation around school segregation has changed as well. Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones reached millions of Americans in 2014 with her award-winning reporting on school segregation, and has worked determinedlysince to make the public grapple even more with the issue. Writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Rothstein published a wave of articles (and later books) challenging how Americans think about inequality and racism, and influential academic research emerging in 2015 and 2016 strengthened the evidence base in favor of racial and economic integration.

On the political side, civil rights advocates worry about what a major expansion in school choice policies—a stated priority of Donald Trump and his education secretary Betsy DeVos—could mean for school segregation. “Any unregulated choice program has real potential for increasing segregation by race and class, in particular increasing racial isolation and poverty concentration in the schools and school districts left behind,” warns Tegeler.

In 2016, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Representative Marcia Fudge of Ohio, both Democrats, introduced the Stronger Together School Diversity Act, a $120 million effort to support voluntary integration in U.S. public schools. Though mostly symbolic, advocates expect that bill to be reintroduced this year.

On the legal side, there is likely to be an increase in state-level school desegregation lawsuits over the next few years. While winning far-reaching remedies in federal court has been much more difficult ever since the Supreme Court’s 1973 Milliken v. Bradley decision, which prevents many urban school desegregation plans from including white suburbs, states courts are under no such restriction. Legal advocates see opportunities for more state-level litigation relying on state constitutional obligations. One such lawsuit was filed in Minnesota at the end of 2015, and it’s making its way to the state’s supreme court later this year.

Civil rights advocates clearly have their work cut out for them, whether it be affirmatively furthering school integration, or preventing new kinds of school segregation. Just last week, EdBuild, an education nonprofit, released a report that found 71 U.S. communities have attempted to secede from their school districts since 2000—most of them wealthy, white communities looking to extricate themselves from poorer black and brown locales. EdBuild finds that 47 of those secessionist communities were successful.

“We’re not expecting a lot of new affirmative enforcement coming from the Trump administration, but this issue of white enclaves looking to opt out of county-wide districts, particularly in the South, it’s a very dangerous trend,” says Tegeler. “We’re really hoping that the Education and Justice Departments pay attention to this, and recognize the importance of keeping these diverse, large districts together.”

But for all the obstacles confronting a rebooted school desegregation movement, the legal path towards integration still lies mostly open. A decade ago, it was far from clear that would be the case: Part of why the erroneous, far-reaching interpretation of Parents Involved has had such staying power is because many progressives at the time expected the worst. Instead, Justice Kennedy helped keep many traditional civil rights remedies alive, and the movement has pushed forward ever since.