When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Intriguingly incoherent. From On 65th Anniversary of Brown v. Board, School Segregation Is Alive and Well—Especially for Latinos by Edwin Rios.

In 1947, seven years before Brown v. Board of Education, a federal appeals court in California struck down segregated “Mexican schools” in Orange County. Mendez v. Westminster prefigured Brown; it was the first case to hold that segregation in schools was inherently unconstitutional. Not long after, then-Gov. Earl Warren signed a bill ending segregation in public schools across California, making it the first state to do so in the country. Warren would go on to become the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and his decision in Brown 65 years ago today followed the contours of the ruling in Mendez.

There was a lesson in this that was forgotten in Brown’s wake. The attack on separate-but-equal was an iterative process, with the struggle on behalf of Mexican students in Orange County inextricably joined to the struggle on behalf of black students in Topeka, Kansas.

Today, resegregation is well underway, and its effects are particularly acute among Latino students. Latinos are more segregated in schools in California than in any other state. Fifty-eight percent of Latino students in California—where the majority of students are Latino—go to intensely segregated schools in which more than 90 percent of their peers are nonwhite.

Forbidding students to attend schools because of their race was of course abhorrent and wrong. And we got rid of that.

But preventing active discrimination never resolved the issue of elective clustering. If kids attend local schools and populations tend to electively cluster, then you will de facto have clustering in the schools as well. To call this segregation is deceptive. Nobody is being prevented from attending their local school because of their race. That was the evil of segregation. We acknowledged segregation and we abolished it.

What Rios is wrestling with, and never acknowledging, is that people do voluntarily self-cluster by race or religion or language or whatever might be their primary valence of affinity. All across the nation we find schools which have some common attributes of their participants that are deviant from the national average. And even though no one is being precluded by law from attending.

Getting rid of the evil inherent in the state discriminating among its students based on race was a good thing and we did that. Racial homogeneity within a school was always only a loose proxy at best for state discrimination through legal segregation.

What was lost and never discussed and still not discussed, is that demographic valences can and do exist for reasons other than discrimination and legal segregation. School demographic homogeneity can be a possible indicator that illegal segregation is occurring but nowadays that is rarely the case. And it is worth emphasizing that demographic homogeneity is not restricted to race - it can be religion, class, income, etc.

There is a second lazy evil lurking in this old mental model.

“Brown, in the immediate aftermath, was focused on how do you integrate African-American children into a majority-white school. It didn’t have to be that way,” says Erica Frankenberg, an education professor at Penn State University. “But that’s how it was implemented.

“So much of our model of desegregation was in this biracial, black-white notion, it’s hard for us to actually think about what should it look like, if there’s no white majority? Or if there are three groups?”

Indeed. It often feels like the purported progressives got confused about their goals.

One set of goals is to prevent government discrimination based on race. That is a good goal.

The goal that seems to have been slid in under that noble objective (and an objective already achieved) is that all schools must share the demographic mix of the state or the nation. That is patently coercive and absurd and yet it is what the Rios's of the world are still pursuing. Inadvertently, they are creating a second pernicious form of racism. They are almost blatantly saying that African-American and Latino students have to be in the minority in their school in order to get the good education being imputed to white Americans.

Frankenburg is right. They never thought this through. Race is not the only demographic and not all demographics are randomly and evenly distributed. And it is unclear how simple mixing adds or detracts from educational outcomes. It is certainly not clear that race is a significant additive or detractor when other factors are controlled.

Nobody notes or complains about the education achieved in New York's selective academies even though the student population is dominated by Asians far out of proportion to their percentage in the City, State or Nation. The students are selected by academic ability alone and they all do exceptionally well whatever race they might be. The mix seems not to matter at all.

Other studies have indicated that there are virtually no issues or challenges when you control by class and by capability. In other words, many of the horror stories and urban legends surrounding bussing and similar efforts in the early 1970s were a product of class mixing, not race mixing. Schools with significant racial mixing but consistent social economic status of all students do perfectly well.

Rios leaves the impression that African-Americans and Latinos can only do well if they are in a school with a majority of whites. Nonsense. What they need is a good education at a good school, not an imputed racial inferiority. And there are excellent schools that are majority white, majority black, majority Hispanic, and majority Asian.

Focus on delivering an excellent education. Don't focus on enforcing some sort of state endorsed racism through allocating people to schools based on their race.

Rios's incoherence is based on the fact that he is identifying that there are many schools which are overwhelmingly one race or another and then assuming that we will conclude that race is the cause of different outcomes without acknowledging the role that class, religion (values), culture, etc. all play. Rios diagnoses what he thinks might be wrong (clustering) without identifying why this might be a causative problem or what ought to be done about it.

See Exhibit 4 - The Great Revealing for San Francisco's experience with Rios's worldview. Disaster all around.