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In 1954 the United States Supreme Court ruled that separate schools for black and white children were "inherently unequal." This paper studies whether the desegregation plans of the next 30 years benefited black and white students in desegregated school districts. Data from the 1970 and 1980 censuses suggest desegregation plans of the 1970's reduced high school dropout rates of blacks by two to three percentage points during this decade. No significant change is observed among whites. The results are robust to controls for family income, parental education, and state- and region-specific trends, as well as to tests for selective migration. (JEL H4, 12, J1, JV, N3)
From Plessy v. Ferguson1 in 1896 until Brown v. Board of Education2 in 1954, Southern and Border States legally segregated their school systems by race. Black schools received fewer resources and black children were taught almost exclusively by black teachers. Outside the South, migration, housing patterns, and actions by state and local leaders contributed to similar racial isolation in the schools. With the Brown decision, the Supreme Court deemed segregated schools "inherently unequal" and therefore unconstitutional.
Over the next 30 years, federal courts ordered the implementation of desegregation plans for many of the largest school districts in the United States. It was the intent of these court orders to provide equal educational resources to blacks by eradicating segregation on the basis of race. Indeed, the desegregation of the public schools was among the most significant innovations in the educational system of the post-World War II United States. Nevertheless, there is little consensus on the effect of desegregation on integration's intended beneficiaries, black students. Figure 1 shows that, as the nation's schools were being integrated, from the late 1960's to the early 1980's, black high school dropout rates were falling and white rates were holding constant. The contribution of court-ordered integration to this decline is an important open question.
Ideally, one would compare year-to-year changes in black and white high school dropout rates in the years leading to and following integration. Lacking suitable annual data in the relevant time period, I compile census data and use variation in the decade of school desegregation, the result of judicial enforcement of the Brown decision, to estimate integration's effect on black high...