Dive Brief:
- Civil rights attorney Daniel Shulman says little has changed in Minnesota — and has perhaps gotten "even worse" — since 1995, when he won a suit charging that the state was in violation of its constitution for "allowing groups of students to inhabit separate and inherently unequal schools."
- After that lawsuit, the state created a program to send 2,000 low-income kindergartners to wealthier districts, but that alone wasn't enough to desegregate St. Paul and Minneapolis.
- The new suit "seeks class action status for children in Minneapolis public schools and St. Paul public schools," on behalf of their majority-students-of-color population, naming the state, its governor, and its education commissioner as defendants.
Dive Insight:
Between Shulman's winning record, and the pervasive problems in both Minneapolis and St. Paul schools, it seems likely that the new desegregation suit will spark the kind of change needed in the state's urban schools. Previously, local media predicted Shulman's suit would try to inspire a reconfiguration of districts that would mix suburban and urban kids together.
A recent analysis by the Minneapolis Star Tribune found that 19 district elementary schools are now 80% minority students, while two are almost entirely white, and that "test scores in the most minority-concentrated schools lag integrated schools in the metro by about 25 percentage points."
Various factors are blamed for the lack of diversity in the urban St. Paul and Minneapolis districts, including new immigration trends, the end of bussing, and the rise of charter schools.
Nationwide, segregation in American schools remains entrenched. Though re-segregation has occurred in various schools across the South, racial bias is still an issue, as reported in Education Week's year-long series "Beyond Bias: Countering Stereotypes in School."