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70 years after brown v. board of education, new research shows rise in school segregation.

As the nation prepares to mark the 70th anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education , a new report from researchers at Stanford and USC shows that racial and economic segregation among schools has grown steadily in large school districts over the past three decades — an increase that appears to be driven in part by policies favoring school choice over integration.

Analyzing data from U.S. public schools going back to 1967, the researchers found that segregation between white and Black students has increased by 64 percent since 1988 in the 100 largest districts, and segregation by economic status has increased by about 50 percent since 1991.

The report also provides new evidence about the forces driving recent trends in school segregation, showing that the expansion of charter schools has played a major role.  

The findings were released on May 6 with the launch of the Segregation Explorer , a new interactive website from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University. The website provides searchable data on racial and economic school segregation in U.S. states, counties, metropolitan areas, and school districts from 1991 to 2022. 

“School segregation levels are not at pre- Brown levels, but they are high and have been rising steadily since the late 1980s,” said Sean Reardon , the Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education at Stanford Graduate School of Education and faculty director of the Educational Opportunity Project. “In most large districts, school segregation has increased while residential segregation and racial economic inequality have declined, and our findings indicate that policy choices – not demographic changes – are driving the increase.” 

“There’s a tendency to attribute segregation in schools to segregation in neighborhoods,” said Ann Owens , a professor of sociology and public policy at USC. “But we’re finding that the story is more complicated than that.”

Assessing the rise

In the Brown v. Board decision issued on May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racially segregated public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and established that “separate but equal” schools were not only inherently unequal but unconstitutional. The ruling paved the way for future decisions that led to rapid school desegregation in many school districts in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Though segregation in most school districts is much lower than it was 60 years ago, the researchers found that over the past three decades, both racial and economic segregation in large districts increased. Much of the increase in economic segregation since 1991, measured by segregation between students eligible and ineligible for free lunch, occurred in the last 15 years.

White-Hispanic and white-Asian segregation, while lower on average than white-Black segregation, have both more than doubled in large school districts since the 1980s. 

Racial-economic segregation – specifically the difference in the proportion of free-lunch-eligible students between the average white and Black or Hispanic student’s schools – has increased by 70 percent since 1991. 

School segregation is strongly associated with achievement gaps between racial and ethnic groups, especially the rate at which achievement gaps widen during school, the researchers said.  

“Segregation appears to shape educational outcomes because it concentrates Black and Hispanic students in higher-poverty schools, which results in unequal learning opportunities,” said Reardon, who is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and a faculty affiliate of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning . 

Policies shaping recent trends 

The recent rise in school segregation appears to be the direct result of educational policy and legal decisions, the researchers said. 

Both residential segregation and racial disparities in income declined between 1990 and 2020 in most large school districts. “Had nothing else changed, that trend would have led to lower school segregation,” said Owens. 

But since 1991, roughly two-thirds of districts that were under court-ordered desegregation have been released from court oversight. Meanwhile, since 1998, the charter sector – a form of expanded school choice – has grown.

Expanding school choice could influence segregation levels in different ways: If families sought schools that were more diverse than the ones available in their neighborhood, it could reduce segregation. But the researchers found that in districts where the charter sector expanded most rapidly in the 2000s and 2010s, segregation grew the most. 

The researchers’ analysis also quantified the extent to which the release from court orders accounted for the rise in school segregation. They found that, together, the release from court oversight and the expansion of choice accounted entirely for the rise in school segregation from 2000 to 2019.

The researchers noted enrollment policies that school districts can implement to mitigate segregation, such as voluntary integration programs, socioeconomic-based student assignment policies, and school choice policies that affirmatively promote integration. 

“School segregation levels are high, troubling, and rising in large districts,” said Reardon. “These findings should sound an alarm for educators and policymakers.”

Additional collaborators on the project include Demetra Kalogrides, Thalia Tom, and Heewon Jang. This research, including the development of the Segregation Explorer data and website, was supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.   

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University of Chicago Computer Science Researchers To Present Ten Papers at CHI 2024

The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is a premier international conference where researchers and practitioners gather to discuss the latest research in human-computer interaction. Held annually, CHI brings together experts from academia and industry to present groundbreaking research, share insights, and explore future directions in the field.

This year’s conference, CHI 2024, will see a remarkable showcase of innovative research from students and faculty at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science . Three papers, including one each from Associate Professor Blase Ur’s group, Associate Professor Pedro Lopes’ group, and Associate Professor Marshini Chetty’s group, received best paper awards. Another paper from Lopes’ group also received an honorable mention.

Some works, like papers featuring Neubauer Professor Nick Feamster and Associate Professor Marshini Chetty, are also collaborations with faculty from The Law School and the Harris School of Public Policy , highlighting the interdisciplinary work that often takes place in the department. Each paper span a diverse range of topics, including contextual notifications for highlighting fairness and bias in data science, in-depth studies of online content moderation policies, investigations into compliance with privacy regulations, AI for the well-being of workers, the introduction of a design space for writing assistants, groundbreaking advancements in haptic interfaces, and innovative approaches to promoting digital well-being through leveraging material receipts for screen-time reflection. The work reflects the department’s commitment to advancing knowledge and addressing real-world challenges in the realm of computing.

Bias In Data Science

Best Paper Award Harrison et al., 2024. JupyterLab in Retrograde: Contextual Notifications That Highlight Fairness and Bias Issues for Data Scientists.

Although the paper has won an award, the team will be presenting the paper virtually at the conference, rather than traveling to Hawai’i, as a show of solidarity with the community’s protests over the conference’s impact on the local community.

Content Moderation

Schaffner et al., 2024. Community Guidelines Make This the Best Party on the Internet: An In-Depth Study of Online Platforms’ Content Moderation Policies.

Compliance and Privacy Regulations

Tran et al., 2024. Measuring Compliance with the California Consumer Privacy Act Over Space and Time.

AI and Worker’s Well-being

Best Paper Award Das Swain et al., 2024. Sensible and Sensitive AI for Worker Wellbeing: Factors that Inform Adoption and Resistance for Information Workers.

Design Space for Writing Assistants

Lee at el., 2024. A Design Space for Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants.

Pushing Boundaries in Haptic Interfaces

Best Paper Award Nith et al., 2024. SplitBody: Reducing Mental Workload while Multitasking via Muscle Stimulation.

Honorable Mention Tanaka et al., 2024. Haptic Source-effector: Full-body Haptics via Non-invasive Brain Stimulation.

Teng et al., 2024. Haptic Permeability: Adding Holes to Tactile Devices Improves Dexterity. Marzursky et al., 2024. Stick&Slip: Altering Fingerpad Friction via Liquid Coatings.

The Human-Computer Integration Lab (directed by Associate Professor Pedro Lopes ) makes a significant impact with not one, but four papers showcasing groundbreaking advancements in haptic interfaces:

Tangible Intervention for Digital Well-being

Sathya et al., 2024. Attention Receipts: Utilizing the Materiality of Receipts to Improve Screen-time Reflection on YouTube.

The University of Chicago Department of Computer Science continues to make significant contributions to the field of human-computer interaction, as evidenced by the diverse and impactful research that will be showcased at CHI 2024 in May. These researchers’ papers exemplify the department’s dedication to advancing knowledge, fostering innovation, and addressing pressing societal issues through computing research.

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Title: capabilities of gemini models in medicine.

Abstract: Excellence in a wide variety of medical applications poses considerable challenges for AI, requiring advanced reasoning, access to up-to-date medical knowledge and understanding of complex multimodal data. Gemini models, with strong general capabilities in multimodal and long-context reasoning, offer exciting possibilities in medicine. Building on these core strengths of Gemini, we introduce Med-Gemini, a family of highly capable multimodal models that are specialized in medicine with the ability to seamlessly use web search, and that can be efficiently tailored to novel modalities using custom encoders. We evaluate Med-Gemini on 14 medical benchmarks, establishing new state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance on 10 of them, and surpass the GPT-4 model family on every benchmark where a direct comparison is viable, often by a wide margin. On the popular MedQA (USMLE) benchmark, our best-performing Med-Gemini model achieves SoTA performance of 91.1% accuracy, using a novel uncertainty-guided search strategy. On 7 multimodal benchmarks including NEJM Image Challenges and MMMU (health & medicine), Med-Gemini improves over GPT-4V by an average relative margin of 44.5%. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Med-Gemini's long-context capabilities through SoTA performance on a needle-in-a-haystack retrieval task from long de-identified health records and medical video question answering, surpassing prior bespoke methods using only in-context learning. Finally, Med-Gemini's performance suggests real-world utility by surpassing human experts on tasks such as medical text summarization, alongside demonstrations of promising potential for multimodal medical dialogue, medical research and education. Taken together, our results offer compelling evidence for Med-Gemini's potential, although further rigorous evaluation will be crucial before real-world deployment in this safety-critical domain.

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Vanderbilt Law School Students Craft Guide on Public Grocery Stores

May 7, 2024, 1:20 PM

This spring, four Vanderbilt Law Students authored Public Grocery Stores: A Guide for Policymakers . Using case studies from stores around the country, the paper sheds light on the benefits and drawbacks of public grocery store models, offering guidance and a model bill for policymakers and leaders considering their use in urban or rural communities. The guide is the first published paper to come out of the Political Economy and Regulation Policy Lab, a new course offered at Vanderbilt Law School, and was published by the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator for Political Economy and Regulation (VPA).

Authors Taylor Lawing ‘24 , Yesenia Jimenez ‘24 , Jon McNeal ‘25, and Raghav Gupta ’24 researched and drafted the paper during the fall of 2023 under the guidance of VPA Director Ganesh Sitaraman , who holds the New York Alumni Chancellor’s Chair in Law  “Our prompt was to research public grocery stores across the country,” said Lawing. “There were not many of these stores, but those in operation provided the foundation for our research. We used that research to determine if the implementation of a public grocery store was a viable approach to combat food deserts and food insecurity in urban and rural communities.”

The paper was partly inspired by the Illinois Grocery Initiative Act, passed in summer 2023, which will invest $20 million to help maintain and establish grocery stores in “food deserts,” areas with limited access to fresh foods. “We found that there was a lot of room for creativity in how these bills are applied,” said Gupta. “The Illinois bill is written very broadly. It’s not only about having to open supermarkets in these places, but also about how we can best serve the community.”

Through the semester-long course, the students researched their respective sections of the paper; Sitaraman offered guidance and feedback each week. “It was a really great opportunity to experience a different style of law school class, where the outside research impacted in-class discussions each week, with a focus on policy implications rather than caselaw,” Lawing noted. Their research included interviews with operators of public grocery stores in Boston, MA; Baldwin, FL; and Winston-Salem, NC; along with associated individuals and organizations. “One thing I noticed in our case studies was that oftentimes grocers can feel like they’re the only ones doing something,” said Jimenez, “but our paper also shows that there’s a network of people doing this kind of work, who are passionate about addressing food access and food insecurity.”

The paper, published by the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator (VPA) in March, begins with introduction to the significance and causes of Food Deserts, followed by an overview of solutions. It continues with a series of case studies detailing different public options – Publicly-Owned, Non-Profit, Public-Private Partnership, and Cooperative stores – and a guide for building stores. The Appendices offer a checklist for launching a store and a model bill for policymakers.

“I think a lot of folks come to law school with a desire to effect some positive change in the world,” said McNeil. “But the reality is, in that both law school and law as a practice, those opportunities might not come as readily as people might think. I think it was really cool to work on a project that would directly have a positive impact on many people.”

Jimenez noted the difference between the clinic experience and the Policy Lab – “they build two very different skill sets. Something I was looking for in the lab was how to address situations that don’t necessarily have a solution in the courtroom, and food deserts was one of them.”

“I think a lot of people, when they think of experiential education in law school, think of clinical work. I found the policy lab was another great way to teach my brain something new,” Gupta said.

“I’m proud of the way the students embraced this opportunity to conduct in-depth research and develop proposals with immediate, real world applications,” said VPA Director Sitaraman. “Their work is impressive and important, and I look forward to seeing how they carry forward the skills and insights they’ve developed into their future endeavors.”

VPA is part of Discovery Vanderbilt , a groundbreaking initiative to bolster innovative research and education at Vanderbilt. VPA focuses on cutting-edge topics in political economy and regulation to swiftly bring research, education, and policy proposals from infancy to maturity at a pace that aligns with the urgency of today’s challenges.

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