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Fifty years after the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, racial disparities in achievement are a robust empirical reality. Black children enter kindergarten lagging behind white children, and these differences grow throughout the school years (James S. Coleman et al., 1966; Fryer and Steven D. Levitt, 2004). Even in affluent neighborhoods, achievement gaps are startling (Ronald F. Ferguson, 2002). Including myriad controls to proxy for environmental factors, socioeconomic status, and family composition, the test score gap remains essentially unchanged (Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips, 1998). The Brown decision provided unprecedented hope for a future of educational equality—a hope that has yet to be realized.

Many believe that the dramatic differences between blacks and whites in achievement are due, in part, to school segregation (Eric A. Hanushek et al., 2002). 1 …