In practice, school district gerrymandering has effectively recreated "separate but equal". There is research (cited in the article linked below) that school districts are doing this.
https://www.vox.com/2018/1/8/16822374/school-segregation-ger...
Am I reading this wrong or does the article you cite in fact make a point that's exactly the opposite of your claim?
The graph of school district shapes' effect on educational vs residential racial segregation[1] shows that the net effect is to _reduce_ segregation (though not very significantly), and that at the district level, this is true of a fairly substantial majority of districts.
The thesis of the article seems to be that educational racial segregation is overall largely a consequence of residential racial segregation, and that district shapes mitigate this to a minor degree. The article is saying that districts _should_ be gerrymandered, in order to make districts less segregated than the residential areas around them.
I get why you might have interpreted it otherwise: the article is typically poorly-written for Vox and pretty much designed to trick readers into exactly the misunderstanding you fell into. Mentioning that "some" district shapes increase segregation relative to residential, showing multiple cherry-picked examples of same, and then smoothly seguing into advocacy for gerrymandering to reduce segregation relative to the residential baseline is pretty much designed to trap readers that aren't paying attention or actually looking at the graphs. Regardless of your view on the topic, framing the data in the graph the way they did without clarifying that the examples they emphasized are in the minority by far is just dishonest journalism (if you can call what Vox does "journalism"...)
[1] https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/qNGjZMngq3CCtBBqkpzpUUa3Ob4=...
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The Richards paper, on the other hand, claims in the abstract that gerrymandering "generally exacerbates segregation". I wasn't sure how to reconcile this claim with Monarrez's paper, the graph from my comment, as well as https://mobile.twitter.com/alv9n/status/950388285318328321 (from the articles author).
So I read the Richards paper, and now I can't reconcile why it explicitly contradicts its abstract (and your claim) in multiple places:
> Interestingly, gerrymandering was inversely related to segregation, such that districts with higher levels of segregation were less gerrymandered than less segregated districts. ..
> Indeed, in the only direct examination of the effects of educational gerrymandering, Clark (1987) con- cluded that gerrymandering of attendance zone boundaries in Topeka in the 1950s and 1960s were either neutral or desegregative in nature.
The results of her paper show a minuscule mean effect on school segregation due to gerrymandering: between 0.001% (ie 0.00001)and 0.003% mean increase in the level of segregation, with an outlier of 0.006% for Asian-White segregation.
As I mention above, this contradicts the findings from the other papers discussed. But even if we take this paper as our source of truth, it still seems like residential segregation is responsible for the vast majority of district segregation, and that the total magnitude of the gerrymandering effect is tiny.
"White-Flight" is a well-known concept. Also of note, the onus is on the accuser in most Western societies...
Yes, decades of redlining and other less explicit policies have created a situation in which residences are somewhat segregated.
That's not an argument against the goal of desegregation; it's a statement of what the causes of the current problem are.
> CASHIN: In 1954, 0 percent of black children in this country attended a majority white school. By 1988, 43 percent of black kids did. So we were fulfilling the promise of Brown. We were increasing in integration every year from the mid-'60s to the late '80s. We were closing the achievement gap between black and white kids.
> And then, in 1988, we begin to retreat. And in the '90s, the Supreme Court threw three opinions - signaled to lower courts that it was time for federal courts to get out of the business of policing schools' desegregation. And school segregation levels are about where they were in 1968. So we kind of lost 50 years of progress.
https://www.npr.org/2018/03/28/597750714/a-look-at-the-state...