House Education panel to mark up 2 school desegregation bills
The House Education and Labor Committee will mark up a pair of bills on Thursday designed to tackle the growing racial segregation in America’s schools, POLITICO has learned.
The timing of the markup is symbolic as it will fall one day before the 65th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling that outlawed “separate but equal" schools.
Committee Chairman Bobby Scott (D-Va.) has long maintained that a more aggressive federal response is needed on school segregation, which he argues leads to inequitable funding and opportunities. By taking up these bills, the committee is taking a “carrot and stick” approach.
One bill — the “Strength in Diversity Act of 2019,” H.R. 2639 (116) — would extend incentives to voluntary community efforts to integrate schools. Passage of it would represent one of the most significant investments in promoting school integration since federal support for magnet schools began in 1972, according to a committee aide.
The bill was sponsored by Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) and co-sponsored by Scott and Del. Kilili Sablan (D-Northern Mariana Islands).
The second bill is called the “Equity and Inclusion Enforcement Act,” H.R. 2574 (116). It would restore a private right of action to file disparate impact claims under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act that the committee says would provide students with “adequate remedies for civil rights violation.” The measure would also create a Title VI monitor at the Education Department responsible for investigating complaints of racial discrimination.
The bill by Scott was co-sponsored by Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Sablan and Rep. Alma Adams (D-N.C.).
The move by the committee comes as America’s schools become more racially segregated. The share of "intensely segregated" schools enrolling 90 percent or more non-white students was at 18.2 percent in 2016 — three times higher than in 1988, researchers from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and the Center for Education and Civil Rights at Penn State University said Friday.
Separately, the GAO found in 2016 that the percentage of K-12 public schools that had high percentages of poor and black or Hispanic students grew from 9 to 16 percent from the early 2000s to 2013-14.
On April 30, Scott's committee held a hearing on school segregation, which the committee said was the first time it had done so since 1989.
"Congress cannot sit on the sidelines," Scott said during his opening comments.
Scott said that "desegregating schools is the most powerful tool we have to improve the lives of children of color and their families."
Both bills were also filed in previous congressional sessions.
The markup will be at 10:15 a.m. in 2175 Rayburn.
Next Article Previous Article