Can Brown v. Board of Education be revived following last week’s Supreme Court decision striking down racial integration plans in Louisville, Kentucky and Seattle, Washington?

Many don’t think so.  “Brown’s time has passed,” commentator and author Juan Williams declares.  He writes that even the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, the lead lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in Brown, said in 1990 “seating black children next to white children in school had never been the point”; instead, integration was a way to “equalize spending.”  Rather than seeking to integrate schools, particularly in big cities with large minority populations, Williams says, we should focus on improving well-funded neighborhood schools.  The point sounds plausible.  The only problem, however, is that no one has figured out how to make racially segregated high poverty schools work on a systemwide basis.  While it is true that blacks don’t need to sit next to whites to learn, segregated schools in America almost always have high concentrations of poverty.  These high poverty schools—even when equally funded—lack other critical “resources” that matter even more than money: supportive peers, active parents, and great teachers with high expectations.

Any parent knows that children learn a great deal from their peers, and research confirms that it is an advantage to have classmates who are academically engaged and aspire to go on to college.  Peers in high poverty schools are less likely to do homework, more likely to cut class, and about twice as likely to act out.  It is also an advantage to go to a school where parents actively volunteer in the school and hold school officials accountable.  For a variety of reasons, middle-class parents are far more active in school affairs; they are, for example, four times as likely to be members of the PTA.  If life were fair, low income students would get the best teachers because they need them most, but in fact the opposite occurs.  Teachers in high poverty schools are less likely to experienced and licensed, to teach in their field of expertise, and to have high teacher test scores.  Expectations are also dumbed down, so that the grade of “C” in a middle class school is the equivalent of the grade of “A” in a high poverty school, as measured by standardized test results.

So profound is the effect of concentrated poverty that middle class kids in high poverty schools perform worse on average than low income students in middle class schools.  The paucity of middle-class children explains why cities like Washington D.C. and Hartford Connecticut outspend their suburban counterparts but still fail to provide the kind of quality education provided by middle-class schools.

Significantly, all of these resources—positive peer influences, active parents, and good teachers—track more closely with the economic makeup than the racial makeup of the student body.  Forty years ago, the well-known Coleman Report found that “the beneficial effect of a student body with a high proportion of white students comes not from the racial composition per se but from the better educational background and higher educational aspirations that are, on average, found among whites.”

Last week’s decisions struck down race-conscious integration plans, which was unfortunate, but the good news is that they left the door completely open to income-based integration plans.  Across the country, about 40 school districts now use socioeconomic status as a factor in student assignment.  In Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina for example, the school board adopted a policy goal in 2000 that no school should have more than 40% of students eligible for free or reduced price lunch or more than 25% of students performing below grade level.   Low-income and minority students in Wake substantially outperform comparable students in other large North Carolina districts that have failed to reduce concentrations of poverty.  And Wake County’s middle-class students continue to thrive academically.

Wake County’s plan has the additional benefit of providing racial integration indirectly, which is desirable because we want schools not only to raise test scores but also to produce tolerant citizens.  The socioeconomic integration plan produces almost as much racial integration as the district’s prior race-conscious integration program and it does so in a manner that even conservatives concede is perfectly legal.

For years, American education has tried to make separate schools for rich and poor work well, to little avail.  The program in Wake County and other districts pursuing integration by income suggests that Brown doesn’t need to be buried.  It needs to be reinvented.

Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, is author of All Together Now: Creating Middle-Class Schools through Public School Choice (2001) and the recently released report: Rescuing Brown v. Board of Education: Profiles of Twelve School Districts Pursuing Socioeconomic School Integration.