On this episode, I talk with Richard Rothstein (Economic Policy Institute) about his book Color of Law: The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. While the book is not about education, Rothstein’s research is an outgrowth of prior research on racial disparities in education. In the book, Rothstein tells the story of how government policy has been used to create and sustain residential and financial segregation that, it turns out, may have a lot to do with the racial disparities we see between and within schools.

Richard Rothstein is a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a Senior Fellow (emeritus) at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He is the author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, which recovers a forgotten history of how federal, state, and local policy explicitly segregated metropolitan areas nationwide, creating racially homogenous neighborhoods in patterns that violate the Constitution and require remediation. He is also the author of many other articles and books on race and education, which can be found on his web page at the Economic Policy Institute: http://www.epi.org/people/richard-rothstein/.

Here is a link to the USA Today article on de facto school segregation I mention in my intro: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/06/23/why-segregation-still-plagues-americas-schools-and-how-fix-column/3234499001/