Fifty years after nine African-American high school students from Little Rock, Arkansas, put an end to unlawful educational segregation in the Deep South, research suggests that racial prejudice in the US is still a national problem cutting across social class and culture.

The explicit aim of the historic 1954 US Supreme Court ruling which led to the Little Rock campaign was to provide equal access to academic opportunities for racial minorities. But an equally important implicit goal was to reduce children’s prejudices.

Although schools may seem ideal places to teach children about tolerance and harmony, there is even now little consensus on how best to modify negative attitudes and behavior toward peers of different racial or ethnic backgrounds.

Various studies examining the impact of desegregation on prejudice have furthermore failed to produce consistent results. It’s just not clear whether going to school with children of other races will necessarily breed tolerance. The general lesson may be that proximity on its own will not cure prejudice.

Why is desegregation not enough? A recent Social Policy Report article on efforts to teach tolerance in schools provides some possible answers. Academic tracking sometimes places African American (or other racial minorities) in separate classes from white children. Thus they have little exposure to one another. Additionally, teachers’ attitudes appear to affect how US students in multiracial classrooms feel about one another.

Authors Jennifer H. Pfeifer, Christia Spears Brown, and Jaana Juvonen of the University of California, Los Angeles also review evidence on the impact of three approaches (beyond desegregation) to reducing racism among school children.

One called “multicultural curricula,” involves exposing children to positive portrayals of racial minorities in novels and history books, for example. However, the evidence suggests that, as with desegregation, exposure is not enough. Pfeifer and her team note that when multicultural curricula are used in predominately White schools, children don’t have the opportunity to apply their new knowledge in interactions with non-White classmates.

Nor do multicultural curricula take into account the cognitive development of children, when the evidence suggests that younger children, in particular, have a difficult time understanding that things or persons who look different from one another can nevertheless be quite similar.

More promising, according to the California study findings, are approaches that generate authentic interaction among children of different races and address the issue of racism head on.

In classrooms that use “co-operative learning”, for example, children of different races work together in small groups toward common goals. “Anti-bias curricula” and “social-cognitive skills training” attempt to teach children to see the world through other people's eyes and to develop empathy for others. These approaches also involve discussing prejudice and discrimination.

The Supreme Court recently ruled that public schools should not take into consideration racial diversity when accepting students. And statistics suggest that US schools are, once again, becoming more segregated. Desegregation might not be enough to cure racism, but at least it makes it possible for children of different races to interact. Current US trends could diminish that possibility.

“Teaching Tolerance in Schools: Lessons Learned Since Brown v. Board of Education About the Development and Reduction of Children’s Prejudice” by Jennifer H. Pfeifer, Christia Spears Brown, and Jaana Juvonen in Social Policy Report, Volume 21, Number 2, 2007.