How are schools integrated?

Although on the surface we’re meant to believe that schools are equal today, we’re still faced with less-visible yet extremely dominating factors that heavily contribute to modern-day segregation across America. As children, the segregation is much less apparent, but as we grow older we learn about experiences like redlining and the racial wealth gap, which inherently have affected people’s living conditions for generations. A term I’ve heard mentioned a lot in the last few years is “generational wealth” referring to things passed on from generation to generation like homeownership and access to higher education. Generational wealth and poverty has been dictated by, amongst many other factors, the redlining that occured over 50 years ago. Growing up, I went to a school on a military base. There I attended elementary through junior high, and throughout elementary I grew accustomed to my peers. In intermediate school, students from another elementary school were mixed with the students from mine, but mostly all of the students who attended the other school were in a different branch of classes with different teachers than mine. I feel like this instilled a bias of “the other side of town” at a very early age. By junior high, everyone was then mixed, but everyone had their friend groups already established with who they had classes with previously, apart from the few outliers. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized the separation of the students was caused by the school zoning based on lower-income and higher-income neighborhoods.  Because I saw this first hand, I do not believe that schools are completely integrated today, we still see the discrimination that was supposed to be eradicated decades ago in our daily lives.