As education brings together different stakeholders or interest-groups and is ideologically promoted as an equalizing force in the U.S., any injustice inherently built into its structure will compound over the course of a student's career, which affects their adult aspirations and economic opportunities, navigation of later civic and political responsibilities, attitudes towards school that can be passed across generations, and creates a cyclic effect that traps the poor and uneducated in the under-class.

Black children disproportionately suffered from segregation in a few prominent and recurring ways, including access to far less-adequate facilities, material resources, and less-qualified teachers in over-crowded rooms, as human, social, and cultural capital were funneled into schools with higher performance and more perceived potential, which create patterns of upward mobility. The observable distinctions effect self-concept as they can be internalized and perpetuate spaces of exclusion. Black students were placed at serious deficits upon beginning their education and lost great grounds as practices of inequality coalesce. As part of a multi-level approach, it was essential for the NAACP to target desegregation in schools in order to salvage the opportunities of black students across the country.

Even then, many social scientists recognized the benefits of class and race mixing to create more compassionate and informed upper-class, as well as impart the lower-class with skills and practices that promote hard work and achievement.

Even though Brown v. Board of Edu. identified separate schooling as inherently unequal and legally ended segregation, desegregation occurred neither quickly not smoothly as many feared it would erode the performance or standard of their children's school. While desegregation was enacted legally, many states rejected its implementation in practice. In 1955, Brown II held that schools must admit blacks on a nondiscriminatory basis "with all deliberate speed." Nearly a decade later, the 1964 Civil Rights Act permitted that the government cut off federal funds from school districts still not in compliance with desegregation. The effort culminated in 1971, when, in order to uphold its decision, the Supreme Court permitted mandatory busing to achieve desegregation, which garnered extreme opposition as a remedy of racial imbalance.

So, essentially, school desegregation was more effective on paper than in practice, and was just one small part of the whole that cannot resolve multiple injustices.