From my reading of a lot of the literature, this was not exactly the case. The gap in teacher quality and facilities was part of the rationale, but not the whole thing. If the gap had just been in facilities or teacher quality, the courts and leadership would have just ordered improving the facilities in the black schools, which would have been politically a lot easier.

The primary theory for desegregation, was that segregated schools inherently lead to stigmatization and that stigmatization lead to lower self-esteem and lower achievement.

Here, for instance is from the conclusions of a committee from the state Board of Education in Massachusetts back in the 1960s ( https://archive.org/details/reportonracialim00unit ): "The experience of Negroes in the United States, from the destruction of their familial and cultural ties in the days of slavery to the demoralizing surroundings of the Negro ghetto and the predominantly Negro school, tends to transmit to each generation of Negro children a lack of self-esteem and a low level of aspiration, which are perpetuated and reinforced by the segregated environment of the public school...children attending racially imbalanced schools are aware of their segregated environment and, from that environment, draw conclusions about their place in American life ..."

From the same document, they site an academic sociologist about the problem of segregated schools: "Teachers expect less of the students, the students expect less of themselves, they are traumatized by the sense of rejection which stems from the segregation, hence academic performance cannot be achieved."

You can find similar quotes in the Brown decision, or the sociological work upon which Brown was based (The Carnegie Corporation's book An American Dilemma).

Now, I think that clearly this theory is wrong on multiple levels. And the solutions based on these theories did not work on any level. These theories seem to me like "just so" stories created for politically motivated reasons. It is especially interesting that discrimination has been cited as a reason for Asian-American academic overachievement. (The theory is that if you are discriminated against, you are going to work extra hard to achieve in areas where there are objective standards, such as math). I suspect that this is also something of a just-so story and that discrimination probably doesn't have much of an impact either way.

As far as I know the gap still exists today, 50 years later, with only small changes over time, quite possibly due to changing measurement techniques.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_achievement_gap_in_the_...

I'm in favor of desegregation on capitalist grounds. I think it's unjust to legally force me to discriminate if I don't want to. In much the same way, I think it's unjust to force me to use yellow cabs rather than Uber, or prevent me from purchasing services from an unlicensed barber.

If a theory predicts X, and X doesn't occur, that shows the theory to be wrong. The theory should be discarded even if it supports policies I otherwise favor. That's true even if the predictions are on something that's unimportant.

Similarly, if I build a stock market prediction model, and it makes me money but incorrectly predicts how I make money, I'm probably switching it off. The reason is that it is clearly wrong, and will likely lose me money next time.