Report: Public schools more segregated now than 40 years ago
Today, African American students are more isolated than they were 40 years ago, while most education policymakers and reformers have abandoned integration as a cause.
That reality is explained in a new report called “For Public Schools, Segregation Then, Segregation Since: Education and the Unfinished March” by Richard Rothstein of the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute, which looks at the reasons and the implications of continued school segregation.
Here are some excerpts of the report (with footnotes removed), which you can read here in full:
Fifty years ago last January, George C. Wallace took the oath of office as governor of Alabama, pledging to defy the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision prohibiting separate public schools for black students. “I draw the line in the dust,” Wallace shouted, “and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever” (Wallace 1963).
Eight months later, at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Martin Luther King Jr. set forth a different vision for American education. “I have a dream,” King proclaimed, that “one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black
