Why Are American Schools Still Segregated?
A new study offers two answers: White people are making up a smaller percentage of the population than they used to, and different races are living in different school districts
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| Alabama state troopers turn away a bus with 13 black students inside as they tried to attend Tuskegee High School, Sept. 9, 1963 (Associated Press) |
Jeremy Fiel grew up going to fairly diverse public schools in Lubbock, Texas. "Some schools had a higher black or Hispanic population," he said. "But there weren’t any all-white schools." After graduating college in 2006, he spent three years teaching science in Greenwood, Mississippi. What he saw in Greenwood shocked him.
"Segregation there was the most extreme I’ve ever seen," said Fiel. "There were literally less than five white kids in an entire public school."
Fiel's experience as a teacher inspired him to go to graduate school in sociology to study segregation and inequality in education. Now a Ph.D. candidate at University of Wisconsin–Madison, Fiel recently published a study in theAmerican Sociological Review that suggests the factors driving segregation have increased in scale in the past several decades—and that fixing the problem will require a new set of strategies.
Nearly 60 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme
Study: Putting Kids First Means Happier Parents
Problem: Where two of life’s biggest questions—how to be a good parent and how to be happy—collide, there is bound to be some friction. A recent study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science looks at whose well-being comes first in a family, the child’s or the parent’s. The topic feels a little thorny, to be sure, as the first sentence of the study’s abstract recognizes: “A contr