Nation's Most Integrated Schools Now Seeing a Reversal; Charters School Making It Worse
The UCLA Civil Rights Project has released a new report on segregation in southern schools. The press release is below:
Black and Latino students in the South are increasingly isolated in intensely segregated schools and are doubly segregated in schools serving low-income students, according to new research released today by the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA and the Center for Education and Civil Rights at Penn State.
“While significant gains in integration were made during the Civil Rights era, we are unfortunately seeing a troubling reversal of those trends,” says Gary Orfield, Co- Director of the Civil Rights Project.
Building on the gains of the Civil Rights era, from 1968 to 1980, the percentage of Black students in intensely segregated schools (Schools where 90 percent or more are students of color) fell from almost 80 percent to a low of about 23 percent. But since then, the percentage of Black students in intensely segregated schools has risen to more than one in three (35.8%).
Meanwhile, enrollment in Southern schools by Latino students, who make up 27 percent of students in the South, surpasses that of Black students who make up about one quarter of all students. But Latino students are even more likely to be segregated with more than 40 percent of Latino students in the South attending Education Law Prof Blog:
