‘Threatening the Future’: The High Stakes of Deepening School Segregation
The 65th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education approaches on May 17, but fights over school segregation, rather than decreasing, are becoming more common. Cities like New York and San Francisco are debating how to assign students to schools in ways that foster classroom diversity, and school secession movements — in which parents seek to form their own, majority-white districts — are accelerating.
A new report from U.C.L.A. and Penn State outlines the changes in school segregation since the landmark Supreme Court ruling named after Oliver Brown, a black father who sued to enroll his daughter, Linda, in an all-white elementary school blocks from their home in Topeka, Kan.
The court’s unanimous 1954 ruling declared separate educational facilities “inherently unequal.” But the case is one of several major civil rights rulings, alongside those on voting rights and housing discrimination, that have been substantially weakened by more recent decisions.
Today, the decreasing white share of the public school population across the country may lead some to believe that schools are becoming more integrated. But the reverse is true, according to the report. The percentage of intensely segregated schools, defined as those where less than 10 percent of the student body is white, tripled between 1988 and 2016, from 6 to 18 percent.
In “a heightened period of racial conflict in our public life,” the report warns, deepening school segregation by race and class “are very high stakes trends threatening the future.”
Liberal States Suffer Some of the Most Severe Segregation
White students now account for less than half of the nation’s public school students, and Latinos are the most deeply segregated racial group in schools, according to the researchers.
While segregation was once most severe in the former states of the Confederacy, in 2016 it was in four liberal states — New York, California, Maryland and Illinois — that black children were most likely to attend intensely segregated schools. Latinos were most likely to attend intensely segregated schools in California, New York, Texas and New Jersey.
Nationwide, 42 percent of Latino students and 40 percent of black students attended schools where less than 10 percent of their peers were white in 2016. Those numbers have been rising since 1988.
Statistics like these are no surprise after decades of court rulings that released school districts from desegregation orders, and there is no CONTINUE READING: ‘Threatening the Future’: The High Stakes of Deepening School Segregation - The New York Times
