Public schools are becoming more racially segregated
Public schools in the United States are becoming more racially segregated and the trend is likely to accelerate because of a Supreme Court decision in June, according to recent report a report by the Civil Rights Project of the University of California in Los Angeles. The rise in segregation threatens the quality of education received by non-white students, who now make up 43 percent of the total U.S. student body, the report says. Many segregated schools struggle to attract highly qualified teachers and administrators, do not prepare students well for college, and fail to graduate more than half their students. In its ruling the Supreme Court forbade most existing voluntary local efforts to integrate schools in a decision favored by the Bush administration despite warnings from academics that it would compound educational inequality. The trend damages the prospects for non-white students and will likely have a negative effect on the U.S. economy, according to the report. Part of the reason for the resegregation is the rapidly expanding number of black and Latino children and a corresponding fall in the number of white children, it says. Contrary to popular belief, the surge in the number of minority children in public schools was not mainly caused by a flight of white students into private schools. Instead, it says, the post-"baby boom" generation of white Americans are having smaller family sizes. "During the desegregation period there was a major decline in the education gap between blacks and whites and an increase in college entry by blacks ....," adds Gary Orfield, a UCLA professor and a co-author of the report. "That gap has stopped closing." The record of successive administration reforms such as the Goals 2000 project of former President Bill Clinton and President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" in 2001 "justifies deep skepticism," the report says. Those changes focused pressure and resources on making the achievement of minority children in segregated schools equal to children in schools that were fully integrated.
Washington Post By Matthew Bigg (Reuters)
[Editor’s Note: The full report, entitled "Historic Reversals, Accelerating Resegregation and the need for new Integration Strategies," is below. The Civil Rights Project moved this year from Harvard University to UCLA. Background on the Court’s decision and its aftermath is available starting from the second link. At the third link is an initial evaluation of the implications of the Court’s decision, in question-and-answer format, by NSBA’s Office of General Counsel.]
Civil Rights Project report
NSBA School Law pages on aftermath of PICS v. Seattle Sch. Dist. No 1
NSBA "An Educated Guess" guidance