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January 16, 2005
By Gary
Orfield and Chungmei Lee
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Much of the discussion about school reform in the
U.S. in the past two decades has been about racial inequality. President
Bush has promised that the No Child Left Behind Act and the forthcoming
expansion of high stakes testing to high schools can end the “soft
racism of low expectations.” Yet a disproportionate number
of the schools being officially labeled as persistent failures and
facing sanctions under this program are segregated minority schools.
Large city school systems are engaged in massive efforts to break
large segregated high poverty high schools into small schools, hoping
that it will create a setting better able to reduce inequality,
while others claim that market forces operating through charter
schools and private schools could end racial inequalities even though
both of these are even more segregated than public schools and there
is no convincing evidence for either of these claims. More and more
of the still standing court orders and plans for desegregated schools
are being terminated or challenged in court, and the leaders of
the small number of high achieving segregated schools in each big
city or state are celebrated. The existence of these schools is
being used to claim that we can have general educational success
within the existing context of deepening segregation. Clearly the
basic assumption is that separate schools can be made equal and
that we need not worry about the abandonment of the movement for
integration whose history was celebrated so extensively last year
on the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision even as the schools
continued to resegregate. There has been a continuous pattern of
deepening segregation for black and Latino students now since the
1980s.
What if this basic assumption is wrong? What if the
Supreme Court was correct a half century ago in its conclusion that
segregated schools were “inherently unequal”? What if
Martin Luther King’s many statements about how segregation
harms both the segregator and the segregated, drastically limits
opportunity, and does not provide the basis for building a successful
interracial society are correct? What if the Supreme Court’s
sweeping conclusion in the 2003 University of Michigan case that
there is compelling evidence that diversity improves the education
of all students is true and applies with even greater force to public
schools?
If, however, it is wrong to assume that segregation
is irrelevant and policies that ignore that fact simply punish the
victims of segregation because they fail to take into account many
of the causes of the inequality, then current policy is being built
on the foundation that it cannot produce the desired results and
may even compound the existing inequalities. We believe this to
be true. Segregated schools are unequal and there is very little
evidence of any success in creating “separate but equal”
outcomes on a large scale.
One of the common misconceptions over the issue of
resegregation of schools is that many people treat it as simply
a change in the skin color of the students in a school. If skin
color were not systematically linked to other forms of inequality,
it would, of course, be of little significance for educational policy.
Unfortunately that is not and never has been the nature of our society.
Socioeconomic segregation is a stubborn, multidimensional and deeply
important cause of educational inequality. U.S. schools are now
41 percent nonwhite and the great majority of the nonwhite students
attend schools which now show substantial segregation. Levels of
segregation for black and Latino students have been steadily increasing
since the l980s, as we have shown in a series of reports. Achievement
scores are strongly linked to school racial composition and so is
the presence of highly qualified and experienced teachers. The nation’s
shockingly high dropout problem is squarely concentrated in heavily
minority high schools in big cities. The high level of poverty among
children, together with many housing policies and practices which
excludes poor people from most communities, mean that students in
inner city schools face isolation not only from the white community
but also from middle class schools. Minority children are far more
likely than whites to grow up in persistent poverty. Since few whites
have direct experience with concentrated poverty schools, it is
very important to examine research about its effects.
Evidence of the Multidimensional Nature of
Segregation in Education
Race is deeply and systematically linked to many forms
of inequality in background, treatment, expectations and opportunities.
From an educational perspective, perhaps the most important of those
linkages is with the level of concentrated poverty in a school.
These differences start at an early age. A comprehensive federal
study of children across the country entering kindergarten shows
very large differences in the acquisition of skills invaluable for
school success long before the children ever enter a schoolhouse.
Schools where almost all of the students come with these problems
obviously face very different challenges than schools where some
of the kindergarteners come better prepared.
Our study of metro Boston shows a strong relationship
between segregation by race and poverty and teacher quality, test
scores and dropout rates. In the entire metro region, 97 percent
of the schools with less than a tenth white students face concentrated
poverty compared to 1 percent of the schools with less than a tenth
minority students. These differences were strongly related to the
results on the high stakes MCAS state examinations.
The nation’s dropout problem is concentrated
in segregated high poverty schools. In our new book, Dropouts in
America, we report that half of the nation’s African American
and Latino students are dropping out of high school. The most severe
problems are in segregated high poverty schools. For the high school
class of 2002 almost a third of the high schools that were more
than 50 percent minority graduated less than half of their class.
Among schools that were 90 percent or more white, only one school
in fifty had this kind of record. Half of the majority-minority
schools had dropout rates over 40 percent as did two-thirds of the
schools with less than a tenth white students. Nationally the gap
in graduation rates between districts with high and low proportions
of low income students was 18.4 percent in 2001, even higher than
the gap between majority white and majority-minority districts.
Richard Rothstein’s important 2004 book, Class
and Schools, reviews a wide array of studies that have shown for
decades strong links between individual poverty, school poverty,
race and educational inequality. Studies show that poverty is strongly
related to everything from the child’s physical development
to the family’s ability to stay in a neighborhood long enough
so that a school might have an effect on the student. His analysis
suggests that we tend to provide weaker education in highly impoverished
schools and that the major claims about successful reforms in these
schools are wrong. He argues that it is unrealistic to expect to
change schools in any deep way without dealing with some of the
issues that arise with poverty.
Further, a major 2005 report from the University of
North Carolina explored the increasing concentration of poverty
in metropolitan Charlotte following the end of desegregation. By
the 2004-2005 school year, more than a fifth of the metropolitan
district’s schools had poverty levels over 75 percent. Many
studies over four decades have found a strong relationship between
concentrated school poverty and low achievement. The study found
that between 2003 and 2004 the largest achievement test score gains
were reported by low income students attending middle income schools.
These students gained 10 points on the test compared to just 4 points
for similarly low income students in high poverty schools; 82 percent
of poor children in middle class schools were at grade level compared
to 64 percent of poor children in concentrated poverty schools.
The high poverty schools were performing much worse than schools
in nearby Wake County (metro Raleigh) which had socio-economic desegregation
to end poverty concentrations.
High poverty schools also tend to have a less stable
and less qualified teaching staff. A 2004 U.S. Department of Education
report showed that in schools where “at least 75 percent of
the students were low-income, there were three times as many uncertified
or out-of-field teachers in both English and science…”
Teachers tend to become more effective with experience, and building
an effective team in a school takes years of collaboration. In Charlotte’s
highest poverty schools, almost a third of the teachers left each
year. The North Carolina study recommended that the school district
limit the number of high poverty schools and use districting and
choice policies to create economically diverse schools.
A 2004 study by researchers at the University of Miami
and the University of South Florida explored the relationship between
segregation, integration and success of students in passing the
state’s demanding high stakes tests. Florida is one of the
states that achieved the greatest increase in desegregation in the
l970s and has been losing those gains ever since. After controlling
for other possible factors such as expenditures, poverty levels,
teaching quality, class size, and mobility of students, the study
showed that segregation was clearly related to lower pass rates
on the state test for black students in racially isolated schools
and that black students in integrated schools did about as well
as the rare black students in overwhelmingly white schools. The
authors concluded that segregated schools can be viewed as institutions
of concentrated disadvantage and that policies “that attempt
to resolve the achievement gap by funding equity or classroom size
changes” would probably fail if the segregation issue were
not addressed.
These and many other inequalities do not mean that
racial or socioeconomic integration is a magic bullet that can cure
all the inequalities rooted in the broader society, but they clearly
suggest that it is foolish to ignore the damage of segregation and
to accept policy changes that may make it worse. Those who argue
that because there are segregated schools that succeed we need not
worry about segregation are engaged in a fallacy of using exceptions
to the rule to prove a relationship.
Martin Luther King understood the nature of racial
inequality and campaigned against segregation, discrimination and
poverty. Dr. King died more than a third of a century ago and with
his death the civil rights movement lost its central voice and focus
and faced a strengthening movement toward preservation of the status
quo. With the passage of time and changing political leadership
we have seen sweeping policy reversals, rising segregation, especially
in the South and West, and a loss of understanding of the reasons
for Dr. King’s crusades against racial separation. Certainly
there was nothing about Dr. King that held that black institutions
were bad—he was the proud pastor of an overwhelmingly black
church of great influence and power and a proud graduate of the
preeminent black college for men, Morehouse in Atlanta. Segregation
was evil in his mind not because of skin color but because it almost
always led to unequal opportunities, given the realities of American
society, and because it produced both ignorance and damaging racial
stereotypes in the minds of both the segregated and the segregators.
Segregation was a basic structure that subordinated and limited
opportunities for nonwhite children. Dr. King advocated not only
plans that brought minority children into previously segregated
white schools but much deeper transformations in which segregated
schools became truly integrated with equal treatment and respect
for all groups of students.
Segregation was never just a black-white problem,
never just a Southern problem, or never just a racial problem, but
in the initial struggle in the South of the mid-twentieth century
that was clearly the focus. By the time Dr. King organized his last
movement, the Poor Peoples Campaign, his approach was clearly multiracial,
with a deepening emphasis on poverty as well as racial discrimination.
Speaking ten days before he died, King spoke of his conviction that
it was “absolutely necessary now to deal massively and militantly
with the economic problem…. So the grave problem facing us
is the problem of economic deprivation, with the syndrome of bad
housing and poor education and improper health facilities all surrounding
this basic problem.” Had he not been assassinated shortly
before that movement came to Washington, perhaps the link between
racial and economic isolation would be better understood as would
the profound impact of double segregation (often triple segregation
for immigrant children who are also isolated by language in their
schools.)
The civil rights movement was never about sitting
next to whites, it was about equalizing opportunity. If high poverty
schools are systematically unequal and segregated minority schools
are almost always high poverty schools, it is much easier to understand
both the consequences of segregation and the conditions that create
the possibility of substantial gains in desegregated classes. At
a time when the racial achievement gaps remain substantial and desegregation
orders are being challenged, it is particularly important to understand
the pattern that is developing and to think seriously about how
to address it.
This report examines the changing nature of segregation
and integration in a society that has now become far more profoundly
multiracial than it was in the past and explores some of the connections
between segregation by race, segregation by poverty, and unequal
opportunity. It has several basic goals—to help people understand
some of the mechanisms of educational inequality by looking at segregation
of schools and students by poverty, discussing the massive research
literature showing the ways in which high poverty schools are systematically
unequal, and then exploring the racial consequences of the fact
that concentrated poverty schools have a vastly larger impact on
black and Latino students than on their white and Asian counterparts.
Another basic goal of the paper is to show how different relationships
between race and poverty in differing parts of a nation in rapid
demographic transition challenges the traditional black-white description
of segregation. Unlike our earlier studies, this one gives central
attention to the issue of segregation by poverty and shows how it
relates to racial inequality.
To view the COMPLETE REPORT
and study conducted by The Civil Rights Project go to:
Why Segregation Matters:
Poverty and Educational Inequality (in PDF Format)
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