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School Desegregation We are committed to generating and synthesizing research on key civil rights and equal opportunity policies that have been neglected or overlooked. Racial Transformation and the Changing Nature of SegregationGary Orfield and Chungmei Lee. January 12, 2006 This report is about the changing patterns of segregation in American public schools through the 2003-2004 school year. We begin by examining the transformation of racial composition in the nation’s schools, the dynamic patterns of segregation and desegregation of all racial groups in regions, states, and districts by using data from 1968 until 2003-4. We examine both the changes over the last decade (1991-2003) as well as those over a much longer period (1954-2003). Data from this report are computed from the Common Core of Data of the National Center for Education Statistics of the U.S. Department of Education for the years 1988, 1991, and 2003.
New Faces, Old Patterns? Segregation in the Multiracial South Chungmei Lee. September 6, 2005 A third of a century ago the schools of the South became the most integrated in the nation, a stunning reversal of a long history of educational apartheid written into the state laws and constitutions of the eleven states of the Confederacy and the six Border states, stretching from Oklahoma to Delaware, all of which had legally imposed de jure segregation until the Supreme Court prohibited it in 1954. From being almost completely segregated in their own schools, more than two-fifths of black students in the South were attending majority white schools and many more were in schools with significant diversity at the height of integration.
Why Segregation Matters: Poverty and Educational Inequality Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee. January 13, 2005 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.
Is Resegregation Real? Chungmei Lee. October 26, 2004 Analysis by the Civil Rights Project has shown that the isolation of Latino and black students from white students in public schools has substantially increased since the l980s. These findings have been criticized recently in a report by the Mumford Center at the University at Albany, “Resegregation in American Public Schools? Not in the 1990s” and in Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom’s book, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. The Mumford report argues that the increased isolation is not caused by public policy but by demographic trends and hence, “it is misleading to label these trends as resegregation”... This paper seeks to address these criticisms, clarify our findings, and reaffirm our conclusion that black and Latino isolation has indeed increased, not only because of demographic trends but also because of public policy changes.
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