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January 16, 2003
By Erica
Frankenberg, Chungmei Lee
and Professor Gary Orfield
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, American
public schools are now twelve years into the process of continuous
resegregation. The desegregation of black students, which increased
continuously from the 1950s to the late 1980s, has now receded to
levels not seen in three decades. Although the South remains the
nation's most integrated region for both blacks and whites, it is
the region that is most rapidly going backwards as the courts terminate
many major and successful desegregation orders.
This report describes patterns of racial enrollment and segregation
in American public schools at the national, regional, state, and
district levels for students of all racial groups. Our analysis
of the status of school desegregation in 2000 uses the NCES
Common Core of Data for 2000-01, which contains data submitted by
virtually all U.S. schools to the Department of Education. Additionally,
this report examines trends in desegregation and, now, resegregation
over the last one-third century.
- The statistics from the 2000-2001 school year show that whites
are the most segregated group in the nation’s public schools;
they attend schools, on average, where eighty percent of the student
body is white. The two regions where white students are more likely
to attend substantially interracial schools are the South and
West. Whites attending private schools are even more segregated
than their public school counterparts.
- Our schools are becoming steadily more nonwhite, as the minority
student enrollment approaches 40% of all U.S. public school students,
nearly twice the share of minority school students during the
1960s. In the West and the South, almost half of all public school
students are nonwhite.
- The most dramatic growth is seen in the increase of Latino and
Asian students. Latino students are the most segregated minority
group, with steadily rising segregation since federal data were
first collected a third of a century ago. Latinos are segregated
both by race and poverty, and a pattern of linguistic segregation
is also developing. Latinos have by far the highest high school
dropout rates.
- Conversely, at the aggregate level, Asians live in the nation's
most integrated communities, are the most integrated in schools
and experience less linguistic segregation than Latinos.1 Asians
are the nation's most highly educated racial group; the rate of
college graduation for Asians is almost double the national average
and four times larger than Latinos.
- The data show the emergence of a substantial group of American
schools that are virtually all non-white, which we call apartheid
schools. These schools educate one-sixth of the nation's black
students and one-fourth of black students in the Northeast and
Midwest. These are often schools where enormous poverty, limited
resources, and social and health problems of many types are concentrated.
One ninth of Latino students attend schools where 99-100% of the
student body is composed of minority students.
- Paralleling housing patterns from the 2000 Census, this study
shows a very rapid increase in the number of multiracial schools
where at least one tenth of the students are from three different
racial groups. Three-fourths of Asian students attend multiracial
schools, but only 14% of white students do.
- The nation's largest city school systems
account for a shrinking share of the total enrollment and are,
almost without exception, overwhelmingly nonwhite and increasingly
segregated internally. These twenty-seven largest urban systems
have lost the vast majority of their white enrollment whether
or not they ever had significant desegregation plans, and today
serve almost one-quarter of our black and Latino student population.
- The balkanization of school districts and the difficulty of
creating desegregated schools within these cities show the huge
consequences of the Supreme Court's 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision2
blocking city-suburban desegregation in metropolitan Detroit.
According to one recent study, metropolitan Detroit schools were
extremely segregated in 1994 and had the highest level of between-district
segregation of all metro areas in the country.3
- In 1967 the nation's largest suburban systems were virtually
all white. Despite a huge increase in minority students in suburban
school districts, serious patterns of segregation have emerged
in some sectors of suburbia as this transition takes place. Many
of the most rapidly resegregating school systems since the mid-1980s
are suburban. Clearly segregation and desegregation are no longer
merely urban concerns, but wider metropolitan issues.
- The largest countywide school districts that contain both city
and suburban schools are mostly concentrated in Southern states.
These districts, with about half the enrollment of the big cities,
had far more extensive and long-lasting desegregation and far
more opportunity for minority students to cross both race and
class barriers for their education.
- Many of the nation's most successful plans are being dismantled
by federal court decisions as the courts have been changed from
being on the leading edge of desegregation activity to being its
greatest obstacle. Since the Supreme Court changed desegregation
law in three major decisions between 1991 and 19954, the momentum
of desegregation for Black students has clearly reversed in the
South, where the movement had by far its greatest success.
- During the 1990s, the proportion of black students in majority
white schools has decreased by 13 percentage points, to a level
lower than any year since 1968.
Desegregation has been a substantial accomplishment
and is linked to important gains for both minority and white students.
Just as more and more convincing evidence of those gains is accumulating,
school systems are actually being ordered to end successful desegregation
plans they would prefer to continue. This is not driven by public
opinion, which has become more supportive of desegregated schools
(most of which have been achieved through choice mechanisms in the
past two decades). The persisting high levels of residential segregation
for Blacks and increasing levels for Latinos in the 2000 Census
indicate that desegregated education will not happen without plans
that make it happen. We recommend a set of policies that would slow
and eventually reverse the trends reported here.
Race matters strongly and segregation is a failed
educational policy. Any policy framework must explicitly recognize
the importance of integrated education not only as a basic education
goal but also as a compelling societal interest. Specific policies
to address this include:
- Continuing desegregation plans;
- Amending transfer policies in the federal No Child Left Behind
Act to give students a real choice of better integrated schools;
- Encouraging educational choice plans that diminish segregation;
- Linking housing mobility programs with educational counseling;
and
- Increasing city-suburban transfer options in metropolitan areas.
A great deal of long-lasting progress was achieved when this issue
was last seriously addressed, a third of a century ago. If we are
not to lose those gains and if we are to be ready for a profoundly
multiracial society with no racial majority we must begin to face
the trends documented here and devise solutions that will work now.
To view the COMPLETE REPORT
and study conducted by The Civil Rights Project go to:
A Multiracial Society with
Segregated Schools: Are We Losing the Dream?
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