Segregation: Stepping Back in Time?

By David T. Gordon

Forty-five years after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in schools in Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. public education system is again becoming segregated, this time by both race and class, according to a new report by Harvard Graduate School of Education researchers. Such trends may threaten equal opportunities in education for American minority students, the report says.

In Resegregation in American Schools, authors Gary Orfield and John T. Yun of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard contend that typical black and Latino students have less opportunity to interact with white students than at any time in the past three decades. In 1996-97, 68.8 percent of blacks and 74.8 percent of Latinos attended schools with mostly minority students. More than one-third of all black and Latino students went to schools with a minority population of at least 90 percent.

Minority students are increasingly isolated by economic class as well as race, according to the study. Average black and Latino students go to schools where 42.7 and 46 percent of students are poor, respectively. A typical white student attends school where only 18.1 percent of students are poor. "Segregated African American and Latino schools are many times more likely than white schools to face concentrated poverty, which is powerfully related to lower educational results," the authors write.

The Northeast is the country's most segregated region, with 46 percent of Latinos and 50.5 percent of blacks attending schools that are 90 percent minority. In the South-which aggressively promoted integration in the 1970s and 1980s-the percentage of black students in mostly white schools fell from a peak of 43.5 percent in 1988 to 34.7 percent in 1996.

[Click here for large version]

Changing demographics-not necessarily racism-are driving resegregation, the study says. Waves of immigration have increased the number of minority public school students, especially in suburban areas. For instance, the Latino population in public schools has tripled since the 1960s, while the number of whites in public schools has declined almost six percent.

Federal and state courts also have contributed to the isolation of minority students by chipping away at desegregation measures, and Washington needs to do more to safeguard equal opportunity in education for minority students, the report says: "Although the Clinton administration has seen the largest increases in segregation in the last half century, it has proposed no policies to offset the trend and has not included the issue among its priorities for public education."

Not everyone sees federal intervention as a likely answer, however, especially given a rash of court cases in the past few years striking down race-based school assignments. "If you're the government, what do you do?" asks Alfred A. Lindseth, an Atlanta lawyer who has worked on several cases involving school desegregation. "To bring about increased educational integration would involve instituting federal guidelines that would probably be illegal under current law. So [the government would] probably want to look first at other ways of increasing educational opportunities for minorities-like doing a better job of distributing funds."

Resegregation in American Schools, was issued in June 1999.