American’s Schools—Increasingly Separate and Unequal
Feature Story by Tia Sumler - 7/20/2001
A new study from The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University finds that nearly a half century after the Supreme Court decision ending legally segregated education in the South, American schools are rapidly becoming resegregated. The study, Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation, warns that the newly segregated system is no more equal that that of the 1950s, and that the trend threatens to deepen America’s educational and economic inequities and increase racial tensions.The study, by Gary Orfield, co-director of The Civil Rights Project, and Nora Gordon relied on data from National Center of Education Statistics’ Common Core of Education Statistics. The findings are stark: Despite strong public support for integrated education, and despite an increasingly diverse student population, our schools are becoming racially polarized. In an interesting twist, the drive behind this resegregation, which began in the 1990s, is the courts, just as it was the courts that the drive for desegregation of schools began nearly five decades ago.
The data shows that racial isolation in education is increasing across the board, most dramatically in the Latino community, where it has increased 13.5% since 1969. However, whites are still the most isolated group overall; most white children attend schools where less than 20% of the students are from all of the other racial and ethnic groups. Without opportunity or occasion to interact with students of other races in school, students are less likely to socialize with them outside of school. This deprives students of the opportunity to learn about racial and cultural differences and similarities, and experience working effectively with people of other races or ethnicity. For any who doubt the pragmatism of this argument; GM cited these skills as an asset to both employees and employers in its brief supporting the affirmative action program at the University of Michigan.
There are other reasons to turn back the tide of resegragation. The book’s executive summary states: “[C]onvincing evidence exists that desegregated schools both improve test scores and positively change the lives of students. A 1999 study of two elite law schools shows, for example, that almost all of the admitted black and Latino students who were admitted into those schools came from integrated educational backgrounds. [1] Minority students with the same test scores tend to be much more successful in college if they attended interracial high schools. In fact, racial differences in achievement and graduation have begun to expand again in the 1990’s, in concert with growing segregation of schools, after closing substantially between the 1960s and the mid-1980s. “
Orfield and Gordon stress that recent Census findings indicate that “increasingly, there will be entire metropolitan areas and states with no majority group” and that to do nothing about the resegregation of American schools risks “increasing serious racial and ethnic polarization.” They offer several policy recommendations to help re-integrate schools ranging from broad proposals such as exploration of school and housing policies to avoid massive resegregation of large sections of the inner suburbs to more specialized suggestions, like initiating a focus on desegregation and race relations training in state departments of education.
