|
printable version
- js reader version
- view hidden posts
- tags and related articles
by Harvard Civil Rights Project
Thursday, Jul. 19, 2001 at 5:55 AM
America's schools grew increasingly more segregated in the 1990s. This was the lead finding in a new report from the Civil Rights Project of Harvard University, "Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation," by Gary Orfield with Nora Gordon. "Much of the progress for black students since the 1960s was eliminated during a decade which brought three Supreme Court decisions limiting desegregation remedies," while Latinos have become even more segregated than blacks. The increased minority suburban population "minorities has not produced integrated schools."
School Segregation on the Rise Despite Growing
Diversity Among School-Aged Children
A New Study from The Civil Rights Project
Harvard Graduate School of Education
July 17, 2001
Almost a half century after the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that Southern school segregation was unconstitutional and "inherently unequal," a new study from The Civil Rights Project of Harvard University shows that segregation continued to intensify throughout the 1990s. The study, "Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation," by Gary Orfield with Nora Gordon, analyzes statistics from the 1998-99 school year, the latest data available from the National Center of Education Statistics' Common Core of Education Statistics. Researchers found that much of the progress for black students since the 1960s was eliminated during a decade which brought three Supreme Court decisions limiting desegregation remedies. The data also shows that Latinos, the nation's largest minority, have become increasingly isolated for the last 30 years, with segregation surpassing that of blacks, and the rapid growth of suburban minorities has not produced integrated schools.
This resegregation is happening despite the nation's growing diversity, in particular the rapid growth of 245% in the Latino student population over the last 30 years. According to Orfield, co-director of The Civil Rights Project and professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, resegregation is contributing to a growing gap in quality between the schools being attended by white students and those serving a large proportion of minority students.
"Though our schools will be our first major institutions to experience non-white majorities," says Orfield, "our research consistently shows that schools are becoming increasingly segregated and are offering students vastly unequal educational opportunities. This is ironic considering that evidence exists that desegregated schools both improve test scores and positively change the lives of students and that Americans increasingly express support for integrated schools. Minority students with the same test scores tend to be much more successful in college if they attended interracial high schools."
Key Findings Include:
* Steady Resegregation Occurring Nationally and in the South
70.2% of the nation's black students now attend predominantly minority schools (minority enrollment of over 50%), up significantly from the low point of 62.9% in 1980. More than a third of the nation's black students (36.5%) attend schools with a minority enrollment of 90-100%. The proportion of black students in such schools has been rising consistently since 1986, when it was at a low point of 32.5%.
Although the South remains more integrated than it was before the civil rights revolution, it is moving backward at an accelerating rate. In the decade between 1988 to 1998, the percent of black students in majority white schools decreased steadily from 43.5% to 32.7%. The resegregation in the South is noteworthy because this region saw the greatest increase in racial integration of its schools between 1964 and 1970.
* Steady Latino Segregation Growing
The most dramatic trends in segregation affect Latino students. While intense segregation for blacks is still 28 points below its 1969 level, it has actually grown 13.5 points for Latinos. In 1968, 23.1% of Latino students attended schools with a minority enrollment of 90-100%. In 1998, that number rose to 36.6% of Latino students.
* Whites Most Segregated in Schools
According to the data, in spite of the rapid increase in minority enrollment in schools, white students remain the most segregated from other races in their schools. Whites on average attend schools where more than 80% of the students are white and less than 20% of the students are from all of the other racial and ethnic groups combined. Even in the District of Columbia, where fewer than one student in twenty was white, the typical white student was in a class with a slight majority of whites.
Blacks and Latinos attend schools with 53% to 55% students of their own group. Latinos attend schools with far higher average (12%) black populations than whites do (8.7%), and blacks attend schools with much higher average Latino enrollments (10.5%) than whites do (6.9%). American Indian students attend schools in which about a third (31%) of the students are from Indian backgrounds.
* Strong Links between Segregation by Race and by Poverty
Segregation by race is very strongly related to segregation by class and income. Racially segregated schools (for all groups except whites) are almost always schools with high concentrations of poverty. Almost nine-tenths of segregated African American and Latino schools experience concentrated poverty.
The average black or Latino student attends a school with more than twice as many poor classmates than the average white student. Data from 1998-1999 shows that in schools attended by the average black and Latino students, 39.3% and 44% of the students are poor, respectively. In schools attended by the average white student, 19.6% of the students are poor. Poverty levels are strongly related to school test score averages and many kinds of educational inequality.
Policy Recommendations
The census data shows that, increasingly, there will be entire metropolitan areas and states with either no majority group or where the majority group will be Latino or African American. This will be a new experience in American educational history. Researchers at The Civil Rights Project recommend the
following policy actions in order to curb racial and ethnic polarization and educational inequalities:
* expansion of the federal magnet school program and the imposition of similar desegregation requirements for federally supported charter schools;
* active support by private foundations and community groups of efforts to continue local desegregation plans and programs, through research, advocacy and litigation;
* creation of expertise on desegregation and race relations training in state departments of education;
* documentation through school district surveys of the value (in legalterms, the compelling value) of interracial schooling experience in their own cities;
* creation of many two-way integrated bilingual schools in which students of each language group work with, learn with, and help each other acquire fluency in a second language;
* provision of funding for better counseling and transportation for interdistrict transfer policies;
* promotion and funding of teacher exchanges between city and suburban school districts and training of teachers in techniques for successful interracial classrooms;
* exploration of school and housing policies to avoid massive resegregation of large sections of the inner suburbs;
* sponsorship through federal and state funds and universities of integrated metropolitan-wide magnet schools;
* launching of serious new scholarship focusing on the most effective approaches to effective education and race relations in schools with three or more racial groups present in significant numbers and two or more languages strongly represented;
* careful documentation of the impact on students in districts that restore segregated neighborhood schools.
Background
The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University is an interdisciplinary initiative committed to mobilizing the resources of Harvard and the broader research community in support of the struggle for racial and ethnic justice. By building strong collaborations between researchers, community organizations, and policy makers, The Civil Rights Project hopes to raise the level of discourse on targeted issues and to reframe the tone and content of many of the current legal and political debates
For More Information
Full copies of "Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation" can be downloaded from The Civil Rights Project web site after 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday, July 17, 2001. Findings from a 1999 study on segregation, conducted by the Civil Rights Project, can be found on Harvard Graduate School of Education's website. For more information, contact Gary Orfield at (617) 496-4824, Johanna Wald (617) 496-3229, or Christine Sanni (617) 496-5873.
Respond to this press release with an e-mail to the editor
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
News & Views, Harvard Graduate School of Education
www.gse.harvard.edu/nv/features/orfield07172001.html
Report this post as:
|
Local News
GUIDE TO REBEL CITY LOS ANGELES AVAILABLE
A12 5:39PM
lausd whistle blower
A10 11:58PM
Website Upgrade
A10 3:02AM
Help KCET and UCLA identify 60s-70s Chicano images
A04 1:02PM
UCLA Luskin: Casting Youth Justice in a Different Light
A02 11:58AM
Change Links April 2018
A01 11:27AM
Nuclear Shutdown News March 2018
M31 6:57PM
Join The Protest Rally in Glendale on April 10, 2018!
M29 7:00PM
Join The Protest Rally in Glendale on April 10, 2018!
M29 6:38PM
Spring 2018 National Immigrant Solidarity Network News Alert!
M19 2:02PM
Anti-Eviction Mapping Project Shows Shocking Eviction Trends in L.A.
M16 5:40PM
Steve Mnuchin video at UCLA released
M15 12:34AM
Actress and Philanthropist Tanna Frederick Hosts Project Save Our Surf Beach Clean Ups
M06 12:10PM
After Being Told He's 'Full of Sh*t' at School Event, Mnuchin Demands UCLA Suppress Video
M02 11:44AM
Resolution of the Rent Strike in Boyle Heights
M01 6:28PM
What Big Brother Knows About You and What You Can Do About It
M01 3:30PM
Step Up As LAPD Chief Charlie Beck Steps Down
F14 2:44PM
Our House Grief Support Center Hosts 9th Annual Run For Hope, April 29
F13 12:51PM
Don’t let this LA County Probation Department overhaul proposal sit on the shelf
F13 11:04AM
Echo Park Residents Sue LA Over Controversial Development
F12 8:51AM
Former Signal Hill police officer pleads guilty in road-rage incident in Irvine
F09 10:25PM
Calif. Police Accused of 'Collusion' With Neo-Nazis After Release of Court Documents
F09 7:14PM
Center for the Study of Political Graphics exhibit on Police Abuse posters
F07 9:50AM
City Agrees to Settle Lawsuit Claiming Pasadena Police Officer Had His Sister Falsely Arre
F04 3:17PM
Professor's Study Highlights Health Risks of Urban Oil Drilling
F04 12:42PM
Claims paid involving Pasadena Police Department 2014 to present
F04 10:52AM
Pasadenans - get your license plate reader records from police
F03 11:11PM
LA Times Homicide Report
F03 1:57PM
More Local News...
Other/Breaking News
Biodiversité ou la nature privatisée
A20 11:22AM
The Market is a Universal Totalitarian Religion
A20 7:14AM
Book Available about Hispanics and US Civil War by National Park Service
A19 5:52PM
The Shortwave Report 04/20/18 Listen Globally!
A19 4:01PM
The Republican 'Prolife' Party Is the Party of War, Execution, and Bear Cub Murder
A19 11:48AM
Neurogenèse involutive
A18 9:21AM
Paraphysique de la dictature étatique
A16 10:13AM
Book Review: "The New Bonapartists"
A16 3:45AM
The West Must Take the First Steps to Russia
A14 12:25PM
Théorie générale de la révolution ou hommage à feu Mikhaïl Bakounine
A14 3:30AM
The Shortwave Report 04/13/18 Listen Globally!
A12 3:50PM
“Lost in a Dream” Singing Competition Winner to Be Chosen on April 15 for ,000 Prize!
A12 3:48PM
The World Dependent on Central Banks
A12 4:43AM
Ohio Governor Race: Dennis Kucinich & Richard Cordray Run Against Mike DeWine
A11 9:40PM
March 2018 Honduras Coup Again Update
A10 10:52PM
Apologie du zadisme insurrectionnel
A10 3:33PM
ICE contract with license plate reader company
A10 1:14PM
Palimpseste sisyphéen
A09 11:23PM
Black Portraiture(S) IV: The Color of Silence...Cuba No...Cambridge Yes
A09 5:32AM
Prohibiting Micro-Second Betting on the Exchanges
A09 4:18AM
Prosecutors treat Muslims harsher than non-Muslims for the same crimes
A08 10:33PM
Amy Goodman interview on cell phone safety
A08 10:29PM
Mesa, Arizona police officer kills unarmed white man
A08 9:50PM
Israeli leaders should be prosecuted for war crimes
A08 9:48PM
Paraphysique de l'autorité
A08 12:11AM
Two Podcasts on fbi corruption
A06 10:13PM
Fbi assassins assault & try to kill DAVID ATKINS
A06 7:29PM
EPA Head Scott Pruitt: Of Cages And Sirens
A06 2:15PM
More Breaking News...
|