'Separate But Equal' Backslide
Government inaction is to blame for increasing racial segregation in America's schools, according to a study by The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University.
Released on the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the nationwide analysis of enrollments from the 2000-2001 school year found a growing number of black and Latino students attend schools where the majority of students are minorities. Similarly, white students are found increasingly likely to attend schools where most of their classmates are also white.
"Martin Luther King's dream is being honored in theory and dishonored in the decisions and practices that are turning our schools back to segregation," said professor Gary Orfield, co-director of The Civil Rights Project.
In the South, where civil rights legislation aimed at integrating schools had the most dramatic results in the 1960s and 1970s, the process of resegregation has been most rapid, the study showed.
"The South went from being the most segregated region in the country to being the most integrated," said researcher Erica Frankenberg. "Now the reverse is happening."
In 1964, a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered all schools desegregated in Brown v. Board of Education, 98 percent of blacks in the South still attended totally segregated schools.
By 1988, 44 percent of black students in the South attended schools that were majority white. In 2000, however, just 31 percent of black students went to schools where whites made up more than half the enrollment.
"It doesn't mean that everyone in the South wants to go back to the way things were in 1963," says Frankenberg. "This is a more subtle form of segregation. In some ways that makes it more difficult to combat."
The impact of these trends, the report says, is on educational outcomes.
"Racial segregation almost always accompanies segregation by poverty and many forms of related inequality. Levels of competition among students and parent support are much lower in schools with fewer resources," the report reads.
"The desegregation era was a period in which minority high school graduations increased sharply and the racial test score gaps narrowed substantially until they began to widen again in the l990s," it claims.
The researchers blame the resegregation trend on a series of court decisions, beginning with the 1991 Supreme Court ruling Oklahoma City v. Dowell, which backed away from the court-enforced desegregation laws of the 1960s.
In addition, "the last constructive act by Congress on the issue of integrated schools and neighborhoods was the enactment of the federal desegregation aid program in 1972," the report states. President Reagan ended that program.
Although resegregation has been most rapid in the South, the study shows schools there remain far more integrated than those in the Northeast and on the West Coast, where socio-economic divisions between city and suburb create a different kind of segregation.
New York has the most segregated schools for black and Hispanic students, according to The Civil Right Project report. Just 13.3 of the state's Hispanic students, and 13.6 percent of its black students attend majority white schools.
Meanwhile, a growing number of white children across the nation are enrolled in schools that are overwhelmingly white, the study showed. The average white student in America attends a school where 80 percent of their classmates are also white.
The report recommends that state and local governments preserve existing desegregation plans, counsel public housing residents who move to new facilities on local educational choices, and try to encourage private schools to diversify.
It also urges that the federal No Child Left Behind Act provide realistic choices for urban youth, who often are able to choose only from among several segregated, failing schools.
"We hope the administration will avoid the soft racism of false expectations," the report said, a play on President Bush's insistence that America avoid "the soft bigotry of low expectations."