School Segregation Rises as Brown Ruling 60th Anniversary Nears

[Purveyor]

By Sonali Basak May 15, 2014 12:39 PM ET

Racial segregation is still a prominent feature of U.S. public schools for black and Latino students, 60 years after the Supreme Court ordered a halt to the practice, according to a report.

Racial disparity is led by the isolation of Latinos in the West and blacks in the Northeast, according to a study by the University of California at Los Angeles. Latino populations now surpass blacks as the most segregated population in suburban America, the study found.

“Segregation is usually segregation by both race and poverty,” co-authors Gary Orfield and Erica Frankenberg said in the report released today. “Black and Latino students tend to be in schools with a substantial majority of poor children, but white and Asian students are typically in middle class schools.”

A 30 percent drop in white student enrollment and an almost quintupling of Latinos since the civil rights era has led to racial separation in the country’s largest public-school regions, according to the report. The study comes days before the 60th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which concluded that “the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place” in public schools.

School Integration

The ruling paved the way for integration by striking down state laws that established separate public schools for black and white students. It was a major victory for the civil rights movement, which had been using the courts to fight legally sanctioned discrimination, particularly in the South.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-15/school-segregation-rises-as-brown-ruling-60th-anniversary-nears.html

[frazzled]

1. This began happening in the 1990s with ...

local movements to return to "neighborhood" schools. Arguments were made by the left as well as others that, with the end of enforced and voluntary desegregation plans that were happening in the late 90s, that children would be better off being closer to home, and able to walk to their schools, have parents participate more, etc.

We lived in Minneapolis at that time, where a truly successful system addressing desegregation had been in place for years. When my kids were finishing high school and junior high, and we were about to move to another state, the city moved to promote more "neighborhood" schools rather than the choice system that encouraged people to move around in racial and socio-economic groups. I opposed this vociferously, worrying that "neighborhood schools" was just another way of returning to separate but equal. I think the motive on the part of our normally liberal mayor and a progressive school district was purely economic: it costs a lot of money to bus students around to a bunch of different places.

Now we live in Chicago, and though I don't have kids in the system anymore, I can see that the issue here is pretty moot: CPS (with 681 schools and more than 400,000 students) is more than 85% "minority" to begin with (counting only African American and Hispanic students only). Still, I think that there is a fair amount of economic and cultural diversity within the population and that students would be better served by greater movement to and from their neighborhood schools.