School Segregation Peaks for Latino and Black Students 60 Years After Brown vs. the Board of Education Ruling
Sixty years after the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision that segregation by race is unconstitutional, segregation is still widespread in public schools across the nation.
According to a new report released Thursday by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, black students are experiencing more segregation in school than they have in previous decades, while over half of Latino students are now attending schools that are majority Latino.
The report reveals that Black and Latino students are being marginalized in underserved schools where the classrooms are predominately filled by peers of their own race. In states like New York, California and Texas, more than half of Latino students are enrolled in schools that are 90 percent minority or more. Likewise, black students are enrolled in schools that are comprised of 90 percent or more of minorities in New York, Illinois, Maryland and Michigan.
Furthermore, black and Latino students are more likely to attend schools with mostly poor white students, whereas white and Asian students are more likely to attend middle-class schools.
The report also points out that in both 1968 and 2011, only 23 percent of black students attended a majority white school.
Educators say that the rise in segregation began after the 1991 Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell ruling ended federal desegregation policies.
Federal policy "didn't do much outside of the South, and we didn't do much for Latinos ever," said Gary Orfield, director of the Civil Rights Project, in an interview with USA TODAY Network.
"Neighborhood schools, when we go back to them, as we have, produce middle-class schools for whites and Asians and segregated high-poverty schools for blacks and Latinos," Orfield added.
John Rury, an education professor at the University of Kansas, argues that racial discrimination is part of the reason for continued segregation, in addition to the migration of more affluent white families to school districts with better reputations and resources.
Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noted that discrimination against minorities from moving into predominantly white neighborhoods is another factor in school segregation, reports the Associated Press.
In addition, the increasing wealth gap is also a factor in today's education system.
"These are the schools that tend to have fewer resources, tend to have teachers with less experience, tend to have people who are teaching outside their area of specialty, and it also denies the opportunities, the contacts and the networking that occur when you're with people from different socio-economic backgrounds," said Dennis Parker, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Racial Justice Program.
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