BROWN AT 62: SCHOOL SEGREGATION BY RACE, POVERTY AND STATE

Gary Orfield, Jongyeon Ee, Erica Frankenberg, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley
2016 unpublished
As the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education decision arrives again without any major initiatives to mitigate spreading and deepening segregation in our nation's schools, the Civil Rights Project adds to a growing national discussion with a research brief drawn from a much broader study of school segregation to be published in September 2016. Since 1970, the public school enrollment has increased in size and transformed in racial composition. Intensely segregated nonwhite schools with zero
more » ... to 10% white enrollment have more than tripled in this most recent 25-year period for which we have data, a period deeply influenced by major Supreme Court decisions (spanning from 1991 to 2007) that limited desegregation policy. At the same time, the extreme isolation of white students in schools with 0 to 10% nonwhite students has declined by half as the share of white students has dropped sharply. This brief shows states where racial segregation has become most extreme for Latinos and blacks and discusses some of the reasons for wide variations among states. We call the country's attention to the striking rise in double segregation by race and poverty for African American and Latino students who are concentrated in schools that rarely attain the successful outcomes typical of middle class schools with largely white and Asian student populations. We show the obvious importance of confronting these issues given the strong relationship between racial and economic segregation and inferior educational opportunities clearly demonstrated in research over many decades. The Civil Rights Project has issued many reports on these enrollment changes and their impacts on segregation of schools across the country in the last 20 years. 1 We have done that because of massive and growing research evidence that (1) segregation creates unequal opportunities and helps perpetuate stratification in the society and (2) diverse schools have significant advantages, not only for learning and attainment but for the creation of better preparation for all groups to live and work successfully in a complex society which will have no racial majority. 2 In the last quarter century, the public school enrollment has both grown substantially in size and diversity. From 1990 to 2013, the number of American public school students has grown from 41.2 to 49.9 million. 3 Over a similar time period, the racial composition of the schools changed 1 The Civil Rights Project's reports on national, regional and state trends are available at https://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/.
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