Segregation and its sordid history is is back in the news today with reports of increasing segregation in U.S. public schools.
Blacks and Hispanics are more separate from white students than at any time since the civil rights movement and many of the schools they attend are struggling
The new analysis comes from a report (PDF) authored by Gary Orfield at the University of California. The report is critical of the current system of education which is not prepared for increasing numbers of nonwhite students.
Although there are serious interracial conflicts in schools and neighborhoods shared by two or more disadvantaged minorities, very little research or assistance has been provided to solve those urgent problems. The percentage of poor children in American schools has been rising substantially and black and Latino students, even those whose families are middle class, are largely attending schools with very high fractions of low-income children who face many problems in their homes and communities.
Given the world in which we live today, this failure has large ramifications for the future of our nation.
In a world economy where success is dependent on knowledge, major sections of the U.S. face the threat of declining average educational levels as the proportion of children attending inferior segregated schools continues to rise.
These are the results of a systematic neglect of civil rights policy and related educational and community reforms for decades, in addition to being the products of active opposition by the Bush Administration and the prior administrations of Reagan, Bush and Nixon.
We now have a society where 44 percent of our public school children are non-white and our two largest minority populations, Latinos and African Americans, are more segregated than they have been
since the death of Martin Luther King more than forty years ago.
Even the Supreme Court has taken part in this deterioration allowing a measure of segregation in Louisville under a 2007 decision. In that divided decision
Justice Kennedy allied with four justices in striking down voluntary plans that assigned students to schools solely on the basis of their race.
The full effect of this decision will not be reflected in Federal data for another 2-3 years.
The end issue becomes one of the proverbial tiger chasing its tail.
Segregated nonwhite schools usually are segregated by poverty as well as race. Being in a school where everyone is poor, teachers transfer out as soon as they can, parents are powerless, and gangs sometimes shape the environment of the community is deeply harmful to students.
The failure rate increases, students drop out, and the community falls farther behind.
Part of the issue today is the declining enrollment of white students, about half a percent a year. White students rarely attend highly segregated schools (where the population is 90-100 percent nonwhite). Only about 1% of white students are in such schools.
One-sixth of Asian students are in such highly isolated schools, some of them in the overwhelmingly Asian state of Hawaii, as are one-fifth of American Indian students.
Segregation patterns were far worse in 2006 than in 1988, near the peak of desegregation for black students. Then the average black student was in a school that was one-third white and just one-third of black students were in intensely segregated schools with 90-100 percent minority students. (snip) Back then, Latinos were also in schools with average enrollments of one-third white, and one-third of Latinos were in intensely segregated schools. Now both groups are in schools with almost three-fourths minority students on average and about 40% are in intensely segregated schools.
We are regressing at a too rapid rate.
We as a nation must see this course is changed. We need real leadership from our new administration. The election of a black man in Barack Obama shows a nation ready to recognize nonwhite citizens.
If people realize that there are more positive paths and feel that the country’s leaders and major institutions are supporting them, there could be a far better outcome.
It is the duty of our elected officials to insure all the people of our nation are represented in a fair and equitable way. Our leaders must deliver those positive messages to which people respond and from which action may be derived.
By possum's diary of Daily Kos
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