UCLA’s Civil Rights Project this month reported on its examination of schools, 65 years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled racial segregation in schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education.
The study showed a rollback. The authors wrote segregation levels “are on the rise once again. White and Latino students are the most segregated groups.”
Photo by Nicole Honeywill/Unsplash
Other conclusions from the study:
- “White and Latino students are the most segregated groups. White students, on average, attend a school in which 69% of the students are white, while Latino students attend a school in which 55% of the students are Latino.
- “There was considerable segregation within the suburbs, where both African American and Latino students typically attended schools that were about three-fourths nonwhite.
- “Even rural schools that were 70% white had stark differences in segregation. The typical white student went to a rural school in which 80% of students were white, while the typical black or Latino student went to a rural school with 57% nonwhite enrollment.”
Why should we care?
The study said school resegregation can hurt everyone in an increasingly diverse country where “research shows that segregation has strong, negative relationships with the achievement, college success, long-term employment and income of students of color.
The point behind the Bias Busters project is that the less we know about each other, the poorer we are and the less able we are to succeed in a diverse world.
