Segregation is still widespread at American public schools, 60 years after the landmark Brown v. Topeka Board of Education ruling, a new report said.
And it no longer impacts just black and white students.
Black and Latino students are more likely to attend schools with mostly poor students, while white and Asian students are more likely to attend middle-class schools, according to a report released Thursday by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA.
In New York, California and Texas, more than half of Latino students are enrolled in schools that are 90 percent minority or more. In New York, Illinois, Maryland and Michigan, more than half of black students attend schools where 90 percent or more are minority, the report said. Latinos are now the largest minority in public schools.
Black student attendance at majority-white schools steadily increased since the civil rights era but has been on the decline since the early 1990s. In 2011, only 23 percent of black students attended a majority white school – the same percentage as in 1968, according to the report.
Although segregation is most serious in large cities, it’s also “severe” in the suburbs, the report points out. In the suburbs, Latino students are “significantly more” segregated than black students.
The segregation rebound began after the 1991 Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell ruling ended federal desegregation orders.
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.
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