70 Years After Brown Decision, School Segregation Getting Worse

01May 17th marked the 70th anniversary of one of the most notable cases in U.S.

02Supreme Court history, Brown v.

03Board of Education.

04The 1954 decision declared segregated schools unconstitutional.

05It also struck down the principle of separate but equal, which was used as the basis for U.S.

06government policies related to racial segregation.

07President Dwight Eisenhower famously sent federal troops to southern states to enforce the decision.

08Today, American schools cannot legally restrict students based on race.

09But because of long-held economic divides and other issues, some schools have become segregated in a de facto way.

10Some researchers say that despite the continuing ban, school segregation has gotten worse over the years, even as the U.S.

11overall has become more racially diverse.

12A team from the University of California, Los Angeles, or UCLA, recently released a report examining the ways segregation has changed in U.S.

13schools.

14The report is called The Unfinished Battle for Integration in a Multiracial America, From Brown to Now.

15It was written by two UCLA professors, Gary Orfield and Ryan Flager.

16The study found that schools have gotten less white and more Latino, Asian, and multiracial.

17But it also noted the number of schools considered intensely segregated tripled from 1988 to 2021.

18The study defined intensely segregated as schools with white student populations of less than 10%.

19About 20% of American schools are intensely segregated, up from 7% in 1988, the report found.

20The study's writers state that schools of the South are dramatically less segregated than the apartheid conditions that had always existed before Brown.

21However, Orfield and Flager add that the Supreme Court's decision's historic aims have not been attained, and, as this report shows, we have been moving backward.

22The researchers found that black and Latino students were the most highly segregated populations.

23In 2021, schools overall were 45% mostly white.

24But on average, black students attended schools that were about 76% non-white.

25For Latino students, the school average was about 75% non-white.

26Education experts say segregation especially hurts black and Latino schools.

27This is because they are often underfunded and have higher rates of teacher shortages.

28Non-white school districts receive $23 billion less funding than mostly white school districts, a 2019 report by the nonprofit group EdBuild found.

29The trends are toward increasing double segregation by both race or ethnicity and poverty, the UCLA study said.

30Researchers at another California university, Stanford, found that schools are getting more segregated even as neighborhoods have gotten more diverse and racial economic inequality has improved.

31The findings indicate that policy choices, not demographic changes, are driving the increase, said Sean Reardon.

32He is a professor at Stanford who specializes in how poverty and inequality affects education.

33The UCLA study noted that desegregation policies following the Brown decision were generally aimed at improving access to schools for black students.

34But 70 years later, the issue of school segregation has gotten more complex.

35Latinos now make up the largest U.S.

36minority group, and the Asian population has also grown.

37Most Americans of all racial groups think integrated schools are better, but are divided about what, if anything, to actually do, the UCLA study states.

38The researchers offered several suggestions for improving integration.

39One is for districts to increase efforts to register students from poorer areas and offer more diverse school programs.

40A 2018 article by the non-profit group Edutopia described how some school districts have been successful in improving integration.

41In Cambridge, Massachusetts, for example, every school must have a balance of wealthier and poorer families.

42In San Antonio, Texas, bilingual schools and other specialized programs have brought in students from many different backgrounds.

43And in New York City, schools have made progress by removing standardized testing requirements.

44Others introduced admittance systems that take into account whether a student is poor, homeless, or a non-native English speaker.

45American schools have been moving away from the goal of Brown and creating more inherently unequal schools for a third of a century, writers of the UCLA study wrote.

46It will soon become understood once more that schools that serve all children together with equity are central to any good outcomes.

47I'm Dan Novak.