Segregation is back!

Study says integration in retreat 60 years after Brown v. Board

(Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Richmond Free Press) – Segregation is once again in full flower in American public schools. Progress toward integrated classrooms has been rolled back since the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kan., decision 60 years ago, according toa report from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA.

That historic decision wiped out government-enforced segregation. But housing patterns and sharp increases in the number of Black and Latino students in recent decades has essentially made voluntary segregation of schools a fact of student life across the country.The return of neighborhood schools has meant that Black students today are once again more likely to attend predominantly Black schools, the report noted. And more than half of Latino students are now attending schools that are majority-Latino, the report found.

The report was released May 15, two days before the nation marked the 60th anniversary of the decision that the nation’s highest court issued May 17, 1954.The report reconfirms numerous studies in the last 20 years. Like those reports, the new UCLA report shows resegregation of public schools began in 1986 when courts began phasing out busing for integration and has continued unabated since then. While civil rights laws have enabled Black families to spread into formerly whites-only areas and expand their suburban presence, the Brown decision has proven to have had less impact than many hoped.

Today in New York, California and Texas, more than half of Latino students are enrolled in schools that are 90 percent minority or more, the report found. In New York, Illinois, Maryland and Michigan, more than half of Black students attend neighborhood schools where they represent 90 percent or more of the enrollment. Project co-director, Gary Orfield, author of the “Brown at 60’’ report, said that data show that the segregation of Black and Latino students results in a lower quality of education than is provided to white students and Asian students in middle-class schools. The report urged, among other things, deeper research into housing segregation, which is a “fundamental cause of separate-and-unequal schooling.’’

Although school segregation is more prevalent in central cities of the largest metropolitan areas, it’s also in the suburbs. “Neighborhood schools, when we go back to them, as we have, produce middle class schools for whites and Asians and segregated high-poverty schools for Blacks and Latinos,’’ Dr. Orfield said. Housing patterns, where people cluster by race and income, play a key role in school segregation and “that’s been a harder nut to crack,’’ said Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which argued the Brown case in front of the Supreme Court in 1954.

School quality often is entwined with poverty. A majority of Latino and Black students attending schools where they are the majority come from low-income families. “These are the schools that tend to have fewer resources, tend to have teachers with less experience, tend to have people who are teaching outside their area of specialty and tend to lack the opportunities, the contacts and the networking that occur when you’re with people from different socioeconomic backgrounds,’’ said Dennis Parker, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Racial Justice Program.

For students like Diamond McCullough, 17, a senior at Walter H. Dyett High School on Chicago’s South Side, the disparities in education are real. Her school is made up almost entirely of African-American students. She said her school doesn’t offer physical education or art classes, and advanced placement offerings for a college-bound student like her are only available online. Miss McCullough noted the school is named after a famous musician, Walter H. Dyett, and the school no longer has a band class.

“We don’t have a music chorus class,’’ she said. “We barely have the basic classes we need.’’ Aquila Griffin, 18, said she transferred from Dyett to another high school 20 blocks away because she needed biology and world studies to graduate. The two traveled to Washington for a labor sponsored rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court in support of public education on the anniversary of the Brown decision.

“Many blame the schools for failing, or teachers, but they never blame the bad policies put in place in schools,’’ Griffin said. “A teacher can only teach to a certain extent with the resources. It’s the policies put in place that’s failing the students.’’ In the Brown decision, the Supreme Court ruled: “In the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.’’

In the aftermath of that ruling, scores of cities and towns implemented desegregation plans that often included mandatory busing, in some cases triggering an exodus of white students to private schools or less diverse communities. John Rury, an education professor at the University of Kansas, said the work at UCLA and in earlier reports show many of the advances in desegregating schools made after the Brown ruling have stopped — or been reversed. While racial discrimination has been a factor, other forces are in play, Dr. Rury said. Educated parents with the means to move have flocked to districts and schools with the best education reputations for decades, said Dr. Rury, who has studied the phenomenon in the Kansas City region.

In the South, many school districts encompass both a city and a surrounding county, he said. That has led to better-integrated schools. Still, around the country, only 23 percent of Black students attended white-majority schools in 2011. That’s the lowest number since 1968. Advocates point to rulings by federal courts that have freed school districts from Brown-related desegregation orders since the mid-1980s. Those rulings they argue, have led the country back toward more segregated schools. At the same time, a demographic change in public schools is contributing. Between 1968 and 2011, the number of Latino students in public school systems rose 495 percent, while the number of Black students increased by 19 percent. Meanwhile, the number of white students dropped 28 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Charles Brothers, a retired social studies and psychology teacher who taught in a low-income school in St. Lucie County, Fla., said the nation has not figured out how end resegregation. Brothers said, “I think we haven’t taken the time, and it’s across the board, politically and socially, to really understand what we really do want out of education and how are we really going to make it available for everyone.”

This article originally published in the June 2, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.