In her article for The Village Voice, Anya Kamenetz describes the “Dispersed and unequal”
circumstances that displaced New Orleans students are experiencing in the Baton Rouge, LA schools. Baton Rouge is the site of one of the longest running school desegregation cases in the US.
The experiences of the students sent to Baton Rouge are a test case of [Jonathan] Kozol’s contention that racial segregation, exacerbated by testing, is the central problem in our public school system. Overt racism does not seem at work; the African-American East Baton Rouge superintendent, Charlotte Placide, is making the direct decisions about the treatment of these students, and Ms. Sherry Brock, Ms. Clara Joseph, and their respective staffs are each obviously working as hard as is humanly possible to teach their students with the tools at their disposal. Yet it is very easy to see how the continued structure of segregation is hurting the chances that something good can come from this disaster, for those who most need a second chance.
Kozol has just published a new book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, which he called in a recent Salon interview “the angriest book I’ve written in my life.” He finds that Brown v. Board of Education has failed; schools are now just as segregated as they were in 1968, and black and Latino schools are still dramatically inferior and underfunded, receiving a national average of $1,000 less per student each year. [Kozol’s article “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid” was published in Harper’s Magazine last month.]
Kozol’s findings are support by the research of the Harvard Civil Rights Project, which published a report in 2003 titled “A Multiracial Society with Segregated Schools: Are We Losing the Dream?”.
Key finds from the Harvard Civil Rights Project Study include:
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The statistics from the 2000-2001 school year show that whites are the most segregated group in the nation’s public schools; they attend schools, on average, where eighty percent of the student body is white. The two regions where white students are more likely to attend substantially interracial schools are the South and West. Whites attending private schools are even more segregated than their public school counterparts.
Our schools are becoming steadily more nonwhite, as the minority student enrollment approaches 40% of all U.S. public school students, nearly twice the share of minority school students during the 1960s. In the West and the South, almost half of all public school students are nonwhite.
The most dramatic growth is seen in the increase of Latino and Asian students. Latino students are the most segregated minority group, with steadily rising segregation since federal data were first collected a third of a century ago. Latinos are segregated both by race and poverty, and a pattern of linguistic segregation is also developing. Latinos have by far the highest high school dropout rates.
Conversely, at the aggregate level, Asians live in the nation’s most integrated communities, are the most integrated in schools and experience less linguistic segregation than Latinos.1 Asians are the nation’s most highly educated racial group; the rate of college graduation for Asians is almost double the national average and four times larger than Latinos.
The data show the emergence of a substantial group of American schools that are virtually all non-white, which we call apartheid schools. These schools educate one-sixth of the nation’s black students and one-fourth of black students in the Northeast and Midwest. These are often schools where enormous poverty, limited resources, and social and health problems of many types are concentrated. One ninth of Latino students attend schools where 99-100% of the student body is composed of minority students.
Paralleling housing patterns from the 2000 Census, this study shows a very rapid increase in the number of multiracial schools where at least one tenth of the students are from three different racial groups. Three-fourths of Asian students attend multiracial schools, but only 14% of white students do.
The nation’s largest city school systems account for a shrinking share of the total enrollment and are, almost without exception, overwhelmingly nonwhite and increasingly segregated internally. These twenty-seven largest urban systems have lost the vast majority of their white enrollment whether or not they ever had significant desegregation plans, and today serve almost one-quarter of our black and Latino student population.
The balkanization of school districts and the difficulty of creating desegregated schools within these cities show the huge consequences of the Supreme Court’s 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision2 blocking city-suburban desegregation in metropolitan Detroit. According to one recent study, metropolitan Detroit schools were extremely segregated in 1994 and had the highest level of between-district segregation of all metro areas in the country.
In 1967 the nation’s largest suburban systems were virtually all white. Despite a huge increase in minority students in suburban school districts, serious patterns of segregation have emerged in some sectors of suburbia as this transition takes place. Many of the most rapidly resegregating school systems since the mid-1980s are suburban. Clearly segregation and desegregation are no longer merely urban concerns, but wider metropolitan issues.
The largest countywide school districts that contain both city and suburban schools are mostly concentrated in Southern states. These districts, with about half the enrollment of the big cities, had far more extensive and long-lasting desegregation and far more opportunity for minority students to cross both race and class barriers for their education.
Many of the nation’s most successful plans are being dismantled by federal court decisions as the courts have been changed from being on the leading edge of desegregation activity to being its greatest obstacle. Since the Supreme Court changed desegregation law in three major decisions between 1991 and 19954, the momentum of desegregation for Black students has clearly reversed in the South, where the movement had by far its greatest success.
During the 1990s, the proportion of black students in majority white schools has decreased by 13 percentage points, to a level lower than any year since 1968.
In his book, Kozol also argues that the inflexible testing requirements imposed by No Child Left Behind create a sense of “siege” in the poorest schools, punishing them by withholding funds and forcing teachers to teach by rote and to the test.
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