Two years ago the Harvard Civil Rights Project issued a report titled A Multiracial Society With Segregated Schools: Are We Losing the Dream?.
That report concluded that US “public schools are becoming steadily more nonwhite, as the minority student enrollment approaches 40% of all U.S. public school students, almost twice the share of minority school students during the 1960s. Almost half of all public school students in the West and the South are minority students. The desegregation of black students, which increased continuously from the l950s to the late l980s, has now receded to levels not seen in three decades. Black students are experiencing the most rapid resegregation in the south, triggered by Supreme Court decisions in the 1990’s, and have now lost all progress recorded since the 1960’s.”
[You can download an op-ed piece I wrote in March 2003 for the Lexington Herald-Leader (KY) on the resegregation of schools here.]
In his recently published book The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, Jonathan Kozol reiterates the findings of the HCRP report and argues that the conditions of inner-city schools in the US have deteriorated in the 15 years since the federal courts started dismantling Brown v. Board (and roughly the same period of time since Kozol wrote his acclaimed book Savage Inequalities).
The latest issue of The Nation has an article adapted from Kozol’s book. Also see the September 2005 issue of Harper’s Magazine for Kozol’s article “Still Separate, Still Unequal.”
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