Racial Diversity Eludes
Schools CAMBRIDGE,
Masssachusetts, July 18, 2001
Segregation in U.S. schools increased
during the last decade, despite the nation's growing racial diversity, according
to a Harvard University study.
The study, released Tuesday, found that
70 percent of black students and more than one-third of Hispanic students
attended predominantly minority schools during the 1998-99 school year, the
latest data available from the National Center of Education Statistics.
The study also found that white students were more segregated from other
minorities. While the average black student or Latino student attended a school
that was 53 to 55 percent black or Latino, the average white student attended a
school more than 80 percent white.
"White children are growing up in a
society that is going to become more than half minority, and they are almost
totally isolated from those minorities," said Gary Orfield, a Harvard professor
and co-director of The Civil Rights Project that conducted the study. "These
suburban kids are vastly unprepared for the future."
One reason the
researchers cited for re-segregation was the U.S. Supreme Court's 1974 ban on
desegregation across city-suburban boundaries, which they said left central city
schools overwhelmingly poor and overwhelmingly segregated.
"Cleveland is
a classic case of a place that had to go through a desegregation experience that
was very difficult and often counterproductive because the city and suburbs were
so separate," Orfield said.
Last year, the Cleveland schools were
released from court control, ending a 27-year-old desegregation case that
required schools to reflect the racial composition of the district. Today, half
of the district's more than 120 schools are considered all black.
The
Harvard study's data also shows that Latinos have become increasingly isolated.
In 1968, 23.1 percent of Latino students attended schools with a minority
enrollment over 90 percent; in 1998, that number was 36.6 percent.
The
1990s, a decade which brought Supreme Court decisions limiting desegregation
remedies, also saw an increase in the number of black students attending schools
in which more than half the enrollment was minority, from a low of 62.9 percent
in 1980 to 70.2 in 1999.
The Harvard study also included several
recommendations, including creating metropolitan magnet schools with programs to
attract students of all races across district boundaries, drawing foundation
support to continue local programs aimed at integration, and promoting teacher
exchange programs between cities and suburbs.
