Louis Freedberg

Louis Freedberg

L years afterward the March on Washington, a major challenge facing California and the West in full general is increasing segregation of black and Latino students, reviving a argue that Chocolate-brown five Board of Education was supposed to resolve: whether information technology is possible to have "separate but equal" schools.

Every bit Gary Orfield, director of UCLA'due south Civil Rights Project, noted, "We seem to be on a path to return step by step to the 'carve up but equal' philosophy that then clearly failed the country for vi decades between 1896 and 1954."  Orfield, then a recent college graduate and an intern at the State Department, attended the1963 March being commemorated today.

Echoing his remarks is a report issued this week by the Economic Policy Institute lamenting the increasing educational isolation of black students nationally.  "The educational goal of the March on Washington — school desegregation — is a status affecting blackness students in which we are sliding backwards,"  Richard Rothstein, its author, wrote.

The challenge is specially compelling in the West, including California, with its burgeoning Latino school population.  Latinos comprise 52 percent of California'south student enrollments. Whites, past dissimilarity, comprise simply 26 percent of public school enrollments, and blacks only 6.five percentage.

Researchers from The Civil Rights Project noted that "in states with significant shares of Latino students extreme patterns of isolation were evident."

In California, in 2009-10, 91 percent of Latino students were in schools that had 50 percent to 100 percent minority enrollments – and 52 percent were in schools with 90 percent to 100 percent minority enrollments. Simply in New Mexico did Latino students feel a greater level of racial isolation.

In the W, three out of four Latino students are in schools with xc percent to 100 percent minority students – compared to 2-thirds in 1968. Other indicators show the aforementioned trends: the typical Latino pupil in the 1960s attended a school with a 54 pct white pupil enrollment, compared to simply 16.5 percent 40 years afterward.

Yet school desegregation is an upshot that has been virtually absent from education reform debates and policies enacted over the past xiii years. The No Kid Left Behind police, the major education reform attempt of the concluding decade, is overlaid by a gloss of ceremonious rights rhetoric, merely it has done aught to address the concentration of black and Latino students in the same schools, and the lack of resources they confront.

In fact, just the reverse has occurred. The NCLB law gives parents the choice to withdraw their students and send them elsewhere, rather than address the concentration of low-performing minority students – typically poor ones – that did non take the resources to get find their style to more afar schools in their own districts.

Orfield and his colleagues concede that the segregation is not due to the explicitly racist laws that prescribed schoolhouse attendance by race. In an interview with EdSource, Orfield noted that the racial isolation didn't occur by happenstance, just reflects residential segregation that has been shaped by explicit policies affecting where people alive, such a whether communities allow affordable rental housing in their communities, as well as how school boundaries are fatigued.

"Information technology is not done by the state constitution, but that doesn't hateful it has not occurred without public action of some kind," he said.

While the sheer number of Latino students in California makes the task of having less concentrated enrollments of blackness and Latino students in many schools very difficult, Orfield rejects the view that if more racially integrated schools can't be accomplished for all students, it shouldn't be attempted at all.

He says that by taking steps like establishing magnet schools that attract students from diverse backgrounds and regulating the expansion of charter schools, more children could do good from higher quality schools, which typically have more resources, including more experienced teachers.

"Tin can we use non coercive measures to do it? Yep," he said. "Would it solve the problem for everyone? Of course non."

The debate is not simply one of balancing percentages of students from different racial or ethnic groups. It is clear that academic outcomes in the vast majority of schools with overwhelming blackness and Latino enrollments fall far behind those with loftier numbers of white and Asian students.

"In that location is a real clear connection between segregation – which in California almost always means double segregation past race and ethnicity every bit well by social class – and the probability that you will reach sure levels of education attainment," he said.

Having loftier concentrations of poor children in the same schools makes no academic sense, says the Economic Policy Found's Rothstein.  "When low-performing students are concentrated in the same schools, information technology is more difficult to raise their achievement than when these children are integrated into the middle-class population," Rothstein writes.

The reality is that schools serving high proportions of black and Latino students – typically in low-income communities – tend to suffer from a range of stresses that affect the quality of the education they tin provide, including factors such as high teacher turnover, shortages of basic materials, fewer counselors, overcrowding, and poorly maintained facilities.

The segregation on school sites is reflected in the ongoing achievement gap that is even so disturbingly large. The NCLB legislation, whose goal was to get every pupil to a "skilful" level on land tests past this spring, has done fiddling to close the gap. In California, scores on the California Standards Tests have risen significantly for all racial groups over the past decade, but significant gaps remain, because scores for white and Asian students have increased by almost the aforementioned level as those of blacks and Latinos.

As a result, black and Latino students are still between xx and xxx percentage points below whites in proficiency levels in math and reading on country tests  – a just slightly narrower gap than in 2002-03, the start yr results broken down by racial and ethnic groups were available.

What disturbs Orfield and his colleagues is that the issue of school desegregation is completely absent from the nation's political and education agenda.

"Tin we have dissever and equal schools?" researchers from the Ceremonious Rights Project asked in a paper on "severe segregation" of Latino students published last September. "The reply has been historically, and continues to be, a quite demoralizing, 'no'."

 Louis Freedberg is the executive manager of EdSource.

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