The report, titled "Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation," notes that the trend in reversing desegregation gains is undermining educational opportunities for Black and Latino children. It found that in 1998–99 around 70 percent of Black children--up from 63 percent in 1981-- attended schools where the minority population is more than 50 percent. At least 76 percent of Latino youth went to segregated schools that year.

Prior to the 1960s, public schools throughout the United States for Blacks and other oppressed nationalities were segregated, with grossly inferior conditions. This inequality also existed in jobs, housing, and every other facet of society. Under pressure of the battle that was beginning in the 1950s against the Jim Crow system of legal segregation across the South, and the rising anti-colonial struggle around the world, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1954 Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that supposedly "separate but equal" schools were unconstitutional.

As a result of the victories of the civil rights movement in the South, that region of the country experienced the greatest increase in desegregation between 1964–70. In fact it remains the only region in the country where whites typically attend schools with significant numbers of Blacks, according to the Harvard University report. Also, "the period of growing desegregation coincided with the period of the most dramatic narrowing of the test score gap ever recorded" for Black and white students, it noted. Black students gaining access to better facilities, including new textbooks, better desks, and well-constructed buildings can account for some of the improvement in academic performance.  
 
Acceleration of segregation
In the decade between 1988 and 1998, however, erosion of desegregation plans accelerated throughout the United States. The segregation of housing in metropolitan areas, poorly implemented desegregation plans, and the Supreme Court's blocking of cross-district desegregation contributed to the rise in resegregation of public schools. Some of the largest school districts--including New York, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Chicago--never had significant desegregation programs.

Schools in the state of New York, followed by those in Michigan, Illinois, and California, were found to be the most segregated in the country. In Minnesota, more than 60 percent of the state's Black students attend schools where minorities make up most of the students.

While desegregation programs still exist in many cities, court orders have terminated desegregation plans in recent years in St. Petersburg, Florida; Rockford, Illinois; Nashville, Tennessee; Wilmington, Delaware; Denver; Cleveland; and elsewhere.

The authors of the Harvard report didn't have to look far to find one of the most segregated school systems in the country. In Boston, where mass struggles for desegregation took place in 1974–75, court-ordered busing ended in 1987. By 1975 the city's public school system had 85,000 students, of whom 49 percent were white, 39 percent Black, 9 percent Latino, and 3 percent Asian. Today some 63,000 of Boston's 83,000 school-age children attend Boston's public schools, where 49 percent are Black, 26 percent Latino, 9 percent Asian, and 15 percent white, due to the fact that many children who are white are sent to private or suburban schools.

One of the Supreme Court rulings that helped step up ruling-class moves to dismantle school desegregation plans came with the 1991 Board of Education of Oklahoma v. Dowell. That decision said school districts could be released from court-ordered busing if a local federal district court judged they had sufficiently implemented their court mandates. It allowed them to start assigning students to neighborhood schools that were segregated as the result of segregated housing.

For example, in Charlotte, North Carolina, the site of the country's first busing order, schools have become more segregated since the 1990s. New schools with modern equipment have been built in the outer edges of the Mecklenburg County suburbs, while schools in the more working-class areas of central Charlotte, where many Black residents live, are falling apart.

In September 1999 federal district judge Robert Potter declared the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools fully desegregated and ordered the school board to end any consideration of race in school assignments. Black parents and the Charlotte-Mecklenberg school board appealed this decision, and the following year a federal appeals court overturned Potter's ruling.  
 
Surge of immigrants in public schools
Over the last three decades, the number of Latino and Black students in U.S. public schools increased by 5.8 million, while white students' attendance declined by 5.6 million. As a result of massive immigration into the United States from Latin America, the Latino student population exploded from 2 million in 1968 to 6.9 million in 1998--an increase of 245 percent in 30 years.

In 1968 there were three times as many Blacks as Latinos attending public schools, but by 1998 there were seven Latino students for every eight Blacks. The 1968 ratio of 17 white students for every Latino student was reduced to four whites for every Latino student 30 years later. Between 1970 and 1998 Latino enrollments more than tripled in California, and rose by 508 percent in Florida. Other states that experienced dramatic increases over that period included Texas, New York, Illinois, Arizona, New Jersey, and New Mexico.

"Though our schools will be our first major institutions to experience nonwhite majorities, our research consistently shows that schools are becoming increasingly segregated and are offering students vastly unequal educational opportunities," remarked Gary Orfield, co-director of Harvard's Civil Rights Project and one of the study's authors.

With the increase in Latino student enrollment also came segregation by language. Many immigrants in the United States have incomes below the official poverty line; their children attend schools with inadequate facilities and have the highest dropout rates. Schools in California, Florida, and Texas--states with large concentrations of immigrants where affirmative action for college admission has been banned--have "a poor records of graduating students" from immigrant families, stated the Harvard study.

According to the report, "the only state where there was substantial desegregation of Latino students was Colorado, the site of the 1973 Supreme Court decision recognizing Latino desegregation rights." That court ruling was a result of pressure exerted by the mass protests against discrimination by the Chicano people in the southwestern states.
 
 
Related article:
The resegregation of education  
 
 
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