The study found that Black students are increasingly concentrated in the same schools--schools that receive a lower proportion of funds and resources. Latino students face a similar situation. The blows to desegregation reflect the growing class divide and inequality, and the persistent racial discrimination, built into the education system.

The researchers at the Harvard University Civil Rights Project state that these students today face more segregation than their forebears did 30 years ago when the first court-ordered desegregation plans were announced.

The average Black student sits in a classroom in which the proportion of Blacks is many times higher than their percentage in the population, which stands at 12 percent. The study indicates that this is a continuing trend. During the 1990s the enrollment of Black students in majority-white schools declined by 13 percent, to a lower level than in any year since 1968.

The report documents this reversal by listing the percentage of white students in schools in cities such as Chicago, where the figure is 10 percent, Birmingham (7 percent), and Atlanta (3 percent), and their enrollment in public schools, which dropped from 35 million in 1968 to 29 million in 2000.

The number in public schools has declined from 80 percent to 62 percent in the same period.

In most large urban school districts, says the study, white students make up less than 25 percent of the school population.

In the nation’s five largest districts the figure ranges from 10 percent to 15 percent.

The same trends affect Latino students who, along with Blacks and Asians, make up the majority of the student population in California and Texas, the country’s two largest states. Immigration has resulted in steadily growing Latino school enrollment, now 7.5 million and rapidly approaching Black public school attendance of about 8 million students.

Latinos were not included in most desegregation court orders in southern districts. Today the average Latino student goes to a school where less than 30 percent of their classmates are white. The only state where substantial measures were taken to counter this was Colorado. There, a 1973 court ruling paralleling the 1960s desegregation orders was a result of pressure exerted by the mass protests against discrimination by the Chicano people in the southwestern states.

The termination of desegregation plans that began in the 1990s has been the major factor in these reversals. The 1991 Board of Education Oklahoma v. Dowell ruling, for example, said that school districts could be released from court-ordered busing if a federal district court deemed that they had sufficiently implemented government mandates.  
 
Busing programs terminated
Busing programs--a gain of struggles against racism--enforced desegregation of schools by instructing authorities to bus students into schools they would otherwise have avoided or been excluded from.

The 1991 ruling opened the way for officials to be released from this obligation. Without the busing programs, the class- and race-determined patterns of housing put their stamp on the composition of student bodies.

Desegregation programs still exist in many cities. However, court decisions have ended such plans in at least 36 school districts over the past decade. This growing list includes Little Rock, Arkansas; San Diego, California; Miami; and Denver.

The study reports that in Charlotte, North Carolina, the site of the country’s first court-ordered busing plan, schools have become more segregated. This trend was reinforced by a federal appeals court decision in 2001, which ended 30 years of federal oversight.

Dozens of Charlotte schools became nearly all Black virtually overnight. 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--home to many Black residents--are falling apart.

The impact of these developments has been magnified by cuts in spending on education, which have hit schools in working-class areas the hardest. State governments have begun laying off teachers, bus drivers, and janitors, while schools are shortening the calendar year.

The attacks on school desegregation are part of the bipartisan drive to chip away at affirmative action programs. The Bush administration has lent its support to the legal challenge to the University of Michigan admissions policies, backing two lawsuits against the university’s law school and its undergraduate college.

The programs that enforced progress in overcoming inequality and segregation were a product of mass struggles. Under the pressure of the protests and battles that unfolded in the 1950s and earlier against the Jim Crow system of legal segregation across the South, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that supposedly "separate but equal" schools were unconstitutional.

Through these battles the South became the "most integrated region of the country," in the words of the Harvard study.

The Civil Rights Project noted two years ago that "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. Access to better facilities, including new textbooks and usable desks, and well-constructed buildings help account for these improvements.

"School systems are actually being ordered to end successful desegregation plans," the Harvard researchers concluded, "just as more and more convincing evidence of those gains is accumulating."  
 
 
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