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THE RESEGRGATION OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Alternet - America's schools are more segregated now than they were in the late 1960s. More than 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education, we need to radically rethink the meaning of "school choice.". . .
A professor at Teachers College at Columbia University, [Amy Stuart] Wells has spent much of her career studying the resegregation of American schools - writing the history of the steady march back to separateness that has left our educational system more racially segregated now than it was in 1968. . .
Today, one-third of black students attend school in places where the black population is more than 90 percent. A little less than half of white students attend schools that are more than 90 percent white. One-third of all black and Latino students attend high-poverty schools (where more than 75 percent of students receive free or reduced lunch); only 4 percent of white children do.
Things have been better, and not so long ago. In 1990 more than 40 percent of black students in the South were attending majority-white schools. Today, fewer than 30 percent of students do - roughly the same percentage as in the late 1960s, when many districts were still refusing to implement 1954's Brown v. Board of Education. . .
A professor at Teachers College at Columbia University, [Amy Stuart] Wells has spent much of her career studying the resegregation of American schools - writing the history of the steady march back to separateness that has left our educational system more racially segregated now than it was in 1968. . .
Today, one-third of black students attend school in places where the black population is more than 90 percent. A little less than half of white students attend schools that are more than 90 percent white. One-third of all black and Latino students attend high-poverty schools (where more than 75 percent of students receive free or reduced lunch); only 4 percent of white children do.
Things have been better, and not so long ago. In 1990 more than 40 percent of black students in the South were attending majority-white schools. Today, fewer than 30 percent of students do - roughly the same percentage as in the late 1960s, when many districts were still refusing to implement 1954's Brown v. Board of Education. . .
1 Comments:
The article dwells on percentages because the truth of school desegregation is uninspiring. Here in Boston, black kids are bussed to 90% black schools in white neighborhoods. White kids are not bussed the other way, because almost nobody voluntarily chooses the schools in the black neighborhoods (including the black parents). If the neighborhood school in the white neighborhood becomes identified as a mostly bussed school, the white parents won't send their kids there.
When the day is over, everybody just gets on the bus and goes home. The black parents are less likely to attend events and meetings at the school across town.
The only thing school desegregation has positively accomplished is to get black kids out of neighborhoods where stray bullets might kill a kid on the playground.
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