Segregation in U.S. Schools on Rise, Study Finds

American public schools are becoming more racially segregated now than at any time since the late 1960s, a new Harvard University study reported Monday.

Blacks and Latinos, especially in major metropolitan areas, are increasingly isolated in predominantly minority schools with a high ratio of children from poor families, the study found.

Even in the suburbs, the Harvard figures showed, school segregation has persisted for most black and Latino students, who have moved away from central cities, despite hopes that suburbia would provide good, integrated schools.

The study also said that racial divisions were stronger in the Northeast, Midwest and California than in most of the Southern and border states, where segregation existed as a matter of policy before a landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling declared the practice unconstitutional.

While blacks comprise less than 20% of the population, the study found that two of every three black children in 1991-92 attended schools in which more than half the student body was black or Latino. The ratio was the highest since 1968, when 77% of black students went to predominantly minority schools.

The proportion of Latinos in minority-dominated schools rose from 54% in 1968 to 73% in the academic year ending in 1992.

In part, the change reflected a sharp increase in Latino birth rates and ongoing housing discrimination, along with a tendency of federal courts to steer away from desegregation orders, the study said. The report also reflected an exodus from big-city schools, where violence has increased and academic achievement has declined.

“The civil rights impulse from the 1960s is dead in the water and the ship is floating backward toward the shoals of segregation,” said Gary Orfield, director of the Harvard Project on School Desegregation and the study’s chief author.

His report was issued by the National School Boards Assn. and Johnathan Wilson, past president of the group’s Council on Urban Boards of Education, who said the results show the nation is returning to “a uniquely Americanized form of apartheid.” The study provided new data on the relationship of school separation and poverty.

“It shows that both African American and Latino students are much more likely than white students to find themselves in schools of concentrated poverty,” Orfield said. “Segregation by race is strongly related to segregation by poverty.”

Racial integration of schools was most likely to occur in small towns, rural areas, smaller metropolitan areas and suburbs of medium-sized cities, the study found. In contrast, the level of school segregation remains highest in big cities and middle-sized central cities.

“The great increase in the proportion of nonwhite students has not been a consequence of ‘white flight’ from public to private schools (but rather) it has been huge change in birth rates and immigration patterns,” Orfield wrote.

Enrollment in public schools grew by 7% in the last half of the 1980s, while private school enrollment dropped by 9%, he said.

“The major changes in desegregation occurred for black students in the 1966 to 1972 period,” the study noted. “They were very large and they lasted with very little overall erosion for about two decades.”

But the study said: “The changes were concentrated in the South, which was the only region to face a serious federal enforcement effort, and (today’s) segregation is greatest where desegregation was never accomplished.”

Orfield noted, for example, that the highest degree of school segregation was in the Northeast, where 76% of black children and 78% of Latino children attend a predominantly minority school. In the Midwest, the ratios were 70% for blacks and 53% for Latinos, compared to 61% of blacks in the South who go to schools that are more than half black.

New York has the lowest percentage of whites in schools with blacks, followed by Illinois, Michigan and New Jersey, the study showed.

Segregation for Latino students was most severe in the Northeast, in the Chicago area and in California and Texas, the report indicated.

“The changes in California have been dramatic,” Orfield reported. “In 1970, the typical California Latino student was in a school with 54.5% white students. A decade later it was down to 35.9% and by 1991 it was 27%.”

“Blacks in Alabama and Mississippi are significantly less segregated, according to this measure, than Latinos in California,” he concluded.

“One reason for the increase in segregation of Hispanic students is the tremendous increase in the number and proportion of Latino students in most of the areas in which they are concentrated during the past two decades,” the report added.

Latino enrollment in California schools jumped by 155% from 1970 to 1991, rising to 1,804,500 students in the latter year.

As far as black students are concerned, California ranked third among the states in the degree of segregation, with 80% of black children in schools with more than 50% minority enrollment, the study said.