School Segregation Is Growing, Report Finds

Segregation in the nation’s public schools is accelerating, with the trend particularly notable among Latinos in California, a study to be released Monday says.

Although the trend is driven more by immigration than by exclusionary policies, especially in California, the result is educational settings that can be “profoundly unequal,” according to the study by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University.

Schools that are predominantly African American and Latino are far more likely to serve poor students, be overcrowded and have poorly trained teachers, the report says.

Such conditions put students at an even greater competitive disadvantage, given--in California, for example--the growing emphasis on test scores, high school graduation tests, mandated reductions in remedial education and the end of affirmative action in college admissions, according to the report.

Nationwide, nearly 70% of black students and 75% of Latinos attend schools that are predominantly black, Latino or Native American, according to the report, based on 1997 data. More than a third of blacks and Latinos are in schools where 90% or more of their classmates are Latino, African American or Native American.

The average Asian American student, on the other hand, attends a school where 31% of the enrollment is from those three groups. Meanwhile, the average white student is enrolled in a school where more than eight in 10 of his or her classmates are white.

In California, ethnic isolation is even greater, with more than 40% of Latino students and 35% of African Americans attending schools that are 90% or more minority. Authors of the report said the state is approaching the “hypersegregation” that has characterized schooling in the Northeast.

One of the most intriguing trends in the federal enrollment data analyzed is the increasing segregation of suburban schools.

A computerized analysis by The Times found that in Los Angeles County, 59% of Latino high school students are at campuses where 90% of the enrollment is black, Latino or Asian. For Orange County, the figure is 36% and in Ventura County it is 14%. Similarly, half of the black students in Los Angeles County are in schools that are 90% or more black, Latino or Asian.

Gary Orfield, one of the report’s authors and a longtime critic of segregation, said educators could take a regional approach to such trends and help suburbs “avoid the sorry experiences of the intense segregation of the inner cities.”

Desegregation of city schools is no longer feasible, said Orfield, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. “But there’s lots of places where it is, and it’s important to think about it.”

Nationally, integration of black students increased from the 1960s to 1980, when the average black student attended a school where 36% of fellow students were white. The numbers then began to fall, hitting 33% by 1996.

For Latinos, segregation has been increasing for three decades. In 1970, the average Latino student attended a school where 44% of fellow students were white. As the number of Latino students tripled, that figure fell to less than 30% in 1996.

Immigration and Economics Cited

Some observers say those who support desegregation as a way to improve education want schools to undertake the almost hopeless task of stopping or reversing the effects of immigration, economics and housing patterns.

Orfield “wants us to believe that the schools are doing this deliberately,” said William Arthur Valentine Clark, a UCLA professor of geography. “In fact . . . you’ve got a huge increase in the young Latino population, so how is it segregation if they’re all going to school together? Whites are an aging population, and they have opted out of the [public] schools if they can afford it.

“Is it necessary to have a white child and a Latino child and a black child sitting next to each other to deal with the basic educational issues?” asked Clark, author of a new book called “The California Cauldron: Immigration and the Fortunes of Local Communities.”

But Orfield and others argue that the trends toward resegregation must be reversed. Students in the most racially isolated minority schools are 11 times more likely to be poor than students in nearly all-white schools, the report says.

Such schools also are less likely to offer advanced courses, and they typically send fewer of their graduates on to college, according to the report.

Even the nation’s $8.2-billion Title I program, a federal plan that provides extra assistance to disadvantaged students, has been unable to make much of an impact in the face of such forces, the report found.

Meanwhile, the educational stakes are higher than ever, with reformers raising academic expectations for students across the board.

Such policies can “only be fair if we offer equal preparation for children, regardless of skin color and language,” the report said.

Pedro Noguera, a sociologist in the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education, said resegregation “is the most serious problem facing the state.”

But he said Gov. Gray Davis’ education policies are not addressing it, instead focusing on more testing and ranking of schools. “The implications are that large numbers of black and brown kids will be unprepared for the jobs that are available because they lack the skills,” he said, “and education is the missing element.”

The report’s authors accused the Clinton administration of failing to try to reverse the trends, which they say have become increasingly apparent in recent years.

“Every other Democratic president since 1960 has had a policy to foster desegregation,” Orfield said. “The administration has been almost completely passive in the face of this process, and under its aegis the most dramatic resegregation since the Brown [vs. Board of Education] decision has taken place.”

Administration officials could not be reached for comment.

But Elaine R. Jones, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, was reluctant to blame the administration, saying that resegregation began long before President Clinton took office.

Instead, she singled out the federal courts for bearing “a huge burden” in the failure to create equal educational opportunity for children of all races. “Too many of our judges have lost the vision of what Brown was all about,” she said.

Furthermore, Jones said, American society has given “lip service” to, but never bought into the promise of, the historic court decision that opened up public schools to all races.

“If we want desegregation, we have to decide we want it,” she said. “Desegregation doesn’t happen by folding our hands and figuring it will take care of itself. As a result, the few gains that we did make are slipping by.”

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Times education writer Kenneth R. Weiss and Richard O’Reilly, Los Angeles Times director of computer analysis, contributed to this story.

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Minority Schools

Forty-five years after segregation was ruled illegal in the nations public schools, it is once again on the rise. Following is the percentage of black and Latino students nationwide attending schools with minority enrollments of 90% or more.