Historic Reversals, Accelerating Resegregation, and the Need for New Integration Strategies.

Abstract

From the "excellence" reforms of the Reagan era and the Goals 2000 project of the Clinton Administration to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, we have been trying to focus pressure and resources on making the achievement of minority children in segregated schools equal.The record to date justifies deep skepticism.8 On average, segregated minority schools are inferior in terms of the quality of their teachers, the character of the curriculum, the level of competition, average test scores, and graduation rates.This does not mean that desegregation solves all problems or that it always works, or that segregated schools do not perform well in rare circumstances, but it does mean that desegregation normally connects minority students with schools which have many potential advantages over segregated ghetto and barrio schools especially if the children are not segregated at the classroom level.Desegregation is often treated as if it were something that occurred after the Brown decision in the l950s.In fact, serious desegregation of the black South only came after Congress and the Johnson Administration acted powerfully under the l964 Civil Rights Act; serious desegregation of the cities only occurred in the l970s and was limited outside the South.9 Though the Supreme Court recognized the rights of Latinos to desegregation remedies in l973, 10 there was little enforcement as the Latino numbers multiplied rapidly and their segregation intensified.11 Resegregation, which took hold in the early 1990s after three Supreme Court decisions from l991 to 1995 limiting desegregation orders, 12 is continuing to grow in all parts of the country for both African Americans and Latinos and is accelerating the most rapidly in the only region that had been highly desegregated-the South.The children in United States schools are much poorer than they were decades ago and more separated in highly unequal schools.Black and Latino segregation is usually double segregation, both from whites and from middle class students.For blacks, more than a third of a century of progress in racial integration has been lost--though the seventeen states which had segregation laws are still far less segregated than in the l950s when state laws enforced apartheid in the schools and the massive resistance of Southern political leaders delayed the impact of Brown for a decade.For Latinos, whose segregation in many areas is now far more severe than when it was first measured nearly four decades ago, there never was progress outside of a few areas and things have been getting steadily worse since the 8 J. Lee, Tracking Achievement Gaps and Assessing the Impact of NCLB on the Gaps: An In-depth Look into National and State Reading and Math Outcome Trends, Cambridge: Civil Rights

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