Resegregation in American public schools has intensified over the last two decades, particularly in the American South, and the U.S. Supreme Court is largely responsible for this trend. Those are the findings in a new report released by the Civil Rights Projects, which is headquartered at the University of California, Los Angeles.
In “Historic Reversals, Accelerating Resegregation, and the Need for New Integration Strategies,” authored by Dr. Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee, the scholars argue that since 1991, the U.S. Supreme Court has steadily ruled against efforts to integrate public schools, creating a climate that has ultimately forced local and state school districts across the country to abandon voluntary desegregation programs.
The indictment of the Supreme Court comes just three months after the high court ruled in the Louisville and Seattle cases that race cannot be used in an effort to achieve desegregation, prompting some to question whether the court was slowly reversing its position on the 1954 landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision.
“The court [has] reversed nearly four decades of decisions and regulations which had permitted and even required that race be taken into account because of the earlier failure of desegregation plans that did not do that,” Orfield and Lee wrote, adding that in 1968, 99 percent of Black students attended totally segregated schools, compared to 27 percent of Black students who attended majority White schools in 2005. If left unaddressed, the authors conclude that the level of resegregation among African-Americans in the South will likely revert back to the dismal numbers of the 1950s and 1960s.
Orfield and Lee argue that the trend against desegregation has impacted African-Americans and Latinos the greatest, in part because many of these students are often separated by residence from Whites and from middle-class students and often attend schools that lack quality teachers, high test scores and steady graduation rates.
“The reality is that we are going backwards, year after year,” said Orfield, who is co-director of the Civil Rights Project and a professor of Education, Law, Political Science and Urban Planning at UCLA. “We think that the Supreme Court is the leading cause for what is happening in the country, particularly the South. Schools are becoming more segregated.”
Orfield says that Latinos — the fast growing group in the American South — are most at risk, particularly since there has been no significant action to reverse the rapid increase in Latino segregation and its relationship to high dropout rates and low test scores.
