MILWAUKEE
Segregation is growing in schools nationwide, including in Wisconsin, where it particularly affects black students, according to two new national studies.
The studies show schools are still more integrated than they were 40 years ago. But, the wave of desegregation efforts seen from the 1950s to 1970s has stemmed and some gains are being reversed.
That’s largely because the number of minority students has been growing while the number of white students has declined.
As a result, fewer white students are going to all-white or nearly all-white schools. But a growing number of black and Hispanic students attend all, or nearly all, minority schools.
The studies from the Pew Hispanic Center and the University of California, Los Angeles, both list Wisconsin as a state in which segregation is strong, particularly among black students.
Wisconsin is one of a half-dozen states where the percentage of black students attending schools that are more than 90 percent black at least doubled from 1991 to 2005, according to the UCLA study.
