In 1954 the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case decided that separate public schools for white and black students was unconstitutional. “”Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” stated the courts decision. “Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system”
But in 2012 many states including New York, California and Texas seem to have forgotten this statement, stopped caring or enforcing the law.
A New study by the Civil Rights Project found that 43% of Latino and 38% of Black students across the nation attend intensely segregated schools with 0-10% white students. Beyond that 15% of black students, and 14% of Latino students, attend what the study terms, “apartheid schools” where white students make up 0 to 1% of the enrollment.
While the report found that nationally school segregation has declined, in many large cities and in states with high levels of immigration segregation has increased.
“This report shows that segregation has increased seriously across the country for Latino students, who are attending more intensely segregated and impoverished schools than they have for generations. The segregation increases have been the most dramatic in the West,” reads the report’s executive summary. “In spite of declining residential segregation for black families and large-scale movement to the suburbs in most parts of the country, school segregation remains very high for black students. It is also double segregation by both race and poverty. Nationwide, the typical black student is now in a school where almost two out of every three classmates (64%) are low-income, nearly double the level in schools of the typical white or Asian student (37% and 39%, respectively). New York, Illinois, and Michigan consistently top the list of the most segregated states for black students”
The Civil Rights Project has called for The Justice Department and the Office for Civil Rights to take action