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U.S. school resegregation is surging
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
By Rachel Smolkin, Post-Gazette National Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Nearly a half-century after the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that school segregation was "inherently unequal," the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University yesterday released findings showing that racial and ethnic school segregation intensified throughout the 1990s.
New figures from the 1998-1999 school year show resegregation is occurring despite the nation's growing diversity and the increase in Hispanic students. The study found that Northeastern schools, including those in Pennsylvania, remain far more segregated than Southern schools.
Gary Orfield, co-director of Harvard's Civil Rights Project, said patterns of resegregation are contributing to a widening gap in quality between the schools attended by most white students and the schools attended by large numbers of minority students.
"Segregated minority schools are almost always impoverished schools," Orfield said. "They're profoundly unequal in almost every dimension. ... That is a huge educational problem."
Although President Bush, Congress and many local lawmakers have pledged to improve the nation's schools, few politicians have focused on disparities produced by recent trends toward resegregation.
Orfield's study found that segregation is closely linked to school poverty and, therefore, to school quality. Poor schools offer fewer advanced subjects, have less-qualified teachers and experience higher student dropout rates than their wealthier counterparts.
In 1954, the Supreme Court initiated widespread desegregation efforts when the justices ruled in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka that the prevailing "separate but equal" doctrine denied students equal protection under the law. Segregation decreased nationally for black students from the 1960s until the late 1980s.
Orfield attributed the current trend toward resegregation to three major Supreme Court decisions during the 1990s that limited the scope and duration of desegregation orders. Most federal courts, once on the "cutting edge" of guiding integration efforts, interpreted the high-court rulings as a signal to "get out of the desegregation business as fast as possible," Orfield said.
Unlike most states, Pennsylvania experienced a tiny trend toward integration over the past two decades. Black students in Pennsylvania generally attended schools that had 30 percent whites in 1998, an increase of nearly 1 percent from 1980. In most other states, the percentage of white students attending school with black students declined during the same period.
Orfield said Pittsburgh probably is responsible for the movement toward integration, because Philadelphia never adopted a comprehensive desegregation plan. In 1998-1999, Philadelphia's school district had 207,465 students. Of those, about 65 percent were black, 18 percent white, 12 percent Hispanic and 5 percent Asian.
In Pittsburgh, 55.4 percent of the district's nearly 39,000 students are black, 40.3 percent are white, 1.4 percent are Asian. The rest are Hispanic, American Indian and those of mixed race.
A quarter of the district's black students attend schools where they make up at least 90 percent of the student population. Only a tiny percentage -- 3.3 percent -- attend schools where at least 75 percent of the students are white.
Despite Pennsylvania's small trend toward integration, the state continues to rank among the most segregated for black students. In 1998-1999, nearly half the state's black students attended schools composed entirely or almost entirely of minorities. Pennsylvania ranked sixth among states on this measure of segregation, according to the study.
The most segregated states for black students are Illinois, Michigan, New York and New Jersey, according to the report. In Michigan and Illinois, black students on average attend schools that have only 19 percent white students; in New York, black students generally attend schools with only 18 percent white students.
Although public schools in the South remain more integrated than before the civil rights movement, they are becoming more segregated at accelerated rates, the study found. This trend especially alarms researchers because the South led the nation in school integration efforts between 1964 and 1988.
Even now, despite the rapid pace of resegregation, the South remains the nation's only region where whites typically attend schools with significant numbers of blacks.
Nationally, white students remain the most segregated from all other races, despite the rapid growth of suburban minorities, the study found. Whites generally attend schools where fewer than 20 percent of the students are from all other racial and ethnic groups combined.
Most Allegheny County suburban districts have few black students. Among the exceptions are the Duquesne City and Wilkinsburg districts, which have few white students.
An example of a district that is more balanced is Woodland Hills, in which 53 percent of the nearly 6,000 students are white and 46 percent are black. District officials said all of its schools are close to a 50-50 mix.
Post-Gazette Staff Writer Carmen Lee contributed to this report.