Segregation Report Sheds Light on Challenges in Diversifying U.S. Schools

In California, 87 percent of the non-white students attend schools that are majority minority, and in New York, it's 86 percent.

Further down the list, Mississippi has 77 percent; Georgia has 73 percent, and Alabama has 70 percent of minority students attending majority minority schools.

"What we show here is that if you are in a highly segregated black or Latino school, chances are you are in a low-income neighborhood," Gary Orfield, co-author of the report, "Racial Transformation and the Changing Nature of Segregation," told BlackAmericaWeb.com. "There students tend to get less because their communities don't have as much political power and the more experienced and credentialed teachers tend to leave."

Also, Orfield said, in those schools, there are fewer advanced courses, less academic challenges and lower graduation rates, "and it's not because they are not sitting next to white kids."

Orfield said America's intensely segregated schools are the result of years of Supreme Court inaction regarding race in schools.

"The Supreme Court that used to be pushing us forward is undermining efforts to desegregate," Orfield said.

"Anyone who thinks that the Supreme Court does not make a difference should look at the quarter century of decline in the segregation of Southern schools though the late l980s, the continual, year-by-year growth in segregation since the Court authorized ending desegregation plans in 1991, as well as the impact of the Court's 5-4 decision against city-suburban desegregation in 1974," he said.

The report also showed:

More than three quarters of intensely segregated schools are also high poverty schools.

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