A study released on May 15, 2014, by the UCLA Civil Rights Project shows that as whole schools in America have resegregated. Today a minority student is more likely to attend a public school with a predominately minority student body. This move backwards towards segregated schools comes almost 60 years after the Brown v. Board of Education case in Topeka, Kansas. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled: “In the field of public education, the doctrine of `separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” and that sates must desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” However not only has the speed slowed, but the vehicle of progress seems to be going in reverse. Among the facts the study reveled are:
- Black and Latino students are an increasingly large percentage of suburban enrollment, particularly in larger metropolitan areas, and are moving to schools with relatively few white students.
- Segregation for blacks is the highest in the Northeast, a region with extremely high district fragmentation.
- Latinos are now significantly more segregated than blacks in suburban America.
- Black and Latino students tend to be in schools with a substantial majority of poor children, while white and Asian students typically attend middle class schools.
- Segregation is by far the most serious in the central cities of the largest metropolitan areas;the states of New York, Illinois and California are the top three worst for isolating black students.
- California is the state in which Latino students are most segregated.
The report states that economic, cultural and the demographic changes have played a significant role in the changes of the educational landscape. The UCLA Civil Rights Project was founded in 1996. Its mission is to create a new generation of research in social science and law on the critical issues of civil rights and equal opportunity for racial and ethnic groups in the United States.
