School Segregation and the Achievement Gap - Essay Example

The progress toward school desegregation peaked in the late 1980s, according to a study by the Harvard Civil Rights Project, and, there has been an opposite trend through the last 15 years. How did it move so slowly and how is it now regressing? Segregation proved difficult to break initially: it was only with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that desegregation came close to a reality in many aspects of American life… especially in upper-level educational institutes. By the 1970’s attention focused on trying to desegregate elementary and high schools. Here a problem arose, for if schools were blind to race, then the racial mixture of the student body should parallel the racial percentages of the community. Consequently, as school districts might not necessarily be segregated, they could easily be a larger percentage of a certain ethnicity, and schools were hardly heterogeneous. If nothing else, wealthier communities frequently had, if not necessarily better education, then certainly more access to updated teaching supplies.

This program met with varying levels of success, yet remained effective through the ’70’s up until the late ‘90’s.  The desegregation is said to have peaked with the federal overturning of mandatory busing in 1991, directly due to a large migration of Caucasians to suburbs, the creation of magnet and charter schools, and larger enrollment in private schools.  While magnet and charter schools can draw students to otherwise minority-oriented neighborhoods, their degree of integration ultimately boils down to the selection process.

The Harvard Civil Rights Project claims that the largest focus of segregated schools is now in the Midwest, with schools in the Northeast following behind them.  Re-segregation has been addressed most recently because of proposed laws in Omaha, Nebraska, which would divide the school districts into three segregations: black, white, and Latino. Ernie Chambers, Nebraska’s only African-American State Senator, claims that the proposed law, which would go into effect in 2008, would “let minority-led school boards run the schools that educate minority children since white-run schools have failed to improve black and Latino graduation rates and reduce dropouts nationwide…” 

The law would simultaneously erase the integration busing has established, which has returned to racially predominant segregation since the end of busing, according to Jonathan Kozol author of Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.  His statistics indicate that by the academic year 2000-2001, 87 percent of public school enrollment in Chicago was black or Hispanic while less than 10 percent of children in the schools were white.  Other cities revealed similar trends: Philadelphia and Cleveland were 78 % black or Hispanic, 84% in Los Angeles, 88% in Baltimore, and nearly 75% in New York City, respectively.  John Jackson, education director for the NAACP, interprets the busing reversal this way: “The implications are the same as in the '50s: Minority students in high poverty areas are not getting a quality education.”

Why should the public be concerned about school integration?  Firstly, because segregated schools perpetuate inequalities in learning abilities and widen the gaps in academic success for children of different races.  The UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research finds that “Test scores, college attendance rates, and employment outcomes have been found to improve for students from integrated schools… (likewise, they) are more adept and confident at studying and working in diverse settings…”

Harvard professor Gary Orfield has found 3 direct correlations between school segregation and achievement gaps: 1)a coincidence of re-segregation and achievement gap trends, 2) evidence that indicates that segregated minority schools generally provide inferior education, and 3) research that suggests that desegregation raises some students' test scores.  It seems clear that school desegregation is therefore in the best interest of the nation as a whole.  While magnet and charter schools can draw students to otherwise minority-oriented neighborhoods, their degree of integration ultimately boils down to the selection process.  What remains is self-evident: There has been no single greater deciding factor in accepted integration than the mandatory busing program.  Although it was overturned due to inconclusive (now outdated) arguments that the integration did not necessarily help a minority child’s grades, Tamar Jacoby, in his article Wall Street Journal article “Beyond Busing,”  notes:

Integration outside the classroom… was slowly spreading… With legal barriers eliminated, blacks prospered in school and on the job according to their abilities. The black middle class nearly quadrupled over four decades; the number of blacks in college grew by a factor of 10. By the mid-1990s, blacks were as likely as whites to graduate from high school… and, in two-parent households, black family income was almost 90% that of whites…” It seems that both integration and learning are not necessarily confined to the classroom… they can be learned just as thoroughly on the bus.   Read More