Report: Public schools more segregated now than 40 years ago

States that have the most segregated public schools for blacks are New York, Illinois, and Michigan; among states with significant black enrollments, blacks are least likely to attend intensely segregated schools in Washington, Nebraska and Kansas.

The most extreme levels of black-white school dissimilarity exist in the Chicago, New York, Detroit, Boston, St. Louis and Pittsburgh metropolitan areas.

Why does it matter? Segregation in public schools has been linked to a number of problems that affect the achievement of minorities. Schools with a big majority of students who live in poverty have higher dropout rates, fewer experienced teachers and far less resources than schools with majorities of middle- and upper-class students. The studies note that expert teachers and advanced courses more common in predominantly white and/or wealthy schools help create educational advantages over minority segregated settings.

The nation’s largest metropolitan areas report severe school racial concentration. Half of the black students in the Chicago metro area, and one third of black students in New York, attend apartheid schools.

Latino students experience high levels of extreme segregation in the Los Angeles metro area, where roughly 30 percent attend a school in which whites make up 1 percent or less of the enrollment.

Table Reference

Report: Public schools more segregated now than 40 years ago
Fifteen percent of black students and 14 percent of Latino students attend “apartheid schools” across the nation in which whites make up zero to 1 percent of the enrollment, the researchers found.

The Civil Rights Project at UCLA just released three reports — “E Pluribus . . . Separation: Deepening Double Segregation for More Students,”  plus two regional studies — that analyzed data from the National Center for Education Statistics and found that segregation is growing based on both race and poverty.