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10/24/14 2:53 PMWhy Are American Schools Still Segregated? - The Atlantic
Page 1 of 7http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/11/why-are-american-schools-still-segregated/281126/
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ELEANOR BARKHORN NOV 5 2013, 9:16 AM ET
Jeremy Fiel grew up going to fairly diverse public schools in Lubbock, Texas."Some schools had a higher black or Hispanic population," he said. "But thereweren’t any all-white schools." After graduating college in 2006, he spent three
Why Are American Schools StillSegregated?A new study offers two answers: White people are making up a smaller percentage of thepopulation than they used to, and different races are living in different school districts.
Fifty years ago this fall, Alabama state troopers turned away a bus with 13 black students who were ontheir way to the all-white Tuskegee High School. (Associated Press)
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10/24/14 2:53 PMWhy Are American Schools Still Segregated? - The Atlantic
Page 2 of 7http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/11/why-are-american-schools-still-segregated/281126/
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years teaching science in Greenwood, Mississippi. What he saw in Greenwoodshocked him.
"Segregation there was the most extreme I’ve ever seen," said Fiel. "There wereliterally less than five white kids in an entire public school."
Fiel's experience as a teacher inspired him to go to graduate school in sociologyto study segregation and inequality in education. Now a Ph.D. candidate atUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison, Fiel recently published a study in theAmerican Sociological Review that suggests the factors driving segregation haveincreased in scale in the past several decades—and that fixing the problem willrequire a new set of strategies.
Nearly 60 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education SupremeCourt decision that ordered school districts to desegregate, schools seem to betrending back toward their segregated pasts. In the 1968-69 school year, whenthe U.S. Department of Education started to enforce Brown, about 77 percent ofblack students and 55 percent of Latino students attended public schools thatwere more than half-minority. By the 2009-2010 school year, the picture wasn'tmuch better for black students, and it was far worse for Latinos: 74 percent ofblack students and 80 percent of Latino students went to schools that were morethan half-minority. More than 40 percent of black and Latino students attendedschools that were 90 percent to 100 percent minority.
The persistence of segregation is a problembecause, today as in the Brown era, separateschools are unequal. "Schools of concentratedpoverty and segregated minority schools arestrongly related to an array of factors that limiteducational opportunities and outcomes," wrote theauthors of a 2012 report by the University ofCalifornia–Los Angeles's Civil Rights Project."These include less experienced and less qualifiedteachers, high levels of teacher turnover, lesssuccessful peer groups and inadequate facilities and
learning materials."
Fiel's study found that one factor that's led to the decline of white students inminority-heavy schools is the fact that white people make up a smallerproportion of the overall student population:
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10/24/14 2:53 PMWhy Are American Schools Still Segregated? - The Atlantic
Page 3 of 7http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/11/why-are-american-schools-still-segregated/281126/
Whites are nearly a minority in the U.S. population under the age of five, andCensus projections predict that by 2043, whites will no longer be the majority ofthe U.S. population overall. "There’s going to be fewer whites in minority schoolsbecause there are fewer whites in the population," said Fiel.
Another part of the problem is with desegregation policies themselves. At thetime of the Brown decision, schools in the same district were vastly unequal toone another, so efforts went toward integrating schools within each district. Thatmade sense to combat segregation as it existed at the time.
Today, though, Fiel found that racial imbalance tends to exist between schooldistricts, rather than within them. This chart shows how different factors havecontributed to racial isolation over the past decade. Racial imbalance betweendistricts (the black bar) has consistently played the most significant role innearly all forms of racial isolation:
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Jeremy E. Fiel, American Sociological Review
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10/24/14 2:53 PMWhy Are American Schools Still Segregated? - The Atlantic
Page 4 of 7http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/11/why-are-american-schools-still-segregated/281126/
This map of school districts in and around New York City is a good illustration ofthis phenomenon:
The darker the green, the larger the the black population in the school district.Notice that there are several dark-green (i.e. majority black) districts borderingoff-white (i.e. majority white) ones. The Mount Vernon City School District nearNew Rochelle, for example, has a 62.1 percent black population. On its northernborder lies a little off-white dot: the Bronxville Union Free School District,whose population is 0.6 percent black. Student achievement in those districts issimilarly divergent: In Mount Vernon, 68 percent of students pass New YorkState's high-stakes Regents exam; in Bronxville, 100 percent pass. You can seeother, similar contrasts near Newark (on the southwestern side of the map) andon Long Island (on the eastern side).
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Jeremy E. Fiel, American Sociological Review
National Center for Education Statistics
10/24/14 2:53 PMWhy Are American Schools Still Segregated? - The Atlantic
Page 5 of 7http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/11/why-are-american-schools-still-segregated/281126/
"The biggest barrier to reducing racial isolation...is racial imbalance betweenschool districts in the same metropolitan area/nonmetropolitan county," Fielwrote in his American Sociological Review article.
Inter-district segregation does not come with an easy solution. Creatingintegrated schools in these areas would require students to travel across districtlines—a form of desegregation policy that has been struck down by the SupremeCourt.
"We need new policies and new ways of addressing segregation because it’s on amuch larger scale now," Fiel said.
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10/24/14 2:53 PMWhy Are American Schools Still Segregated? - The Atlantic
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