School Segregation On The Rise: Harvard Study

Jet, August 6, 2001

A Harvard University study has found that classrooms grew more segregated in the 1990s.

The study, Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation, by Professor of Education and Social Policy Gary Orfield with teaching fellow Nora Gordon, analyzes statistics from the 1998-99 school year, the latest data available from the National Center of Education Statistics' Common Core of Education Statistics.

Research found much of the progress by Black students since the '60s was eliminated during a decade that brought three Supreme Court decisions curbing desegregation remedies.

Despite the rapid increase in minority enrollment in schools, according to the data, White students remain the most segregated from other races in their schools. Whites on average attend schools where more than 80 percent of the students are White and less than 20 percent of the students are from all of the other racial and ethnic groups combined.

According to Orfield, co-director of The Civil Rights Project, resegregation is contributing to a growing gap in quality between the schools attended by White students and those serving a large proportion of minority students.

"Though our schools will be our first major institutions to experience nonWhite majorities," says Orfield, "our research consistently shows that schools are becoming increasingly segregated and are offering students vastly unequal educational opportunities. This is ironic considering that evidence exists that desegregated schools both improve test scores and positively change the lives of students and that Americans increasingly express support for integrated schools."