In shadow of March on Washington, schools increasingly segregated in California | EdSource Today

In shadow of March on Washington, schools increasingly segregated in California | EdSource Today:

In shadow of March on Washington, schools increasingly segregated in California

August 28th, 2013 | Add a Comment | 
By Louis Freedberg

Louis Freedberg

Fifty years after the March on Washington, a major challenge facing California and the West in general is increasing segregation of black and Latino students, reviving a debate that Brown v Board of Education was supposed to resolve: whether it is possible to have “separate but equal” schools.

As Gary Orfield, director of UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, noted, “We seem to be on a path to return step by step to the ‘separate but equal’ philosophy that so clearly failed the country for six decades between 1896 and 1954.”  Orfield, then a recent college graduate and an intern at the State Department, attended the1963 March being commemorated today.

Echoing his remarks was a report issued this week by the Economic Policy Institute lamenting the increasing educational isolation of black students nationally.  ”The educational goal of the March on Washington — school desegregation — is a condition affecting black students in which we are sliding backwards,”  Richard Rothstein, its author, wrote.

The challenge is especially compelling in the West, including California, with its burgeoning Latino school population.  Latinos comprise 52 percent of California’s student enrollments. Whites, by contrast, comprise only 26 percent of public school enrollments, and blacks only 6.5 percent.

Researchers from The Civil Rights Project noted that “in states with significant shares of Latino students extreme patterns of isolation were evident.”

In California, in 2009-10, 91 percent of Latino students were in schools that had 50 percent to 100 percent minority enrollments – and 52 percent were in schools with 90 percent to 100 percent 

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