Schools More Segregated Today than When Martin Luther King Jr. Was Killed
American schools are more segregated by race and class today than they were on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, 43 years ago. The average white child in America attends a school that is 77 percent white, and where just 32 percent of the student body lives in poverty. The average black child attends a school that is 59 percent poor but only 29 percent white. The typical Latino kid is similarly segregated; his school is 57 percent poor and 27 percent white.
Overall, a third of all black and Latino children sit every day in classrooms that are 90 to 100 percent black and Latino.
This is from Dana Goldstein via Ezra Klein.
My take: (1) the public school system is about the only area of modern life that is completely controlled by the government; (2) the most segregated systems (in Dallas, Anglos are less than 6%) are the ones that were run by federal judges for decades; (3) the almost-exclusive goal of the judges was to promote integration; and (4) where the state of education is now is where the health care system is heading.
What do you think?
I agree with your comments. It’s a tragedy, but the liberal media doesn’t want to admit the cause of the tragedy.
To be more precise, public schools the only area of modern live most under the control of local government. In this case, the “laboratory” of local government is a racist laboratory.
I don’t agree with artk. I don’t think the people who control our school systems are racists at all.
The politicians have sold out to the teachers’ unions. That means that the school system is a jobs program, designed to serve the needs of teachers; not an education system, designed to serve the needs of students.
When you allow quality to deteriorate, everybody who can afford it will flee to the suburbs. And because blacks and Hispanics have lower average incomes, they are disproportionately left behind.
How can you call the controllers racist when in the worst school systems they are hugely minority?
It’s a toss up on whhich has been the worst influence — the judges or the unions.
artk, this is not all that new, and can be explained by the following simple theory.
You would blame the unions, wouldn’t you?
I knew kids who were bused across town in the name of integration. It’s hard to imagine a more coercive practice than removing kids from their communities. This was done because a few misguided federal judges thought it better to educate kids far from home than allow where families reside to determine where they went to school.
If you look at the report, it is the central cities that have “resegregated,” whereas fast-growing suburbs (built in the era of integrated housing) are more integrated. The report shows the Dallas/Fort Worth/Arlington area in one statistic, but whereas Dallas schools are 6 percent white, Arlington is far more integrated, with a bare minority-majority of kids in the public schools. Note that North Dallas schools (which are in the suburban Richardson school district) are far more integrated than the Dallas public schools.
I don’t know about you guys, but my high school was not separated by races or classes. I went to school with some of the poorest kids in the city and also some of the richest. That was ten years ago. I would bet that it depends on how many high schools are in one city. The larger the city, the more likely you are to see segregation.
@ Joe Barnett
The Dallas schools are almost completely segregated, despite the fact that they were under court order for decades — answering to a judge whose only real purpose was to promote integration.
In the meantime, there is much more integration in the suburban school districts that were never under court order and never did anything to promote integration.