By
Gil Klein, Media General News Service, gklein@mediageneral.com
.
Published: Wed, August 29, 2007 - 4:41 pm
Last Updated: Wed, August 29, 2007 - 4:48 pm
Fifty years after federal troops forced the desegregation of a high school in Little Rock, Ark., schools in the South are re-segregating at an increasingly rapid pace. A study released Wednesday by UCLA's Civil Rights Project found that for the first time since the 1960s, Southern schools are not the most integrated in the country.
"The South has passed a critical threshold on the downward spiral," the report said.
To counter a history of legal segregation, the federal government forced Southern school systems to integrate beginning in the late 1950s.
At the peak in 1988, almost half of black students in the South attended majority white schools.
As court orders were lifted and the Supreme Court made it more difficult to integrate based on race, Southern schools have become increasingly homogeneous.
In 2005, the report said, only a quarter of African American students attended majority white schools in the South.
"Southern cities which had substantially desegregated schools for decades are seeing the kinds of ghetto schools that have long been characteristic of the urban North," the report said.
Schools have become more segregated across the nation, said Gary Orfield, the UCLA professor who headed the project. The federal government - especially the Supreme Court -- has been increasingly hostile to integration.
"There's been no positive leadership from the federal government in more than three decades," Orfield said. He called highly segregated, high poverty schools "drop-out factories."
In a statement in response to the study, the Bush administration Education Department said public school choice plans, charter schools and private school scholarships "often provide the potential for greater voluntary integration" than government-imposed integration plans.
The North, where the federal government did little to force integration, still has the highest concentration of segregated schools, the report found.
In Illinois and New York in 2005, three out of five black students attended schools with almost all minority students.
In the South, Alabama and Mississippi had the highest proportion of extremely segregated schools. In those states in 2005, nearly half of all black students attended overwhelmingly minority schools.
The rapid growth of Hispanics - and the decline of whites as a percentage of the population - has made integration in the South more difficult, the report said.
"We are in the last decade of white majority in American public schools," it said.
The South's school population in 2005 was 50 percent white, 27 percent black, 21 percent Hispanic and 3 percent Asian.
The report comes 50 years after President Eisenhower sent federal troops to force Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus to allow nine black students to attend the all-white Central High School in Little Rock.
Little Rock did not come out from under a federal court order to integrate until February.
Today, as the school district prepares to commemorate the anniversary, Central High is about evenly split between blacks and whites. The black majority school board has no plans to change the racial makeup of the schools, a school district spokeswoman said.
Over the last 15 years, many large Southern school districts have abandoned desegregation plans after courts lifted orders to integrate.
In Charlotte, N.C., the average black student attended a school that was half white in 1991. After a federal court lifted a desegregation order in 2002, the average black student was attending a school that was one quarter white by 2005, the UCLA study found.
Hillsborough County, Fla., showed similar changes after a court lifted a desegregation order in 2002. In 1991, the average black student attended a school that was slightly more than half white. By 2005, the average black student attended a school that was a third white.
Parents and civil rights groups have largely stayed silent as schools have re-segregated. The lure of a neighborhood school now trumps the desire for integration.
"People seem most comfortable to have their kids at schools close to their homes," said Kati Haycock of the Education Trust, a non-partisan school research group.
Last June, the Supreme Court ruled that school districts could not use race as the sole reason to voluntarily integrate schools. Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas, the court's only African American, argued that "In reality, it is far from apparent that coerced racial mixing has any educational benefits, much less that integration is necessary to black achievement."
Some educational studies contradict Thomas, finding that integration can help close the gap between minority and white students.
"It's considerably easier to educate kids in a mixed setting," Haycock said. "Now we have to get kids to a higher level of achievement no matter who is in the classroom."
Hyundai Sales Sluggish
Those who Recommended this also liked:
Email to a Friend 
Printer Friendly 
OH PLEEEEEZE!!!!! NOT THE RACE CARD AGAIN. WHY DON’T PEOPLE GIVE IT A REST!!!
I DON’T CARE IF YOUR GREEN WITH PURPLE EYES, YOU USUALLY SOCIALIZE WITH PEOPLE OF THE SAME RACE AS YOU, WEATHER IT BE AT SCHOOL OR ANYWHERE ELSE ON THE PLANET.
WHO CARES WHO GOES TO SCHOOL WITH WHO, WHAT IS THE BIG DEAL WITH SEGREGATION ANYWAY? STOP WORRYING ABOUT SEGREGATION, AND WORRY ABOUT
EDUCATION….