Resegregation Continues to Outpace Integration

By the end of the Reagan years, the U. S. had begun a disturbing trend toward resegregation of schools that has continued unabated. With the corporate oligarchy now in charge of federal education policy, we may expect this trend to accelerate as the neo-eugenic strategy of isolating and mind-scrubbing the poor in charter schools has replaced efforts to end poverty and to integrate K12 education. In fact, in large urban centers like Boston where democratic governance of schools has given way to autocracy (much to the delight of the Dunc), priority for formation of charter chain gangs is given to those who fashion these isolating institutions for poor and minority populations, thus offering explicit government sanction for apartheid schooling.

The new study is from the Pew Hispanic Center and reported by CNN:

(CNN) -- The nation's suburban schools added 3.4 million students to their rolls over the past 15 years -- and nearly all of them were minorities, according to a study released Tuesday.

Yet the new arrivals resulted in only a modest increase in the individual schools' racial and ethnic diversity, the study said.

"The school districts look like they are more diverse, but within your school districts, if the whites are in one school, the blacks in a different school and the Hispanics in yet a different school, it doesn't necessarily mean the suburban whites have more black and Hispanic classmates -- because they don't go to the same school," said Richard Fry, senior research associate at the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, who wrote the report.

Using federal government data, Fry found that minority students made up 99 percent of the increase in suburban school enrollment between the 1993-94 and 2006-07 school years.

During that time, the student body at the nation's suburban schools went from 72 percent white to 59 percent white; from 12 percent black to 15 percent black; from 11 percent Hispanic to 20 percent Hispanic; and from 5 percent Asian to 6 percent Asian.

The diversity, however, is not reflected at the individual school level. For example, in 2006-07, the typical white suburban student attended a school whose student body was 75 percent white, down from 83 percent white in 1993-94, Fry wrote.

"So at a time when the white share of student enrollment in suburban school districts was falling by 13 percentage points, the exposure of the typical white suburban student to minority students in his or her own school was growing by a little more than half that much -- or 8 percentage points," the report said.

From another point of view, the typical black suburban student attended a school in 2006-07 that was 34 percent white, down from 43 percent white in 1993-94. . . . .