WASHINGTON — Poor, black and Latino children are becoming increasingly isolated from their white, affluent peers in the nation’s public schools, according to new federal data released Tuesday, 62 years after the Supreme Court decided that segregated schools are “inherently unequal” and therefore unconstitutional.
That landmark decision in Brown vs. Board of Education began the dismantling of the dual school systems — one for white kids, one for black students — that characterized so many communities across the country.
It also became a touchstone for the ideal of public education as a great equalizer, an American birthright meant to give every child a fair shot at success. But that ideal appears to be unraveling, according to Tuesday’s report from the Government Accountability Office.
The number of high-poverty schools that serve minority students more than doubled between 2001 and 2014, the GAO found. The proportion of such schools — where more than 75 percent of children receive free or reduced-price lunch and more than 75 percent are black or Latino — climbed from 9 percent to 16 percent during the same period.
The problem is not just that students are more isolated, according to the GAO, but that minority students who are concentrated in high-poverty schools don’t have the same access to opportunities as students in other schools.
High-poverty, majority-black and Latino schools were less likely to offer a full range of math and science courses than other schools, for example, and more likely to use expulsion and suspension as disciplinary tools, according to the GAO.
The GAO conducted its study during the past two years at the request of Democratic lawmakers including Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott, the ranking Democrat on the House education committee, and Michigan Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House judiciary committee.
Conyers and Scott planned to announce legislation that would make it easier for parents to sue school districts for civil rights violations. Scott said the GAO report provided evidence of an “overwhelming failure to fulfill the promise of Brown.”
“Segregation in public K12 schools isn’t getting better; it’s getting worse — and getting worse quickly, with more than 20 million students of color now attending racially and socioeconomically isolated public schools,” he said Tuesday.
The resegregation of schools during the past two decades has for the most part happened quietly, in the shadows of loud battles over standardized testing, teacher evaluations, charter schools and Common Core academic standards.
Segregation has returned to the forefront of education policy discussions only recently, amid broad public debates about race, racism and widening inequality.
