The resegregation of American schools

In a lengthy article for Pro Publica, Nikole Hannah-Jones writes that schools in the South, once the most segregated in the country, were by the 1970s the most integrated as a result of federal court orders. Yet since 2000, judges have released hundreds of districts from Mississippi to Virginia from court-enforced integration, and many have slid back into segregation. Black children across the South now attend majority-black schools at levels not seen in four decades. Nationally, the achievement gap between black and white students, which greatly narrowed during the era in which schools grew more integrated, has widened. Hannah-Jones compares the experience of James Dent, who attended "colored" schools in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in the 1950s and '60s, with his daughter Melissa, who attended a successfully integrated Tuscaloosa Central High School in the '80s, and then with his granddaughter D'Leisha, who has attended resegregated schools in Tuscaloosa since 2000. "Tuscaloosa's school resegregation -- among the most extensive in the country -- is a story of city financial interests, secret meetings, and angry public votes," Hannah-Jones writes. "It is a story shaped by racial politics and a consuming fear of white flight. It was facilitated, to some extent, by the city's black elites. And it was blessed by a U.S. Department of Justice no longer committed to fighting for the civil-rights aims it had once championed." More

Source:  Public Education News Blast

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Los Angeles Education Partnership (LAEP) is an education support organization that works as a collaborative partner in high-poverty communities.