Schools Still Segregating as Efforts Fail to Reverse Trends: GAO Study

Six-year-old Ruby Bridges was the first black child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960. Photo credit: Department of Justice

For years, school officials and parents across the country have been working to close the achievement gap between white students and students of color. Students of color have lower grades, test scores, and graduation rates than white students and are disciplined more often and more severely. Investigative reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones set out to figure out what actually worked to reduce educational disparities. And she found it.

“There's one thing that really worked, that cut the achievement gap between black and white students by half,” she told This American Life. “Integration.”

Overall, schools with a higher concentration of poor students and students of color see worse educational outcomes. Greater levels of diversity in a school lead to greater achievement for everyone, of all races and incomes.

A new GAO report, released Tuesday – the 62nd anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education – found that those high-poverty, dominantly minority schools “offered disproportionately fewer math, science, and college preparatory courses and had disproportionately higher rates of students who were held back in 9th grade, suspended, or expelled.” As the Supreme Court found 62 years ago, separate is most definitely not equal.

“Increasingly separate and unequal schools should be an alarm to everyone, not just the parents and allies of African-American and Latino students,” said Judith Browne Dianis, executive director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization. “If we continue to allow broad swaths of our nation’s students of color to attend schools with less experienced teachers, disproportionate rates of suspension and expulsion, and fewer advanced classes and support services, we will further perpetuate the second class citizenship we have fought so hard to overcome.”

Schools re-segregating

Just last Friday, a federal court ordered Cleveland, Mississippi, to end racial segregation at its schools – 51 years after parents filed a lawsuit demanding just that. There, too, there was "the sense among black children in the community that white children attended better schools," according to the ruling. The judge ordered the district to consolidate its mostly-black middle school with its mostly-white middle school and do the same for its high schools.

Cleveland, Mississippi, is not alone in having homogenous schools. School integration has become more and more elusive. The GAO found that segregation has been getting worse since 2000.

K-12 public schools with at a student population that was 75 percent poor and Hispanic or black students – how segregation was measured — grew from 9 percent during the 2000-01 school year to 16 percent in the 2013-14 school year.

Integration efforts not working

The GAO looked at three school districts that had tried aggressively to integrate, but distressingly, their efforts mostly fell flat.

Districts had built state-of-the-art magnet schools with specialized curricula to attract students from around the area, but still had trouble attracting enough white students to meet their targets. Meanwhile, the traditional public schools didn’t get any more diverse, and parents resented that resources were being siphoned away from those schools to the fancy new magnets.

Some also allowed students from urban areas to enroll in suburban schools with better outcomes, but most chose to stay close to home – and the reshuffling sometimes resulted in even greater segregation. One school enacted one diversity plan after another, only to see some families take their kids out of the system altogether in favor of private schools.

In places with “open enrollment,” meaning schools aren’t assigned based on neighborhood, white students tend to cluster at the same schools and avoid others.

The way forward

The GAO recommended that the Departments of Education and Justice keep better track of school civil rights data. But its tools are blunt ones – the departments can investigate where segregation seems to be taking hold and withhold federal funding when called for. But those tactics just put pressure on schools to make integration policies work -- and the above policies haven't.

So what does work?

Civil rights and education groups are pushing for the Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaced No Child Left Behind late last year, to make funding mechanisms more equitable. Nancy Zirkin of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said the GAO report "confirms what we all suspected" about worsening segregation and emphasized that more funding for struggling schools would help.

"These schools and districts are educating a larger share of low-income students and students of color, but compared to their more affluent peers, have minimal access to the educational resources needed to support student success," she said in a statement.

Jitu Brown, national director of Journey for Justice, suggested that the closure of some schools in low-income areas and privatization of others was responsible for the increase in segregation. "If we fail to turn the tide on this disturbing trend, our Black and Brown students will continue to be subjected to Jim Crow-like public education where they are expected to perform at high levels but with a fraction of the resources,” he said in a statement.

Perhaps Mississippi’s Cleveland school district will show the way. Another Mississippi school district integrated in a similar way to the path chosen for Cleveland – by consolidating schools to create a “community” school system instead of a “neighborhood” school system. That district now gets singled out for its success at integrating and raising educational outcomes for everyone.