Desegregation now. Segregation tomorrow?

Examining the changing face of public education

Harvard University's Gary Orfield, director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, has been documenting school segregation in national reports. He has followed the last decade through the Civil Rights Project. His most recent study, "Racial Transformation and the Changing Nature of Segregation," coauthored with Chungmei Lee, analyzes up-to-date research about current school resegregation trends.

According to the report, when data were first collected in the late 1960s, white students made up more than 80 percent of the nations' public school students. Today that number is only 58 percent. Latinos are currently the largest minority group, comprising 19 percent of public school students. (African-Americans currently make up 17 percent, Asians are 4 percent, and Native Americans are 1 percent.)

Orfield and Lee predict that "within a decade there will be fewer than half white students in our nation's public schools," and that "the end of the white majority will lead to a nation of schools without a majority of any one racial group."

Hanna Bordas goes into detail in an article for Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.


Tags: Education, Desegregation, Segregation, Resegregation, Educational Equity, Education Policy, Urban Education, African-American, Latino, Civil Rights, Civil Rights Project, Harvard University, Gary Orfield, Media by Sistrunk