Our Resegregated Schools

Abstract

That's the first white kid I've seen in this school in three years, says a teacher to Jonathan Kozol in The Shame of the Nation (2005). National Public Radio reporter Claudio Sanchez visited Los Angeles high schools to tell the story of changes in schools in the 50 years since the Brown v. Board of Education decision (Jaffe and Sanchez 2004). Clearly, if separate is inherently unequal, students were getting an unequal education in the schools visited by Sanchez--the schools were 100% Hispanic. is back, and some think that's a disaster. John Rogers of UCLA tells Sanchez, Segregation in California has become 'naturalized' today the same way it was naturalized in Mississippi 50 years ago--it's not a topic of discussion. But yearbooks from L.A.'s Garfield High School during the late 1920s also show that segregation in Los Angeles is nothing new. During the 1920s, 70% of the students were white, and they were the only ones photographed in academic programs; Mexican students, who made up 20% of the student body, were in industrial arts. Sanchez reports that students don't regard the resegregation of their schools as a problem. Students even tell Sanchez that a good thing there are no whites at the school because Hispanics have heard that whites are racist and arrogant and it's hard enough to get along with your own kind. Sanchez also hears repeatedly that the 1954 Brown decision made race the issue. Now it is class. Anthony Colon of La Raza says, Having 100% of one ethnicity is not a bad thing. If the school had high standards and great outcomes, Colon asserts, it would attract middle-class Mexican students. The segregation in L.A. schools is especially ironic because in 1945, five Mexican fathers filed a class action suit (Mendez v. Westminster) on behalf of 5,000 Mexican students living in four Orange County, California, districts. The districts had separate schools for Mexicans and whites. The plaintiffs won in 1946 and rebuffed the appeal in 1947. California law did permit segregation of children of Chinese, Japanese, or Mongolian parentage, but didn't specify Mexican children as a separate category. Then California Governor Earl Warren pressed the legislature to outlaw segregation in schools and public places for all ethnicities and signed such a bill in 1947. By the time Brown reached the Supreme Court seven years later, Warren was its chief justice. UCLA's Gary Orfield affirms with statistics the journalistic field work reported above (2009). Most white students attend school with other white students. For example, in rural areas, 55.3% of whites are in schools that are 90% to 100% white; another 18% are in schools that are 80% to 90% white. By contrast, only 0.2% of rural whites are in schools with zero to 10% white students and another 0.5% are in schools that are 10% to 20% white. There are some 8.3 million white students in rural schools, more than a third of all white students in public schools. Such statistics arriving from the countryside might not surprise us, but a similar pattern exists in the suburbs. Some 28.4% of white suburban students are in schools that are 90% to 100% white, with another 25.6% in schools that are 80% to 90% white. At the other end of the spectrum, 0.8% of whites are in schools that are zero to 10% white, and another 1.4% are in schools that are 10% to 20% white. Almost 10 million white students, or 43% of the total number of white students, are in suburban schools. The pattern for blacks and Hispanics reverses that for whites. While 41.2% of black students attend schools that have fewer than 20% white students, only 8% of them attend schools with 80% or more whites. For Hispanics, the comparable figures are 48.7% and 6.3%. There are some 2.5 million blacks in the suburban schools, and 3.5 million Hispanics. Asian students are more evenly distributed across the spectrum. Orfield argues that this reflects their bimodal distribution in terms of income. …