Dive Brief:
- A year after a report found that U.S. schools are moving back toward segregation, the study's author says that fact still holds true and the end result could be "disasterous."
- The original report, Brown at 60, concluded: Six decades of "separate but equal" as the law of the land have now been followed by six decades of "separate is inherently unequal" as our basic law.
- Schools with large numbers of African-American and Latino students have fewer resources, which contributes to a host of other significant impediments to learning that include teachers with less experience, higher teacher turnover, less structure, and poor grades, according to The Guardian.
Dive Insight:
Sixty-one years after Brown v. Board of Education, schools are separated by race and economics. The systematic resegregation of public schools, as chronicled recently in St. Petersburg, is happening throughout the country. In the West, Latinos have limited access to better-performing schools. The South is the least segregated portion of the country and the Northeast is the most segregated.
Students who lack access to the best teachers, resources, and opportunities in K-12 overwhelmingly end up in high schools that are deficient, limiting options for higher education and continuing the cycle of poverty while also helping to feed the school-to-prison pipeline. Lawmakers and educators are aware of the change, but little seems to be getting done.