Dive Brief:
- A new study by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA finds that the average Latino student in California attends 84% non-white schools in impoverished areas.
- Segregation likely results in an achievement gap: 20% of Latino students taking the SAT are ready for college, as opposed to 41% of all students.
- Little data exists on the problem, and the Civil Rights Project says segregated schools are a long-term trend for Latino students that keeps getting worse.
Dive Insight:
Patricia Gándara, who co-directs the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, says that the issue hasn’t gotten adequate attention since it reframes the historical issue through a Latino lens. "We’re stuck in a black-white paradigm that doesn’t work quite the same way for Latinos," she told the Huffington Post.
Some suspect that the issue of desegregation will be taken up by incoming U.S. Secretary of Education, Dr. John B. King. King championed the creation of more diverse student bodies in schools, using federal money to do so, during his tenure as state education commissioner of New York.
California was the nation’s first state to get rid of state-sponsored segregation in public schools, and now boasts one of the nation’s largest and most segregated Latino populations.
Across the U.S, the issue of re-segregation has been on the rise. “Districts in 14 states currently have active desegregation lawsuits with the U.S. Justice Department, with Mississippi and Alabama having 44 and 43 lawsuits each, respectively,” Education Dive previously reported.