1954’s Brown v. Brown of Education decision may have made state laws intentionally separating students of different races by school unconstitutional, but gentrification and other economic factors have kept segregation going. As NPR reports, while the entirety of America’s student makeup is more diverse than ever, segregation is still prevalent in 2022.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a comprehensive report showing that 18.5 million attended a predominantly same-race/ethnicity school during the 2020-21 school year. 14% of students attended schools where almost all of the student body was of a single race/ethnicity.
Director of K-12 education at the GAO and lead author of the report, Jackie Nowicki, stressed that racial division in schools happens because minority students have fewer resources.
“There is clearly still racial division in schools,” says Nowicki. She adds that schools with large proportions of Hispanic, Black and American Indian/Alaska Native students – minority groups with higher rates of poverty than white and Asian American students – are also increasing. “What that means is you have large portions of minority children not only attending essentially segregated schools, but schools that have less resources available to them.”
Source: What Year Is This? While School Populations Have Become More Diverse, Segregation Still Remains
