Schoolchildren More Segregated Today than at Time of MLK’s Death
A national tragedy: African-American and Latino schoolchildren are more segregated today than they were at the time of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death in 1968 says the UCLA’s Civil Rights Project in their January 2010 report.
As a shifting demographics continue to transform many sectors of U.S. society, the country is falling far behind in building faculties that reflect the diversity of its students–44% of whom are now nonwhite–and failing to prepare teachers who can communicate effectively with the 20% of homes where another language is spoken. Millions of nonwhite students are locked into “dropout factory” high schools, where huge percentages do not graduate and have little prospect of contributing to the economy. Often failing US schools are shared by two or more highly disadvantaged minority groups; most schools are not working on creating positive relationships between them and their teachers, who are often white and untrained in techniques that might lower tension and increase school success, the report says.
In states such as California and Texas where nonwhite students are already the majority, these failures are straining local economies and social systems. On an even larger scale, this reversion to segregation threatens the U.S.’s economic and social position in the world. In a global economy where success is dependent on knowledge, average U.S. educational levels decline as the proportion of children attending inferior segregated schools continues to rise.
The findings are the results of a decades-long systematic neglect of civil rights policy and related educational and community reforms. Its findings echo a damning statement made in 1983 in a report commissioned by the Reagan Administration that looked at the state of education back then. In the “A Nation at Risk” report there was this phrase: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
And for students of color the results are worse than mediocre.
They are devastating.
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