Racial Segregation in Schools

Segregation in American Education
Project Censored 2010 Article #2.

5-7 Facts in this article:

1. Schools are more segregated today than 40 years ago.
2. Most of the nation’s dropouts (from high school) occur in nonwhite public schools.
3. Low income campuses are more likely to be ignored by college and job market recruiters.
4. In California, the nation’s most multiracial state, half of blacks and Asians and one quarter Latino and Native Americans attend a segregated school.
5. 85% of the nation’s teachers are white and little progress is being made to diversify this.
6. In the world economy, success is linked to formal education and declining education levels of the growing minority populations is increasing.
7. Rural schools face severe segregation. 73% of rural students attend schools that are 80-100% white.

Lexis Search:
A 2005 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer talks about two books written on the subject: Crash Course by Chris Whittle and The Shame of the Nation by Jonathan Kozol. This article discusses the subject in relation to the books written and states that Pennsylvania is a great place to find evidence proving racial inequality is happening. They discuss the idea about white flight to find “better” schools. This was the only article that spoke on segregation in length under the search of “Segregation in US schools”.

Under “US Educational decline” there were no results. Under “US racial education” I found many results but the majority of them were for articles outside of the US. The connection was the reference to our Brown vs Board case and the supposed end of racial segregation in America.

I would say that the searches I did on Lexis shows that this topic is talked about, although sporadically and not in depth and most of the articles written on the topic are opinions more than in depth news reports. Outside of the US, news articles are not reporting on the educational system in the US; however reporting on the inequality in education in their own country seems more widely covered than in our nation.

Further research:

The following quote is taken from the blog site newspaper in Education, Masslive.com where local students of Massachusetts can discuss topics:

"For Latinos, who have emerged as the largest minority group in the nation, language is also a major barrier as Americans insist on English as the only official language in schools. As a result of this disadvantage, Latinos' achievement rates are generally lower. And, like blacks who also are not associated with achievement, their dropout rates are higher than those of whites."

This seems to be absolutely true and completely unfair. The idea that Hispanics are being segregated against because they speak a different language as their primary seems backward. We should embrace the students who can speak a different language from English and strive to teach them English so they can succeed in the job market because speaking multiple languages is extremely valuable. However this topic is generally not discussed because the majority of high income white groups have more influence than the lower classes and low income minorities. Instead they ignore the potential wealth of educating the minority to concentrate on bettering their own initiatives.

The problems stated in the Censored 2010 article are difficult to overcome. In order to end racial inequality in schools, influential personnel need to take action. However in this never ending circle, our nation is preventing the generation of those influential personnel. Those who would take action and oppose this are the ones being given a poorer education and result in the lack of proper tools and educational intelligence to fight against the problem. Due to the standards of their grade school education they are at a disadvantage and less likely to continue through higher education and find productive ways to actually make a difference.
There are some people, such as Pedro Noguera who have written on this and appealed to the government to make schools more equal.


When it comes down to it, the ones with the money, power and influence are the ones who are not fighting the current system because their childrens' needs are being seen to adequately. More people need to get involved in the children of America's future. While there has been some work done to desegregate schools (again) not enough work is happening.