School Segregation Rising, Report Says

Racial segregation in schools has increased, according to a report published in Washington yesterday by the Harvard Project on School Desegregation.

"The civil rights impulse from the 1960's is dead in the water and the ship is floating backward toward the shoals of racial segregation," according to the study, which was directed by Gary Orfield, professor of Education and Social Policy at the Graduate School of Education.

Orfield said the racially divided educational system makes him fear for the future.

"I think there is very clear evidence that [segregated] education is promoting inequality in our multiracial society," he said in an interview last night. "I see an increasingly divided society. We need a school system that is actually fair."

The report said receiving an education at segregated schools is unfair since there is a "much greater concentration of health, social, and neighborhood problems" in some districts.

Orfield said he blames the Bush and Reagan Administrations for allowing this trend to continue.

"For the first time since the Brown [v. Topeka Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court] decision, resegregation of African-American students occurred during the Bush Administration," according to the report.

In addition to higher minority birth rates and immigration levels, Orfield cited a lack of enforcement of civil rights and federal cutbacks on education and subsidized housing as contributing factors.

"American schools need a new set of goals for successful multiracial education reflecting the vast changes in American society," the report said. "The country and its schools are going through vast changes without any strategy."

The U.S. Department of Education has issued a statement saying it plans to address the problems explicated in the study, Orfield said.

The report also noted that in the South, the most integrated section of the country, public schools are becoming increasingly racially divided "for the first time since the Supreme Court declared school segregation in the South unconstitutional in 1954."

As an example of legislation encouraging segregation, the report criticized the Supreme Court's 1974 Miliken v. Bradley decision for not mandating desegregation unless a district is proven to have caused the segregation.

"The most basic need is a strong affirmation of the goal of successfully integrated schools accompanied by a recommitment to the enforcement of civil rights law," the study said.