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Instead of playing your school choice game, let's really desegregate education.
Because despite the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown versus Board of Education decision to desegregate schools “with all deliberate speed,” too many classrooms are still segregated.
School districts made significant progress toward desegregation after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but the trend has shifted back toward race-based school segregation. Following court decisions in the late 1960s and 1970s that required Department of Education officials to oversee implementation of desegregation plans, the rate of black students attending majority-white schools increased dramatically from 1 percent in 1963 to 43 percent in 1983. After federal oversight phased out and schools were left to make “good faith efforts” to maintain integration, significant backsliding followed. In 2012, 74 percent of black students and 80 percent of Latino students attended schools that were 50 to 100 percent minority; and of these, more than 40 percent of black and Latino students attended schools that were 90 to 100 percent minority.
This re-segregation trend often concentrates minorities in schools with fewer resources that face challenges attracting and retaining quality teachers. A mounting body of evidence indicates that school segregation has negative impacts on short-term academic achievement of minority students and their success in later life. Integrated schools have a positive impact on all students through promoting awareness and mutual understanding and ensuring that they have the necessary tools to function in an increasingly multicultural society. Not taking intentional steps to ensure that all students have the opportunity to attend quality, integrated schools perpetuates injustice, allowing the mistakes of the past to haunt the future.
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