California The Most Segregated State for Latino Students
Date Published: May 14, 2014
State Has Little to Celebrate 60 Years After Brown v Board of Education.
LOS ANGELES--Marking the 60th anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v Board of Education, the UCLA’s Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles assessed California's progress in addressing school segregation, and found that California students are more racially segregated than ever. In their new study, Segregating California’s Future: Inequality and its Alternative 60 Years after Brown v. Board of Education, the report authors conclude that California is the third worst state when it comes to school segregation for African Americans, behind New York and Illinois. California is, however, the state in which Latino students are most segregated.
The Brown decision challenged the legitimacy of the entire "separate but equal" educational system of the South, and helped accelerate the march toward racial and social equality across the United States, but Brown impacted California very little. According to the report, various subsequent state court decisions resulted in California having no school integration policy, which allowed segregation to grown substantially in the past two decades.
After analyzing demographic data from California's more than 10,000 schools, the authors conclude that California’s school enrollment has grown far more diverse since Brown. But demographic shifts that could have led to more diverse and integrated schools have, instead, resulted in the educational isolation of Latino and African-American students, in particular.
