Six decades after Brown ruling, US schools still segregated
African-American and Latino students are less likely to attend racially and ethnically diverse schools today than at any other time in the last four decades. This, almost 60 years after the landmark Supreme Court ruling that desegregated schools, represents a major setback for one of the core goals of the civil rights movement.
According to a September 2012 study by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, more than 74 percent of African-American students and 80 percent of Latinos attended schools in 2009-10 where at least half the population consisted of only one minority.
"Our school district is extremely segregated," said Caitlin McNulty, an English-as-a-second-language teacher at Valley West Elementary School in Houston. "Part of that is just we have a huge minority population in our district, period, so I'd say the majority of our schools are at least 80 percent minority."
In her school district, African-Americans and Latinos made up more than 90 percent of the student population last year. Only seven of the 705 students at her school were white -- less than one percent.
"That's not out of the ordinary" in her district, McNulty said. "It's just not representative of the
