Educators and policy makers must confront the race and class disparities in learning opportunities across American society. Nowhere are these disparities more acute than in the country's great metropolitan areas. As the demographic landscape continues to shift, metropolitan areas are fueling the transition to a majority-minority country. This…

A third of a century ago the schools of the South became the most integrated in the nation, a stunning reversal of a long history of educational apartheid written into the state laws and constitutions of the eleven states of the Confederacy and the six Border states, stretching from Oklahoma to Delaware, all of which had legally imposed de jure…

For this report, the first of a series, the National School Desegregation Research Project obtained federal data for the 1984-85 school year, which show a substantial change in the racial composition of American's public schools since 1968, when data were first collected. The white majority is shrinking, due to a large decline in fertility and a…

Analysis of the United States Department of Education's racial enrollment statistics for the 1980-84 period shows no significant increase in the segregation of black students in the U.S. For black students, the data suggest that the courts ignored the current Administration's policies against mandatory desegregation, and that the trends in…

Documents the largest shift back toward school segregation since Brown v. Board of Education (1954). It explains this trend through Supreme Court rulings and demographic changes due to immigration and the growth of suburbs. Hispanics, seen as the future predominant minority population in the United States, are already reported to be more…

Urban school desegregation can be achieved through more sensible housing policies. Review of the current situation shows that some States (New York, Illinois, Michigan, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Minnesota, for example) have been able to integrate their schools by fostering the development of low and moderate income housing in particular urban…

The significance of continuing segregation in Chicago's public schools is discussed in this report. The failure of the "Access to Excellence" program to achieve voluntary school integration in spite of magnet programs and permissive transfers is described. The question of white flight is examined in light of the belief that mandatory…

Dramatic changes in the size and racial composition of the nation's largest urban school districts are indicators of an increasingly multiracial and highly segregated society. Data were analyzed from the 1986-87 and 1984-85 Department of Education computer tapes containing the enrollments by race of 36,000 schools from 3,400 districts nationwide.…