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Latinos in California are facing higher levels of segregation in high schools today compared to 40 years ago while integration is becoming more and more difficult, reported RT on Tuesday.
According to a study by the University of California, Los Angeles, Latinos today attend schools that are 84 percent non-white. This is a 64 percent increase compared to 1970s when the schools they attended were only 46 percent non-white.
The findings are harmful in terms of college access, since white or Asian schools generally prepare their students better for more competitive colleges, according to the author of the report, UCLA Professor Gary Orfield.
The report adds that non-white school often have less experienced and less qualified teachers, high teacher turnover, less successful peer groups, less challenging curricula, fewer honors level courses, and inadequate facilities and learning materials.
The report also acknowledges that segregation in schools implies housing segregation in California, and that “any long-term policy to foster increased and lasting school integration must determine how to enforce fair housing and affordable housing policies more effectively.”
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According to Orfield, the increased segregation in the state is due to three main factors: growing minority populations, a decreasing white population but also the dissolving of integration policies in the 1990s.
“In California, there was a proposition adopted back in the 1980s that made it more difficult to integrate schools, and then the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1990s adopted a policy of dissolving desegregation plans that had been in existence for quite a while. So that was the end of the plans for San Jose, San Francisco and some other cities,” added Orfield.
The initial UCLA report was released on the eve of the 60th anniversary of a Supreme Court ruling in 1954 that declared segregation in schools to be unconstitutional. However, both the federal government and the state of California continued to block integration measures.
Segregation has long been a problem in the state of California. In the late 1960s, state schools saw a series of walkouts by Latino students organized by Chicano students movements to protest the unequal conditions in schools, lack of access to quality education and to push for the inclusion of better ethnic studies programs.
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These walkouts inspired similar protests in the 1990s against the dissolving of integration policies, and other measures put in place that denied immigrants equal access to education.
According to Orfield, these problems have not been eradicated but rather Latinos today continue to face what he calls “triple segregation.”
“It is segregation by their ethnic group, their social class, and by their language, because a lot of Latinos in California are in non-English speaking homes, and acquiring language is very difficult,” said Orfield.
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