“Martin Luther King’s dream is being celebrated in theory and dishonored in practice with the decisions and methods that our re-segregating our schools. Dr. King spoke of his nightmare, that the country would renege on its promises of racial justice days before his death, but he could hardly have imagined a Supreme Court that would push Southern schools back toward segregation.”
         —Gary Orfield, Harvard University

Two recent reports from The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University document how school desegregation has succeeded in many places across the country, yet is seemingly being abandoned today, with large consequences for the students “left behind.”

Brown at 50: King’s Dream or Plessy’s Nightmare? considers changes in the country and school districts directly affected by Brown.

Losing Our Future: How Minority Youth are Being Left Behind by the Graduation Rate Crisis combines findings of a comprehensive review of state-by-state graduation rates along with interviews of state education officials.

Brown at 50: King’s Dream or Plessy’s Nightmare?

Released in January 2004, this report by Gary Orfield, Professor of Education and Social Policy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Research Associate Chungmei Lee examines a decade of resegregation from the time of the Supreme Court’s 1991 Dowell decision, which allowed school districts to declare themselves unitary and end their desegregation plans. It also reviews broad changes since the Brown decision.

The authors find that while the Brown decision has had an enduring impact, the past decade has pushed back desegregation in U.S. schools, especially for Latino and African-American students. The largest backward movement has been in the South, where civil rights laws had produced the most integrated schools for three decades. On the other hand, Asian students have become the most integrated and successful students by far.

The report includes comparisons between the earliest available and most recent data and between the high point of desegregation and the present.

Key findings [from “Brown at 50” Executive Summary]

There has been a substantial slippage toward segregation in most of the states that were highly desegregated in 1991; and there is great variation among states.

most integrated state for African Americans in 2001 is Kentucky.

• The most desegregated states for Latinos are in the Northwest.
• Asians are the most integrated and most successful group of students and, by far, the most likely to attend multiracial schools with a significant presence of three or more racial groups.
• Although American public schools are now only 60 percent white nationwide and nearly one fourth of U.S. students are in states with a majority of nonwhite students, most white students have little contact with minority students except in the South and Southwest
• The vast majority of intensely segregated minority schools face conditions of concentrated poverty, which are powerfully related to unequal educational opportunity. Students in segregated minority schools can expect to face conditions that students in the very large number of segregated White schools seldom experience.
• Latinos confront very serious levels of segregation by race and poverty and, non-English speaking Latinos tend to be segregated in schools with each other. The data shows no substantial gains against segregated education for Latinos even during the civil rights era. The increase in Latino segregation is particularly notable in the West.
• There has been a massive demographic transformation of the West, which has become the nation’s first predominantly minority area in terms of total public school enrollment.
• In some states with very low black populations, school segregation is soaring as desegregation efforts are abandoned.

Click here to download a copy of the full report, in PDF format.

Losing Our Future: How Minority Youth are Being Left Behind by the Graduation Rate Crisis

This joint report—issued by The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, The Urban Institute, Advocates for Children of New York, and The Civil Society Institute—chronicles the dangerously high percentage of students—disproportionately poor and minority—who disappear from the educational pipeline before graduating from high school.

Nationally, only about 68 percent of all students who enter 9th grade will graduate “on time” with regular diplomas in 12th grade. While the graduation rate for white students is 75 percent, only approximately half of black, Hispanic, and Native American students earn regular diplomas alongside their classmates. Graduation rates are even lower for minority males. Yet, because of misleading and inaccurate reporting of dropout and graduation rates, the public remains largely unaware of this educational and civil rights crisis.

This report aims to raise public awareness of the dropout issue and to make improving high school graduation rates a more central component of national educational reform efforts One of the first issues the report tackles is inaccurate and misleading official dropout data; the authors describe how they derived their figures and why they believe they are far more accurate than those currently reported by both the federal government and most states. Woven throughout the report are narratives about students who have either dropped out or felt “pushed” out of school, often due to the pressure experienced by officials to raise their schools’ overall test profiles. Finally, the report provides recommendations on how both the federal government and individual states can act to address this crisis.

General findings [from “Losing our Future” Executive Summary]

• Nationally, only an estimated 68% of all students who enter 9th grade will graduate with a regular diploma in 12th grade. For whites the rate is 74.9% but rates are significantly lower for most minority groups, and particularly for minority males. According to the calculations used in this report, in 2001 only 50.2% of all black students, 51.1% of Native American students, and 53.2% of all Hispanic students graduated from high school.
• Graduation rates for black and Hispanic Males are averaging fewer than 50% nationally. Black, Native American, and Hispanic males fare even worse: 43%, 47%, and 48% respectively. The gender differences within racial groups can be as large as 20 points, with males of every racial group consistently faring worse than females. The data on minority males are rarely reported although they are clearly experiencing the deepest crisis.
• At the national and state level, the racial gap in graduation rates between whites and most minority groups is pronounced. The national gap for blacks is 24.7 percentage points; for Hispanics, 21.7 percentage points; for Native Americans, 23.8 percentage points. Despite wide ranges within some states, nearly every state shows a large and negative gap between whites and at least one minority group. As the chart below reveals, these racial gaps are sometimes much larger within a given state.
• At the district level, districts characterized by high poverty, districts that are located in central cities and districts with high percentages of minority students, students with disabilities, or English language learners--all are far more likely to have low graduation rates.

  Other findings [from “Losing our Future” Executive Summary]

• Low graduation rates show a strong relationship with indicators of school segregation and this relationship is independent of poverty. Moreover, in every state, districts with high minority concentrations had lower graduation rates than districts where whites were the majority. In Ohio, for example, the minority composition difference is pronounced even among the state’s largest districts, with a graduation rate gap of over 50 points between the majority white district of Westerville (81.0) and the majority minority districts of Cleveland (30.0). This suggests that the growing segregation of our public schools will likely contribute further to low graduation rates.
• Dropout data mislead the public into thinking that most students are earning diplomas. There is little, or no, state or federal oversight of dropout and graduation rate reports for accuracy. Incredibly, some states report a 5% dropout rate for African Americans, when, in reality, only half of their young adult African Americans are graduating with diplomas.
• Most official graduation rates are estimates based on inaccurate data. Both the two most commonly used measures—the modified National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) formula and the Census Bureau CPS data—produce data that often dramatically underestimate the numbers of students who leave school without high school diplomas. The NCES is what most states use to calculate their graduation rates. However, large numbers of students that leave school and are unaccounted for are often left out of the NCES calculations. Most districts do not “chase” students who disappear, often assuming they have relocated.
• Using the Cumulative Promotion Index (CPI) developed by The Urban Institute, this report provides more accurate graduation rates. the CPI, which relies on actual enrollment and diploma data, is the most accurate of current methods for estimating graduation rates. The CPI allows comparisons across years, across districts, and across states using a common metric and a constant statistical treatment. While an estimate may not be more accurate than a very thorough individualized tracking system, individualized tracking systems exist in only a few jurisdictions, and are no guarantee of accuracy. For example, in Texas the state’s tracking system systematically excludes GED enrollees from graduation rate calculations for NCLB and treats them as if they never enrolled in high school, thereby inflating their diploma-completion rate.
• Enrollment-based data are a necessary check on possible unscrupulous accounting. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the exclusive focus of many states and school districts on test-based accountability systems has led to a rising incidence of students who are being “pushed out” in order to raise a school’s overall test profile. Whether individualized tracking or other methods are used, enrollment-based estimates that examine cohorts of students over time provide a good reality check on official reports.
• Despite great potential, The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) graduation rate accountability provisions are being rendered almost meaningless. The graduation rate accountability provisions inserted into NCLB were designed to improve outcomes and create an incentive for school officials to hold onto, rather than push out, struggling and disadvantaged students. However, only 9 states hold schools and districts accountable for the low graduation rates of minority students despite congressional intent. If there were a minimum graduation rate requirement of 66%, 46 states and the District of Columbia would fail to meet this benchmark for the education of its student population as a whole or for at least one major racial or ethnic student subgroup if the CPI measure were used.

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