The Associated Press State & Local Wire

January 18, 2002, Friday, BC cycle

Racial segregation increasing in public schools

DATELINE: ALBANY, N.Y.

Public classrooms nationwide have grown more racially segregated over the last decade as schools have been released from court-ordered desegregation plans, according to a report issued Friday.

"There is a clear rollback in the desegregation process made before 1990," said John R. Logan, director of The Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research at the University at Albany. The report, based on data from the National Center for Education Statistics, found white, black and Hispanic children typically attend schools where they are in the majority.

Each minority group's exposure to white children is declining, according to the report. In 1989-90, for example, 31 percent of the average black child's schoolmates were white; that figure dropped to 26 percent in 1999-2000.

In urban areas, minority children segregated from white children are also more often exposed to poverty, according to the report.

"In many of the regions we looked at, school officials were released from desegregation orders in the last decade," Logan said. "This indicates that increased school segregation is not the result of changes in neighborhood demographics but changes in policy."