The DC Line, May 23, 2019
A couple of weeks ago, my 7-year-old son asked me a heart-wrenching question: “Dad, are schools still segregated?”
My son attends a racially and socioeconomically diverse public charter school in Ward 5, but after three years of morning drop-offs, he had noticed only black kids waiting each day to enter the public school on the same block. What was plain to my second-grader’s eyes was borne out by the statistics. So once I told him that the neighboring school had no white students, he answered his own question: “Yes, schools are still segregated.”
As we mark the 65th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision that ruled racial school segregation unconstitutional, a new study from the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles finds that segregation for black students is increasing in all regions of the country except for the Midwest. In DC, according to a 2018 report from the D.C. Policy Center, half of public schools had a student body more than 90 percent black. The UCLA study finds that such schools are often marked by “double segregation” — by race and by poverty.