Erica Frankenberg and Chungmei Lee, The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University
August 2002
A new study by Erica Frankenberg and Chungmei Lee of Harvard's Civil Rights Project asserts that, after decades of progress toward racial desegregation, many school districts are now resegregating, due to the gradual demise of court ordered busing and other such involuntary desegregation strategies. Of the 239 sizable school districts studied, virtually all are becoming more segregated for African American and Latino students. Perhaps surprisingly, districts in the South are experiencing the least black-white resegregation. For Latino students, however, segregation has risen since the late 1960s, with targeted desegregation efforts rare. Characteristic of this Harvard project, the report makes no mention of evidence that choice-based reforms reduce school segregation by breaking the link between residential and school segregation. Nor is it much interested in school quality and teacher effectiveness. In fact, it maintains a blind faith in court-ordered integration and a fixation on the color of the child in the next seat rather than what's being learned there. You can find it at http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/research/deseg/reseg_schools02.php.
