Rolling back efforts to desegregate African American children

The national average level of segregation of black from white elementary children in metropolitan regions (weighting these regions by the size of the black school population) is high in 1999-2000: 65 on a scale from 0 to 100. This means that nearly two-thirds of black children (or equally, two-thirds of white children) would have to transfer to a different school in order to achieve integration.

This represents a 2-point increase in school segregation compared to 1989-90, a small shift but especially significant when we note that residential segregation was declining by 3 or 4 points in the same period.

One reason for this increase in separation is there are different trends in areas where black children are a small part of the school population and those where they have a more substantial presence. As Figure 2 illustrates, segregation is much lower in those metropolitan regions where blacks are less than 5% of the school population (D = 46) than in those where they are above 20% (D = 67). In addition, the trend is for decreasing segregation in the former category (a decline of 4 points) but increasing segregation in the latter (up 3 points). Clearly there are lower obstacles to integrating a smaller minority group. Unfortunately, most black children, about 3 out of 4, live in the regions where they are more than 20% of the population.