Other education experts point to the 1968 Supreme Court ruling in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, in which the court chastised the Virginia county school board for failing to provide a meaningful plan to desegregate and eliminate racial discrimination “root and branch.” Significant change wouldn’t take place until the late 1960s and, Orfield says, for many black students desegregation rates increased into the late 1980s.
But the trend toward integration did not last. Data from the U.S. Department of Education show that today 74 percent of black and 80 percent of Latino children attend schools where the majority of students are not white. Some 43 percent of Latino and 38 percent of black students are in “intensely segregated schools,” meaning less than 10 percent of their classmates are white. “It’s very obvious that whether it’s de facto or based on law that allows you to segregate based on race, it exists,” says National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel.
Several factors have contributed to segregation in practice if not by law. For example, neighborhoods are often segregated by race. “Because black and white students largely live in separate school districts, about two-thirds of all the black-white segregation in the United States is now between school districts,” says Sean Reardon, professor of education at Stanford University. Therefore, court orders and students assignment policies that targeted segregation within school districts in the past could not fix today’s problem entirely, he explains.