WASHINGTON
D.C., Aug 10 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - According to a recent
report published by the British paper The Guardian, U.S. schools are
returning to the pre-civil rights battle against segregation based on
racial lines.
The
article “Decades after the struggles to integrate black children into
American classrooms, a study says education is again dividing down
racial lines,” by Duncan Campbell, centers around a report by the
civil rights project at Harvard University, which allegedly confirms
that U.S. schools are becoming “re-segregated.”
According
to the article, civil rights activists in the U.S. have “increasingly
claimed that despite the many changes in U.S. society, de facto
segregation still exists in many parts of the country.”
Additionally,
the activists protested that “legal challenges to affirmative action
policies have also had an effect on the levels of integration.”
Affirmative action policies are specifically aimed at increasing job and
education opportunities and are intended to counteract practices that
result in discrimination based on race and/or gender.
Proponents
of the anti-affirmative action movement argue that determinations for
job and/or education opportunities should not be based on racial and/or
gender qualifications. Supporters of affirmative action assert that
there has been a distinct bias based on race and gender and that
discriminatory practices have hindered the ability of minorities and
women to gain access to specific schools, jobs and fields of study.
There are also claims within the affirmative action movement emphasizing
that the socio-economic conditions of certain minority groups deny them
the opportunities that would allow them to effectively compete with
others of higher socio-economic backgrounds.
“According
to the study, integration between whites and blacks is either decreasing
or unchanged in all but a few of the country's largest school districts
over the past 14 years,” The Guardian reported.
"A
lot of people think that nothing can be done, and the efforts have
failed," said Chungmei Lee, a co-author of the report.
“The
study took a sample of 185 of the largest school districts and found
black students' exposure to white students had increased in only four of
them between 1986 and 2000. Latino exposure to whites increased in only
three districts. In 53 districts, white schools became increasingly
whiter. The most marked example in the study was Clayton County,
Georgia, where the level of integration had fallen threefold in the
period of the study.
“The
pattern across the southern states, which had been the scene of the most
turbulent desegregation struggles in the 50s and 60s, was the most
pronounced. Texas has eight of the 20 most ‘re-segregated schools’
in the report, and Georgia has three. But the south also contained a
number of school districts that had resisted the trend and remained
integrated,” the report continued, according to The Guardian.
Further
supporting to arguments that socio-economic conditions play a large role
in education opportunities, Chungmei Lee said that “economics was a
major driving force in re-segregation: the poorest school districts,
which had the least educational resources, suffered the biggest collapse
of integration.”
While
the report recommends that “poorer inner-city school districts should
be combined with wealthier suburban school districts to make up a
single, more integrated district, such attempts have faced legal
challenges from conservative groups,” The Guardian went on to report.
“Chester
Darling, a lawyer representing parents currently fighting a
desegregation policy in Lynn, Massachusetts, challenged the report's
assumption that diversity was desirable. He said that parents and not
the government should decide whether they wanted changes to be made,”
the article went on to state.
"When
you have a government involved in enforcing a particular form of
diversity, then you have a government making decisions that are
illegal," he declared in a statement given to Associated Press.
Segregation
was finally ruled unconstitutional in 1954 during the case of Brown vs.
the Board of Education of Topeka in Kansas. According to the ruling,
segregation based on race in public schools directly violated
constitutional rights guaranteed to all Americans in the 14th Amendment.
