Report: California Schools Most Segregated in U.S.

The release of a report titled Brown at 60 by UCLA’s Civil Rights Project shows that California leads the nation in racial segregation at schools and that segregation at both school and state levels has become widely accepted.

The report, which analyzes data on all of California’s school districts including a few charter schools, was released on the heels of the 60th anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education, which ended racial separation in public schools.

According to the San Jose Mercury, Brown at 60 says that California has moved backwards faster than any other state, even surpassing Texas, which has historically been more segregated than the Golden State.  The report reveals that while the majority of schools in the Bay Area–including the South Bay and East Bay–incur a great deal of segregation, they are more integrated than schools in Southern California, where the highest incidence of racial separation in California occurs, specifically in Los Angeles and the Inland Empire.

Statewide Latinos and blacks are the most isolated in the nation, which the report says “calls into question the state’s racially progressive image,” writes the Mercury.

Ironically, the South is “the least segregated region for black students,” according to UCLA, which notes that “California is the state in which Latino students are most segregated.”

A full copy of the report can be found here.