In Most U.S. Cities, Neighborhoods Have Grown More Integrated. Their Schools Haven’t.
November 21, 2018
By: Matt Barnum
Source: Chalkbeat
Between 1990 and 2015, Seattle’s neighborhoods saw a notable decline in racial segregation.
It would make sense, then, to think that the city’s public schools had also become more integrated. Not so.
In fact, they were headed in the opposite direction. In 1990, only 3 percent of schools were intensely segregated — that is, at least 90 percent of students were nonwhite — but by 2015, that number had spiked to 17 percent.
That’s not entirely surprising. During that time, a high-profile Supreme Court case made it more difficult for Seattle to integrate its schools by race. But new research looking at America’s 100 largest cities shows that the diverging trends in Seattle — neighborhoods growing more diverse, as their schools grow more segregated — is not an anomaly.