UCLA: Public School Segregation Worse

Despite decades of efforts to end "separate but equal" public education for children of different races, the nation's school system is getting more segregated rather than less.

And a decision in June by the U.S. Supreme Court forbidding most voluntary efforts to desegregate is likely to accelerate that trend, reports Reuters. According to a study by the Civil Rights Project of the University of California at Los Angeles, nonwhites comprise 43 percent of the student body of public schools. Meanwhile, an education gap between blacks and whites that decreased substantially for decades during the civil rights era has stopped narrowing, says Gary Orfield, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles who co-authored the report

"It is about as dramatic a reversal in the stance of the federal courts as one could imagine," he says "The federal courts are clearly pushing us backward [toward] segregation with the encouragement of the Justice Department of President George W. Bush."