Dive Brief:
- Despite the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which ended segregation, education still remains largely unequal for black students.
- According to the Huffington Post, many of America's schools are still incredibly segregated, with high-minority populations relegated to schools with fewer resources and educational opportunities than schools in more affluent areas with predominantly white populations.
- The site highlights the separate and unequal educational experience in many states via a slew of stats and visual aids. One data point: In Nevada, high-minority districts get over 20% less funding than those with lower minority populations.
Dive Insight:
Among other findings: Black students are significantly more likely to attend high poverty schools, have less-qualified teachers (who also happen to be predominantly white), go to schools with lower graduation rates, and have suspension or expulsion rates almost three times higher than white students.
The findings paint a bleak picture, especially when juxtaposed with recent events like the protests in Baltimore and Ferguson. While the protests may be a reaction to police brutality, they are also occuring in cities with issues that include broken school systems.
For example, Freddie Gray, the Baltimore 20-year-old whose spine was severed in police custody, went to a school that was 98% black — known in academic circles as an "apartheid school" because less than 1% of the population is white. Almost 70% of Baltimore City Public Schools are “apartheid,” according to data from 2009-10 school year, and even this figure should be taken with a grain of salt since a large number of the schools categorized as non-apartheid had white populations of about 4% or 7% — still incredibly segregated.