Segregation returns

last updated 8 January 2015

Cambridge, Mass.

Minority students have less contact with their white peers than they did before desegregation, according to a Harvard University study. Latino children typically go to schools that are 29 percent white, compared to 45 percent three decades ago. Researchers attributed part of the shift to the growth of black, Latino, and Asian student populations, which has outpaced that of whites. But many schools became segregated again after courts lifted orders that forced them to use busing to integrate. White flight transformed one elementary school in Charlotte, N.C., from being 68 percent black to nearly all black within a few months. “I don’t know why they left,” said one fourth grader. “Maybe they didn’t like it here.”