2017 Press Releases

Research Shows Reversal of Civil Rights Era Gains in Southern Schools

This report by Civil Rights Project at UCLA and the Center for Education and Civil Rights at Penn State finds intense segregation of Black and Latino students in the South with charter schools more segregated for Black and Latino Students. Segregation in the South is double segregation for blacks and Latinos, meaning that they are in schools segregated both by race and by poverty in a region where the share of students poor enough to receive free or subsidized lunches has soared to nearly 60% of all students. Both segregation by race and poverty, research shows, are systematically linked to weaker opportunities and student outcomes.

MA Students Missed More Than 156,000 Days of Instruction Due to Discipline

This research study shows that the overuse of suspensions in the Commonwealth’s schools is harming educational opportunities for all students, but with the burden impacting black students and students with disabilities more than other groups. The study is the first ever to quantify the school-level days of missed instruction due to discipline, reporting both the black/white gap and the impact on students with disabilities. Researchers find 38 schools averaged greater than 100 days of missed instruction for every 100 enrolled due to suspensions. Black students and students with disabilities missed the most days and most missed instruction was in response to minor misbehavior.

School Suspensions Cost California Billions

New report shows that suspensions have high costs in nearly every district in California. Researchers find that more suspensions leads to lower graduation rates, lower tax revenues, and higher taxpayer costs for criminal justice, welfare, health care and more economic ramifications.

New Report Shows Schools in the Nation’s Capital Remain Intensely Segregated; Charter Schools are most segregated in the City

The UCLA Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles today released a new research report on segregation and its alternatives in Washington D.C. showing that despite the sharply increasing diversity of the nation’s capital, generation after generation of African American students in Washington D.C. have attended intensely segregated schools and still do in a city with a wider racial achievement gap than any state.

Segregation Prevalent in Indiana Schools

Although Indiana has seen rapid growth in the enrollment of non-White students, overall interactions between White and non-White students remain low. For example, the average Black student in Indiana attends a school where 68 percent of the students are non-White, while the average White student in Indiana attends a school where 19 percent of the students are non-White.

Tough Choices Facing Florida's Governments

New research prepared for the Leroy Collins Institute at Florida State University by The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles finds that dramatic changes in enrollment, court rulings and policy changes in recent decades have undercut desegregation efforts in Florida, leaving black and Latino students increasingly segregated in racially and economically isolated schools. The trend toward school segregation in Florida has increased and is more complex than 50 years ago.

CA Students Lose More Than 800,000 Instructional Days to Suspensions

The overuse of suspensions in California schools resulted in an estimated 840,656 days of lost instruction during the 2014-2015 academic year, or approximately 13 days for every 100 students enrolled. The is the first California study to quantify days of missed instruction due to suspension, rather than suspension rates.

Troubling Trends for School Segregation in New Jersey

Amid demographic changes reshaping New Jersey’s student population, new research from the UCLA Civil Rights Project makes clear that the state has made little, if any, progress toward reducing the segregation of Black and Hispanic students in the state’s schools. More than one quarter of New Jersey Black students attend schools where less than 1 percent of students are white, and the number of Hispanic students attending these “apartheid schools” has doubled since 1989, and continues to increase. The large majority of Black and Latino students attend schools doubly segregated by both race and income.