Integration and Diversity

Research in this section explores the impacts and benefits of racial and ethnic diversity in education, as well as resegregation trends and remedies in our nation's public schools.

Race, Place, and Opportunity: Racial Change and Segregation in the San Diego Metropolitan Area: 1990 - 2000

The future of the San Diego area is inexorably linked to the well-being of its minority populations, most strongly in the cities and inner-suburbs, but increasingly throughout the region. While moderately-high levels of racial segregation characterize the City, recent trends raise the specter that this pattern may be duplicated in growing suburbs, especially for Latinos.

Race, Place and Opportunity: Racial Change and Segregation in the Chicago Metropolitan Area: 1990-2000

Will metro Chicago, currently in its last decade with a white majority, move forcefully towards establishing equal opportunity or will the emerging majority continue to be isolated from housing and educational opportunity?

Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation

Almost a half century after the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that Southern school segregation was unconstitutional and "inherently unequal," new statistics from the 1998-99 school year show that segregation continued to intensify throughout the 1990s, a period in which there were three major Supreme Court decisions authorizing a return to segregated neighborhood schools and limiting the reach and duration of desegregation orders. The data from the 2000 Census and from national school statistics show that the U.S. is an overwhelmingly metropolitan society, dominated by its suburbs. The high level of suburban segregation reported for African American and Latino students in this report suggests that a major set of challenges to the future of the minority middle class and to the integration of suburbia need to be addressed.

Diversity Challenged: Evidence on the Impact of Affirmative Action

In the courts and in referenda campaigns, affirmative action in college admissions is under full-scale attack. Though it was designed to help resolve a variety of serious racial problems, affirmative action's survival may turn on just one question--whether or not the educational value of diversity is sufficiently compelling to justify consideration of race as a factor in deciding whom to admit to colleges and universities.

Religion, Race, and Justice in a Changing America

The authors look back at the civil rights tradition, offer new insights from diverse religious communities including Protestant denominations, Jewish groups, evangelical organizations, and Islamic and Buddhist groups, among others, and examine the role of religion in a new movement.

Diversity and Legal Education: Student Experiences in Leading Law Schools

This study reports on the experiences of students captured in a high response-rate survey administered by the Gallup Poll at two of the nation's most competitive law schools, Harvard Law School and the University of Michigan Law School, as well as through data collected through an email/internet survey at five other law schools. The data indicate that the Supreme Court was correct in its conclusions about the impact of diversity in Bakke and earlier higher education decisions.

Resegregation in American Schools

This report focuses primarily upon four important trends. First, the American South is resegregating, after two and a half decades in which civil rights law broke the tradition of apartheid in the region's schools and made it the section of the country with the highest levels of integration in its schools. Second, the data shows continuously increasing segregation for Latino students, who are rapidly becoming our largest minority group and have been more segregated than African Americans for several years. Third, the report shows large and increasing numbers of African American and Latino students enrolled in suburban schools, but serious segregation within these communities, particularly in the nation's large metropolitan areas. Since trends suggest that we will face a vast increase in suburban diversity, this raises challenges for thousands of communities. Fourth, we report a rapid ongoing change in the racial composition of American schools and the emergence of many schools with three or more racial groups. The report shows that all racial groups except whites experience considerable diversity in their schools but whites are remaining in overwhelmingly white schools even in regions with very large non-white enrollments.