SEPARATE BUT NOT EQUAL

‘Severe Isolation’: School Segregation Worse for Latino Children Than It Was a Generation Ago, Study Finds

In 1998, Latino children on average attended elementary schools in which nearly 40 percent of their schoolmates were white. By 2010, it was just 30 percent.

Latino children in the United States are more likely to enter elementary schools this year with significantly fewer white peers than a generation ago and “suffer from severe isolation” in large urban school districts, according to a new study published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed journal Educational Researcher. In 1998, Latino children in America on average attended elementary schools in which nearly 40 percent of their schoolmates were white. By 2010, it was just 30 percent nationwide. The study looked at the racial makeup of school enrollments across more than 53,000 elementary schools in the United States between 1998 and 2015. “It’s essential that we consider hard evidence as the nation debates questions of fairness, segregation, and immigration,” said one of the study’s coauthors, Claudia Galindo, who works as a sociologist at the University of Maryland. What’s worse, she said, is that children of immigrant parents in particular “remain in starkly isolated schools.”