ATLANTA (Reuters) - Public schools in the United States are becoming more racially segregated and the trend is likely to accelerate because of a Supreme Court decision in June, according to report published on Wednesday.
The rise in segregation threatens the quality of education received by non-white students, who now make up 43 percent of the total U.S. student body, said the report by the Civil Rights Project of the University of California.
Many segregated schools struggle to attract teachers and administrators who are highly qualified, do not offer good preparation for college and fail to graduate more than half their students.
The Supreme Court in its June ruling forbade most existing voluntary local efforts to integrate schools in a decision favored by the Bush administration despite warnings from academics that it would compound educational inequality.
"The country risks becoming a nation where most of the new non-white majority of young people will be attending separate and inferior schools and educators will be forbidden to take any direct action likely to bring down the color line," the report said.
"Resegregation ... is continuing to grow in all parts of the country for both African Americans and Latinos and is accelerating the most rapidly in the only region that had been highly desegregated -- the South," it said.
The trend damages the prospects for non-white students and will likely have a negative effect on the U.S. economy, according to the report by one of the leading U.S. research centers on issues of civil rights and racial inequality.
Part of the reason for the resegregation trend is the rapidly expanding number of black and Latino children and a corresponding fall in the number of white children, it said.
Contrary to popular belief, the surge in the number of minority children in public schools was not mainly caused by a flight of white students into private schools.
Instead, it said, the post-"baby boom" generation of white Americans are having smaller family sizes.
"We are in the last decade of a white majority in American public schools and there are already minorities of white students in our two largest regions, the South and the West," the report said.
TRIPLE SEGREGATION FOR LATINOS
The record of successive administration reforms such as the Goals 2000 project of former President Bill Clinton and the "No Child Left Behind" of President George W. Bush in 2001 "justifies deep skepticism," the report said.
Those reforms focused pressure and resources on making the achievement of minority children in segregated schools equal to children in schools that were fully integrated.
School desegregation is a sensitive issue in the United States because of resistance to it from white leaders in the decade after a 1954 Supreme Court decision saying segregated public schools were unconstitutional.
One of the chief complaints of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s was that black-only public schools were inevitably starved of resources by local government with the result that black children received inferior education.
Latinos are the fastest growing minority in U.S. schools and for them segregation is often more profound than it was when the phenomenon was first measured 40 years ago, according to the report, "Historic Reversals, Accelerating Resegregation and the need for new Integration Strategies."
"Too often Latino students face triple segregation by race, class and language," it said.
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