Trends And Consequences Of School Segregation In Schools

Topics of race and inequality are critical topics we continue to debate everyday in America. My research synthesis paper is about school segregation, and I wanted to identify how and why schools continue to be racially and socioeconomically segregated today. I will use these questions, as well as knowledge gained from scholarly articles, as a platform for my analysis of school segregation and its implications for students and communities. So I wanted to discover if integration still matters, do our schools need to be desegregated, and if not, then how can our schools become diverse and effective. Racial segregation, segregation and systemic oppression doesn’t just start in one place. There is a structure in place that makes all of the discrimination

At first it is hard to understand why schools are segregated without understanding its causes. There is an obvious social and economic disadvantage, fueled by residential isolation, economic circumstance, and discrimination. I use my first question, why are schools and districts racially and socioeconomically segregated, as an introduction to my analysis. In the article, 60 Years After Brown: Trends and Consequences of School Segregation, authors Readron & Owens (2014) discuss the many factors that contribute to school segregation, and how and why school segregation might affect students. The authors use different indices on how school segregation is measured, being the measurement of isolation or exposure and measures of unevenness. Indices of unevenness measure the extend to which a student population is unevenly distributed among schools, and in contrast, the indices of exposure or isolation measure the extent to which students are enrolled in schools with high or low proportions of a given racial group. (pg. 202) The research done by Readron & Owens demonstrates the different levels of segregation student’s experience, and the consequences it leads to. School resources are distributed among students unevenly, meaning the teachers will be less skilled, there will be less exposure to more challenging curriculum. Housing segregation and school district fragmentation are also largely related to school segregation and student