A new study from The Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, has identified a pattern of extreme segregation by race and class in California’s K-12 schools.
According to the authors, California has two racially identifiable advantaged groups, White and Asian students, who are less likely to be enrolled in schools of concentrated poverty than their Black, Latinx, and American Indian peers. The average White student in California was enrolled in a school with 42.9 percent poor students and the average Asian student attended a school with 42.2 percent poor students. In contrast, the average Black and Latinx students attended schools with 67 percent and 70 percent poor student enrollment, respectively.
California also has the highest proportion of intensely racially segregated schools among all U.S. states. The proportion of California schools with greater than 90 percent students of color has quadrupled over the past three decades, rising from 11.4 percent to 44.5 percent.
Notably, the poverty rate in schools with greater than 90 percent Black, Latinx, multiracial, and American Indian students was over three times higher than in overwhelmingly White and Asian schools. In 2022, 84.5 percent of students attending schools with overwhelmingly underrepresented minority enrollment qualified for subsidized meals, compared to 26.0 percent of students in overwhelmingly White and Asian schools.
The authors found that charter schools are more segregated than similarly located magnet schools. In magnet schools, the average Black student and the average Latinx student were in a school that was 15.2 percent White and Asian in 2019. For charter schools, the comparable statistic was 12.5 percent. As of 2019, 59 percent of charter schools were intensely segregated, compared to 36 percent of magnet schools. Over the past 20 years, charter school enrollment has increased by some 760 percent, while magnet school enrollment has declined.
Schools with high levels of Black and Latinx students had lower graduation rates than the most segregated White and Asian schools, at 87.5 percent and 96.3 percent, respectively. Furthermore, a significant racial gap was found among the completion rates of “A-G” requirements – a sequence of high school courses required for admission to California’s public universities. In majority White and Asian schools, 68.7 percent of students meet A-G requirements. At Black and Latinx schools, only 43.1 percent of students meet the same requirements. Additionally, the top 10 percent of White and Asian schools had higher overall course enrollment per student, higher A-G course enrollment, and higher advanced course enrollment than the top 10 percent of schools with majority students of color.
“It is time for state leaders to affirm the goal of integration and provide assistance and support to communities and school districts to support it,” the authors write. “Our leaders who know about the inequality and bear responsibility for equity need to play a positive role.”
