Study: Schools Becoming Less Segregated

Jackie Zubrzycki writes at the Education Week (3/15, Zubrzycki) that amid concerns that US schools are becoming more racially segregated, "new research offers a nuanced but slightly more positive picture of the status of racial integration in the nation's schools. While the nation's schools did become gradually less integrated over the course of the 1990s, that trend has slowed and even reversed in the new millennium." Zubrzycki details the study's methodology, adding that it found that "between 1998 and 2009, white students became increasingly likely to share classrooms with nonwhite students, and minority students were also increasingly likely to share classrooms with minorities from other racial or ethnic backgrounds." Moreover there has been a marked decrease in segregation between black and white students.