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HOW WELL have efforts to integrate city schools been working? "Looking around their public elementary and secondary school classrooms, black children in most cities are unlikely to see many white classmates," writes Steven Rivkin of Amherst College in the October 1994 issue of Sociology of Education. "The situation is partly the result of the limited integration efforts of some school districts," he acknowledges. "However, residential segregation has severely limited the effectiveness of other school districts' attempts to do so."
Rivkin studied the data on school segregation over a two-decade period in the Northeast, the South, the Midwest, and the West. He found that segregation increased in spite of the fact that in three of the four regions the proportion of whites in schools attended by blacks had increased during the studied period, 1968 to 1988. The proportion of whites in schools attended by blacks rose in the South, the Midwest, and the West; only in the Northeast did the proportion decline, from 34% white students in schools attended by blacks in 1968 to 28% in 1988.
In 1968, 40% of blacks nationwide attended schools where there were no whites, while 37% of whites attended schools where there were no blacks. Eighty-eight percent of blacks attended schools where the proportion of whites was lower than the proportion of white students in the district.
When Rivkin examined the data by region, he found that there has been virtually no change from 1968 to 1988 in the Northeast and not a great deal of change in the Midwest. The West, which had the most integrated schools in 1968, continued to improve. The South, which had the most segregated schools in 1968, had the most integrated schools by 1980 and did not show any change from 1980 to 1988.
A look at the matter of residential segregation helps explain why so little progress has been made. The figures for residential segregation -- figures representing only the residential segregation of schoolchildren, not of the entire population -- show that in the West and the Midwest there was virtually no change over the period studied, while in the Northeast and the South residential segregation of schoolchildren actually increased between 1968 and 1988. "Only the movement of students across district boundaries, either...