WASHINGTON (AP) — Segregation is making a comeback in U.S. schools.

Progress toward integrated classrooms has largely been rolled back since the Supreme Court issued its landmark Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision 60 years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. Blacks are now seeing more school segregation than they have in decades, and more than half of Latino students are now attending schools that are majority Latino.

In New York, California and Texas, more than half of Latino students are enrolled in schools that are 90 percent minority or more, the report found. In New York, Illinois, Maryland and Michigan, more than half of black students attend schools where 90 percent or more are minority.

Project co-director Gary Orfield, author of the "Brown at 60" report, said the changes are troubling because they show some minority students receive poorer educations than white students and Asian students, who tend to be in middle-class schools. The report urged, among other things, deeper research into housing segregation, which is a "fundamental cause of separate-and-unequal schooling."

Although segregation is more prevalent in central cities of the largest metropolitan areas, it's also in the suburbs. "Neighborhood schools, when we go back to them, as we have, produce middle-class schools for whites and Asians and segregated high-poverty schools for blacks and Latinos," Orfield said.
And so another pillar of LBJ's great society has fallen, dragging down countless neighborhoods and communities with it. Busing destroyed America's most prosperous cities, and was the overarching driver of the suburban flight that has caused innumerable issues including sprawl, inner city poverty, drug use, and violence, failing infrastructure, political dysfunction, increased reliance on cars and all of the associated costs, resource exhaustion, and the clusterfuck that is modern urban planning (see: Atlanta). And all for nothing...

Forced desegregation was one of the clearest examples of social engineering in US history, and most certainly the biggest failure. Ending legally enforced segregation was the correct decision, but forcing racial intermixing by removing children from their neighborhoods and busing them across entire metro areas was overreach in the extreme.

And now there are calls to 'fix' the current situation, most assuredly through another pillar of LBJ's house of cards: affirmative action. What the political Left refuses to acknowledge is that the passive racism that whites and Asians practice through self segregation is far more linked to culture than color. The cultural attitudes towards the importance of education in the Black and Latino communities simply place a different value on education, which is proven out in school performance. That certainly does not mean that all black and Latino families place less emphasis on education or that all white and Asian families push their children to excel academically and instill the value of education in them, but ignoring cultural norms is folly, as the article above highlights.

The unfortunate truth is that wherever black and Latino children are placed, white and Asian families with the means will leave, either physically or simply opt out of public education. It's easy to decry the horrors of white flight, but it is much more difficult to accept that such flight says just as much about those being left. Until educational attainment is truly valued in these minority communities, further social engineering will yield the same costly results.