About a month ago, US Education Secretary Arne Duncan gave the keynote speech at a conference for the American Bar Association in Chicago. The Chicago Sun-Times paraphrased the secretary’s words and said he thought Dr Martin Luther King would be “disheartened to see so many schools still effectively segregated.”
Our full coverage of this news story can be found here.
Anytime the secretary of education makes a statement like “many schools are still effectively segregated,” even if a reporter from a huge newspaper was paraphrasing for him, it begs the question: How many schools are effectively segregated, and what exactly do you mean by “effectively segregated”?
Speaking from Illinois, we know there are several high schools, which we cover extensively, in the state that have student populations made up almost entirely of minorities (black or Hispanic), while there are also high schools that have almost no students who are black or Hispanic. Mostly, these are neighborhood schools, and the segregation of the school is not a function of anything the school is doing to achieve segregation (that would be illegal, of course). Rather, if a neighborhood has no black families living there, you wouldn’t expect to find any black students at the local community high school. The same goes for whites, Asians, Hispanics, and so on.
The Illinois State Board of Education reports six categories of racial/ethnic demographic classifications for students: White, Black, Asian, Native American, Hispanic, and Multi-racial. Today’s snapshot tabulates values for the racial composition of a high school alongside ACT composite scores for the Class of 2010 at Illinois high schools. You can view the data for yourself on our School Landscapes of Illinois: Computer Engaged project Web site at the URL below:
irc.schoolsnapshots.org/sch_zoom.pl?q=1011:1051:1052:1053:1054:1055:1056
Try sorting by “% Black” and see how low the ACT scores are. Most of my first page has “% Black” listed as 95 percent or higher — in some cases, 100 percent — while almost every single composite ACT score is in the lowest 10 percent of the state. According to Secretary Duncan, schools in minority communities receive too little investment from those communities and therefore tend to offer a much lower range of opportunities for students to prepare themselves for college. The ACT scores at high minority schools testify to that truth.
The same goes for the schools in the state that have the highest Hispanic proportion, although ACT composite scores are split between the lowest decile in the state and the second-lowest decile in the state. Still pretty bad, but not as bad as it is for black kids.
For comparison purposes, sort the table by “% Asian” and notice how pink the ACT Composite column becomes, indicating that schools with the highest Asian proportions in Illinois — even though the highest reported value in the state is still only 35.1 percent — tended to average in the top or second-highest decile in the state on the ACT composite.
