According to a January report from UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, African-American and Latino schoolchildren are more segregated than they have been since the time of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, in 1968. In the 2006-07 school year, nearly 40% attended schools–many of them subpar “dropout factories”–where students of color made up 90% to 100% of the student body.

The report they are referring to is Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge , written by noted education and civil rights scholar Gary Orfield.

Not only do many public schools remain segregated by race, the report points out, but also by income as those same schools tend to be segregated by economic class.  Add to that the fact that those schools tend to be more likely to have unprepared teachers, college prep courses and enrichment activities and you have a whole class of students starting far behind.

If segregation is so obvious, why don’t we hear more about it?  Orfield provides this explanation of why whites think segregation is over:

Even as black and Latino students are becoming more isolated, the typical white child is in a school that is more diverse than the school white children attended a generation ago. This factor makes it especially hard for whites to understand the degree to which resegregation has taken place. In 1988, 53% of white students attended schools that were 90-100% white, but that number has slipped to 36% in the newest data. 94% of whites were in majority white schools then, but that has dropped to 87% in the most recent data. The share of whites attending multiracial schools has risen from 7% to 14%.

So, whites are becoming less segregated, but African Americans and Latinos are becoming more segregated. Overall, segregation is growing because non-whites are growing in proportion to whites.  But apparently that still isn’t much of a story.

With King shot just the day before in Memphis, Elliott encouraged her third-graders to discuss how something so horrible could happen.

“I finally said, ‘Do you kids have any idea how it feels to be something other than white in this country?’ “

The children shook their heads and said they wanted to learn, so Elliott set the rules. Blue-eyed children must use a cup to drink from the fountain. Blue-eyed children must leave late to lunch and to recess. Blue-eyed children were not to speak to brown-eyed children. Blue-eyed children were troublemakers and slow learners.

Within 15 minutes, Elliott says, she observed her brown-eyed students morph into youthful supremacists and blue-eyed children become uncertain and intimidated.

Brown-eyed children “became domineering and arrogant and judgmental and cool,” she says. “And smart! Smart! All of a sudden, disabled readers were reading. I thought, ‘This is not possible, this is my imagination.’ And I watched bright, blue-eyed kids become stupid and frightened and frustrated and angry and resentful and distrustful. It was absolutely the strangest thing I’d ever experienced.”

As Elliot recounts in videos from the Frontline program, “A Class Divided,” she took this rather drastic approach because experience is more valuable than just talk:

I knew it was time to deal with this in a concrete way not just talk about it, because we had talked about racism since the first day of school.

I remember several years ago being asked by a friend who had been active in the civil rights movement and was African American why I, as the proverbial white male, was so concerned about inequality and discrimination. I had to think about it for a little bit. Certainly my most immediate influences of family and faith played important roles, but as I thought about it more, I realized that my education was formative in this regard. I was fortunate to attend public schools in the same state where Jane Elliot taught, with good teachers and a spirit of open-mindedness. I distinctly remember learning in school at an early age about the value of different cultures and race/ethnic groups. One of my earliest heroes I learned about in school, encouraged by my teachers, was Frederick Douglass. That reflection impressed on me the important role that education can play in learning not just about subjects, but also about life and dealing with with complex issues like racism and discrimination.

• More than 1.5 million children are homeless annually in the United States—one in every 50 American children.
• 42 percent of homeless children are younger than age 6.
• Homeless children have twice the rate of moderate to severe health conditions compared to middle class children, and twice the emotional problems.
• More than 1 in 7 homeless children have moderate to severe health conditions, such as asthma.
• Homeless children struggle in school, with an average 16% lower proficiency in math and reading, and an estimated graduation rate below 25%.

The report includes data for all 50 states along four major domains (extent of child homelessness; child well-being; risk for child homelessness; and state policy and planning efforts) and rankings by state, as well as a policy platform to address the problem of child homelessness.

There is a wealth of information on the report and the Campaign to End Child Homelessness at http://www.homelesschildrenamerica.org

The UCLA Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access (IDEA) has been tracking the state of California’s middle and high schools for years, pointing to the overall appalling outcomes for students and “opportunity gap” between the primarily higher-income white schools and primarily lower-income African American and Latino schools.

IDEA’s latest California Educational Opportunity Report highlights the latest trends.

• California ranks near the bottom of states in terms of education in many categories: 48th in 4th grade reading level, 47th in 8th reading level, 46th for 4th grade mathematics, and 45th for 8th grade math level.
• For those students who started 9th grade in California in 2003, just 65% graduated four years later, just 25% graduated ready for college, and just 14% were in a Cal Sate University or University of California campus a year after graduation. The outcomes for African Americans and Latinos are even worse.
• California ranks among the bottom three states in numbers of students for every school counselor, in student-teacher ratios, and average high school class size.

Besides just the normal misery index of data, the report provides insights from focus groups with parents of public school students throughout the state. One mother shared:

“Years ago when I was in elementary school, California was one of the leading states in education. Now it’s at the bottom. I look at the opportunities that are there now versus what used to be and it’s just sad, it’s not there anymore.”

Just as sad is the fact that while these opportunities aren’t there for most people, they are for a select few. Another mother in one of the focus groups confessed:

“I agree with everybody as far as the gloom, but…I got lucky [with my children’s school]…It makes a big difference where the school is.”

It shouldn’t matter where the school is, or if you are rich or poor, white, African American, Latino, or Asian. These problems and trends, of course, aren’t unique to California: schools across our nation are failing our students.

As a parent of two children in a public elementary school – in Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest district in the nation with a myriad of problems – I obviously care about the state of our education. But, I contend that even those who have kids in private schools or don’t have kids in school at all should be very concerned as well.

If this current economic crisis has taught us anything, it has shown how fragile our economic system is, a system that depends on innovation to compete in a global marketplace, but in an ethical, sustainable way. A big wave of highly-skilled baby boomers will be retiring over the next couple decades, and we need to replace them with a prepared workforce that can help our economy not implode like it has over the last few months. Businesses need skilled employees, we all need doctors, teachers and other public servants. Where are we going to find these workers? They’re in our schools today, so we better invest in them to increase equal opportunity to raise the level for all our students.

Postscript: In today’s LA Times, Michael Hiltzik contends that cuts to the university systems in California are undermining the state’s economic future.