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.

• There are more than 500,000 in foster care in the U.S., at an average age of 10 years and an average stay of 28 months.
• About 20,000 youth “age out” of foster care each year.  Only half of these young people graduate from high school, and only 2 out of 100 will graduate from college.  A quarter will become homeless and almost a third will have no health insurance.  A third to half will be unemployed.

A number of years ago, I worked in a school for kids who had been removed from their homes due to abuse or neglect.  Nearly all of the young people were very behind academically and had severe emotional and social problems.  Apathy and violence coexisted in these kids and could be manifested almost simultaneously.  One of the most wrenching things I’ve ever had to do was physically restrain a 6 year old kid because he was a danger to himself and others. It happened regularly that year that I worked at the school, a year in which I saw little, if any, progress in the kids.

More recently, I visited a project at a state university that provides scholarships and other support to young people who were previously in the foster care system.  Sitting down with several students, I got to witness living success stories.  Wounds and challenges were still evident; eye contact with them was difficult to achieve.  However, against all odds – without parents to send money or cookies, without a home to got back to over Christmas break – these young people are making it and have dreams for career and family.  It gave me hope that I hadn’t been able to feel during my work at the school.

I just got finished reading a book by someone who is an authority on foster care, in more ways than one.  Andrew Bridge’s book, Hope’s Boy, recounts his personal story from growing up in the foster care system in Los Angeles to graduating from Harvard Law School and having a successful career as an attorney and advocate for child welfare reform.  Having gotten to know Andrew personally over the last year, I was prepared to be touched by the details of his story.  I was less prepared, however, for the exquisite quality of his writing and ability to convey the strength of ties between a mother and her son, no matter the circumstances.

Andrew’s mother suffered from severe mental illness and was unable to care for him, leading him to be in the foster care system from age seven until graduating from high school.  The book doesn’t provide any easy answers as to why and how Andrew overcame the odds to become more than just a sad statistic.  He didn’t have a particularly supportive foster family, nor was there one mentor who steered him down the right path.  In many ways, his is a story of self-reliance, which he attributes largely to his mother.  Therapists working with children who have experienced abuse even from their own parents say that no matter the extent of their abuse, these kids always want to go back home.

After many years of faulting on the side of removing kids from their homes at the slightest sign of neglect, child welfare agencies more recently have explicit policies of “family preservation and reunification,” and foster care rolls are on the decline across the country.  This is overall a positive trend, as ultimately it is clearly better for kids to be with family than in foster care.  However, unless there are sufficient supports – from health and mental health to educational and economic – for these kids and their families, it could be simply another example of shifting the burden of a safety net from society to individuals.

If you are interested in learning more about the facts of foster care and how to improve outcomes for youth, check out website of Casey Family Programs, an operating foundation working to reduce the number of kids in foster care and improve outcomes for those who remain in care.