This week, a report from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University noted that many public schools around the United States (particularly in the South) were becoming more segregated, a fact that the researchers attribute to several key Supreme Court decisions, such as the 1991 ruling in the case Oklahoma City v. Dowell. The study also noted that, because resegregation in the South had been rapid, public schools in the region remain more integrated that those in the Northeast and the West Coast. Interestingly, the study also reported that the average white student in the United States attends a school where 80 percent of their fellow classmates are also white.

The first link leads to a recent article from the Harvard Crimson about the recent report on school segregation. The second link will take visitors to the entire report, researched and written by a team of scholars and researchers at the Civil Rights Project. The third link leads to a news article from the Seattle Times that discusses the potential for making college more affordable for low-income students by increasing the limits on federal grants and loans. The fourth link takes visitors to a Chicago Sun-Times article on the potential for reducing the public school segregation levels in Chicago, something that has been mostly unsuccessful over the past thirty years. Concerning a related issue, the fifth link is to a Detroit News article that discusses Colin Powell’s stance on the question of the University of Michigan’s admissions policies as regards to minority enrollments. The final link leads to a site provided by the University of Michigan that offers some explanations about why their admission systems are in full federal compliance, and are not in fact quotas, as some have claimed.