From Phys.org, which I think is kind of a press release website for academics:
JULY 30, 2019
School segregation worsens for Latino children compared with a generation ago
by American Educational Research AssociationLatino children are likely to enter elementary schools this year with fewer white peers than a generation ago, judging by data reported in a new study published today in Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.
It’s almost as if the number of Latino children is growing and the number of white children is shrinking. We must redouble our efforts to track down the last white children and install them in desks next to Latino students so whites’ Privilege Pheromones can waft over to their disprivileged classmates.
However, as racial segregation has intensified, low-income students of all racial groups are likely to learn beside more middle-class pupils than before.
In 1998, on average, the nation’s Latino children attended elementary schools in which nearly 40 percent of their schoolmates were white. By 2010, that percentage fell to just 30 percent nationwide, according to the study by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Maryland; and the University of California, Irvine. Overall, Latino children today make up more than one quarter of the 35.5 million students attending elementary schools.
Yet the researchers also found that low-income children, regardless of their race or ethnicity, increasingly attend schools with middle-class peers, a development that benefits black and Asian-heritage students as well as Latinos.
“Set amidst high levels of racial segregation, the widening economic integration of students offers an unexpected surprise,” said study coauthor Bruce Fuller, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
The odds that a randomly chosen poor child would attend school with a middle-class schoolmate climbed between 1998 and 2010, from about 40 percent to 50 percent. …
Still, Latino children suffer from severe isolation in large urban school districts, the study shows. In 2010, in the nation’s 10 poorest districts, Latino elementary students attended, on average, schools that were just 5 percent white—down from 7 percent white in 1998.
“It’s essential that we consider hard evidence as the nation debates questions of fairness, segregation, and immigration,” said study coauthor Claudia Galindo, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. …
The children of immigrant Latino parents remain in the most racially isolated schools, the study says. Households with a foreign-born mother reported average earnings of just $37,704 in 2010, and low levels of parental education. Their children attended the most racially and economically isolated schools, where two-thirds of their classmates came from impoverished families.
“Children of immigrant parents remain in starkly isolated schools,” Galindo said. “This stands in vivid contrast to the slowly improving picture for many native-born Latinos.”
