The Clinton campaign pointed us to a passage in a 2014 study by UCLA Graduate School of Education’s Civil Rights Project that tracked the amount of southern black students attending white schools in the South. By that yardstick, schools are slightly less integrated now than they were in 1968. That’s the year the Supreme Court mandated the enforcement of desegregation inGreen vs. County School Board and diverse classrooms really started to become reality.
Clinton, however, bookended the 1960s as the point of comparison and her claim doesn’t hold true for the better part of the decade. Jim Crow laws were still in place until the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and despite the Brown decision, most black students in the South still didn’t attend white schools,"the kind of schools that provided strong potential opportunities for diverse learning experiences," according to the study. In 1967, one in 100 black students went to a white school. In 1960, it was one in 1,000.
"It’s true that segregation for blacks is worse today than it was in 1968, but it’s certainly not worse than 1964 and before," said Gary Orfield, a UCLA professor of education and lead author of the study Clinton cited...
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Clinton does have a strong point that American schools have relapsed into monochrome. Classrooms were the most diverse from the 1970s through the early 1990s. At peak integration, four out of 10 black southern students attended a white school, while less than a third of all black students attended black schools.
"We’ve lost a lot of the progress we gained, no doubt about that," Clotfelter said.
Experts say the backslide was the consequence of a series of judicial decisions, beginning with Milliken vs. Bradley in 1974, a relatively unheard of but seminal case in the desegregation saga...
