The issue of segregated schools is still with us in 2010……

This piece about a federal judges ruling in a case about school attendance in the deep South should remind people who even with the nation’s first black president…..

Things still go on that perpetuate racial segregation in this nation’s school’s…

A struggle fought publicly over 50 years ago..that has never really gone away…….

The issue is by no means restricted to the South…….

Last week, a federal judge ruled that a school board policy here in Walthall County has had the effect of creating “racially identifiable” schools in violation of a 1970 federal desegregation order. Although the case is unique in some ways, it fits a broader trend toward racial isolation that has been underway for years in American schools and has undermined the historic school integration efforts of the civil rights era.

More than half a century after courts dismantled the legal framework that enforced segregation, Obama administration officials are investigating an array of practices across the country that contribute to a present-day version that they say is no less insidious.

Although minority students have the legal right to attend any school, federal officials are questioning whether in practice many receive less access than white students to the best teachers, college prep courses and other resources. Department of Education lawyers also are investigating whether minority students are being separated into special education classes without justification, whether they are being disciplined more harshly and whether districts are failing to provide adequate English language programs for students who are not fluent, among other issues.

The Walthall County case fell under the jurisdiction of the Justice Department, which is still monitoring more than 200 mostly Southern school districts for compliance with desegregation orders dating to the 1960s and ’70s. Justice officials said they have sometimes found that local school boards have adopted policies that undermine those orders, a situation that some experts say reflects a misguided sense that civil rights concerns are somehow a thing of the past.

And this also…..

Studies have shown schools drifting back into segregation since the 1980s, when the federal government became less aggressive in its enforcement. The Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that school districts cannot make racial balance a policy goal unless — as is the case in Walthall — they are attempting to comply with a federal desegregation order.

“School boards are constantly under pressure from privileged parts of their districts, and if there isn’t any counterbalance of civil rights enforcement policy, you can easily end up with a set of decisions that increase segregation,” said Gary Orfield, director of the civil rights project at the University of California at Los Angeles. Its studies that show that 38 percent of black students and 40 percent of Latino students attend public schools that are more than 90 percent minority.

More……..