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SCHOOL SEGREGATION

Today, it is not shocking to find schools composed of rather diverse ethnic and racial student bodies in which students from various demographic groups have little or no contact with each other. Classes, lunchrooms and clubs are all segregated by race. Some disabled people are just too hard to include in regular society. That we have behavior that can’t be tolerated, that nobody will ever put up with the way we look, that there’s nothing we could possibly do, and a lot of other things like that. This one, unlike the others, was not on the grounds of an institution, although it might as well have been. The school did run several group homes, and many students lived in the group homes and were driven to school from there. Many of the other students were on strict behavior programs at home, went to school, and only left the house for segregated day programs. As far as I can tell, the main difference between the life lived by most students there, and an institution, was the distances involved between one part of the institution and another, which were traveled by car instead of on foot. We were still separated from the rest of society the vast majority of the time.

Segregation Deaf Schools

When schools were segregated years ago, schools for the deaf followed suit. For over 100 years, black deaf children attended separate educational programs, housed either on separate campuses or in separate buildings on the same campus as the school for the deaf. This separation led to the development of a black dialect of American Sign Language, similar in nature to "black English." When schools for the deaf became integrated, these separate buildings and campuses were either closed or incorporated into the rest of the school. Over time, the black dialect of ASL died out as the black deaf children were no longer separated from the white deaf children. Fortunately, the memories of this experience have been preserved in books such as Sounds Like Home. This segregation was encouraged by the National Association of the Deaf, which in 1904 recommended the establishment of separate schools for black deaf children. This segregation meant that black deaf teachers were able to get jobs teaching in the separate programs. The programs produced the first black deaf teachers, Julius Carrett and Amanda Johnson, both of whom graduated from the North Carolina program for black deaf, and H.L. Johns, who was a graduate of the Maryland program for black deaf. All three were hired by the Texas Institute for Deaf, Dumb and Blind Colored Youth

School segregation intensified through the 1990s, during which time three major Supreme Court decisions authorized a return to segregated neighborhood schools. Though the U.S. South is much more integrated now than before the civil rights revolution, it is moving backward. Although student diversity has increased significantly, most children experience separate societies and schools. White children attend more segregated schools than any other racial group. Segregation follows Black and Hispanic families as they move from the city to suburbia. The high level of suburban segregation reported for Black and Hispanic students in this report suggests that a major set of challenges to the future of the minority middle class and to the integration of suburbia need to be addressed. Hispanic children have been more segregated than Blacks for a number of years, not only by race and ethnicity but also by poverty. There is also serious segregation developing by language. Segregated schools are highly unequal. Segregation by race relates to segregation by poverty and many forms of educational inequality for minority students. Americans believe their children benefit from integrated education, and segregation has not been an effective policy. Segregated schools have significantly higher dropout levels and poorer records of preparing students for higher education