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GAO report on segregation misses the bigger picture
// Economic Policy Institute Blog
Last week, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a misleading report on school segregation, which I discussed with NAACP Legal Defense Fund President Sherrilyn Ifill and others on the Diane Rehm Show.
The takeaway line of the GAO report was:
From school years 2000-01 to 2013-14, the percentage of all K-12 public schools that had high percentages of poor and Black or Hispanic students grew from 9 to 16 percent.
(When the GAO referred to "poor" students, it was not really speaking of poor students, but rather of those from families with incomes less than nearly twice the poverty line and who are eligible for subsidized lunches in schools.)
Not by coincidence, the GAO report was released on Tuesday, May 17, the 62nd anniversary of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision banning school segregation. So it was not unreasonable for those who did not read the GAO report very carefully to conclude that it described a dramatic increase in racial segregation over the last 13 years.
But it did not, and could not.
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