The nation's schools, which have become increasingly segregated in recent decades, are likely to become even more racially divided as a result of this week's Supreme Court decision curtailing the use of race in school integration plans, attorneys and educational experts said yesterday.About 1,000 out of the 15,000 school systems in the country currently use race in some way to decide where children go to school, said Amy Stuart Wells, a professor of education at Columbia University's Teachers College. Many of those districts are expected to revamp or abandon those race-conscious policies because of the new ruling.
"We are going to see a major increase in racial segregation that will cause our children to be less prepared to live in our diverse society," she said.
A case study of how the nation's schools might respond to the decision can be found in the Washington region, which had to abandon race-conscious policies nearly a decade ago, after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit struck down integration plans in Montgomery and Arlington counties. Some local school systems now use income as a race-neutral method to achieve racial diversity, while others do nothing at all, a pattern that experts expect to see repeated across the country.
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