Today’s U.S. schools have a wider mix of students than ever, but they’re still divided by race, ethnicity, and how much money families have.

This comes from a new study shared on Thursday by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). It found that over one-third of students (that’s around 18.5 million kids) went to schools in the 2020-21 school year where most students were from the same racial or ethnic group. And, 14% of kids were in schools where nearly everyone was from just one race or ethnicity.

This report follows a similar one from 2016 by the GAO, looking into how divided schools are by race in grades K-12. The earlier report showed a tough situation, and this latest one isn’t much brighter, according to Jackie Nowicki, who’s in charge of K-12 education at the GAO and helped write the report.

“There is clearly still racial division in schools,” says Nowicki. She adds that schools with large proportions of Hispanic, Black and American Indian/Alaska Native students – minority groups with higher rates of poverty than white and Asian American students – are also increasing. “What that means is you have large portions of minority children not only attending essentially segregated schools, but schools that have less resources available to them.”

“There are layers of factors here,” she says. “They paint a rather dire picture of the state of schooling for a segment of the school-age population that federal laws were designed to protect.”

School segregation happens across the country

In the past, people often linked segregation to the Jim Crow laws in the South. However, a study from the 2020-21 school year shows that the most schools with students mainly from one race or ethnicity – like mostly white, Hispanic, or Black schools – were actually in the Northeast and Midwest.

School segregation has “always been a whole-country issue,” says U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., who heads the House education and labor committee. He commissioned both the 2016 and 2022 reports. “The details of the strategies may be different, but during the ’60s and ’70s, when the desegregation cases were at their height, cases were all over the country.”

The study also noticed segregation in all kinds of schools, including traditional public schools, charter schools, and magnet schools. In charter schools, which get public funding but are privately managed, over a third had students mostly from one race or ethnicity, particularly Black and Hispanic students.

There’s history behind the report’s findings

Nowicki and her team at the GAO weren’t shocked by their findings. They highlight past actions, like redlining, that led to neighborhoods divided by race.

With 70% of students in the U.S. going to schools in their own neighborhoods, Nowicki notes, these divided neighborhoods have resulted in schools separated by race as well.

“There are historical reasons why neighborhoods look the way they look,” she explains. “And some portion of that is because of the way our country chose to encourage or limit where people could live.”

Even though the 1968 Fair Housing Act made it illegal to discriminate in housing based on race, the GAO found that some current laws still support the separation of communities by race.

“Our analysis showed that predominantly same-race/ethnicity schools of different races/ethnicities exist in close proximity to one another within districts, but most commonly exist among neighboring districts,” the report says.

School district secessions have made segregation worse

A big reason why schools haven’t become more mixed, according to the GAO, is something called district secession. This is when a school decides to leave its current district, usually wanting more control, and start a new one. This action tends to make segregation worse.

“In the 10 years that we looked at district secessions, we found that, overwhelmingly, those new districts were generally whiter, wealthier than the remaining districts,” Nowicki says.

The report identified 36 cases of district secessions, with six occurring in Memphis, Tenn. This followed a major district merger years before. In 2011, Memphis City Schools, primarily serving non-white students, merged with Shelby County Schools, which had a wealthier, mostly white student body, due to financial issues.

Joris Ray, an administrator in Memphis City Schools at the time, remembers the dissatisfaction in Shelby County with the merged district. This led to six separate districts breaking off.

According to the GAO report, this has increased racial and economic separation in the Memphis area. The new districts are generally whiter and richer than the combined district now known as Memphis-Shelby County Schools.

Ray, leading Memphis-Shelby County Schools since 2019, points out the harm of this segregation. Studies show students in diverse settings are less prejudiced, have fewer stereotypes, and are better equipped for workplaces valuing diversity.

The report highlights a trend: when parts of a larger school district break away to form smaller ones, it usually results in more racial and economic division. New districts often have a higher percentage of white and Asian American students, and fewer Black and Hispanic students. They also tend to have fewer students needing free or low-cost lunches, indicating less poverty.