Report to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
July 14, 2022
Submitted in Response to the 2021 Periodic Report of the United States of America
Submission prepared by: Janelle Taylor, Robert Lindsay, Maryam Ibrahim, Peter Kye, and Philip Tegeler of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This report outlines the progress, or lack thereof, that the United States has made toward eliminating school segregation and education-related racial discrimination since the 2014 United Nations International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) Committee Review. In their 2014 Concluding Observations, the Committee expressed significant concern about continuing patterns of de facto segregation, discipline disparities, and racial achievement gaps present in U.S. education and called for the U.S. to use special measures (including national, state, and local policy) to condemn and eradicate all forms of racial discrimination.
While the U.S. made some initial progress on these goals under the Obama administration (including guidance designed to promote school integration, encouraging collaboration on school and housing integration across government agencies, school integration planning grants through the Opening Doors, Opening Opportunities program, and guidance on racial discrimination in school discipline), all of this progress was erased during the Trump administration starting in 2017. And while the new federal administration has begun to take some positive steps, their efforts to date are inadequate to address the enormity of the challenge.
The growing trend of racially isolated schools coupled with the fact that about three-fourths of Black and Hispanic students attend majority low-income public schools, has exacerbated the economic and racial isolation of vulnerable children while negatively impacted students of all races through the reinforcement of harmful stereotypes. School segregation, which increases as neighborhood segregation increases, has led to a public school system where wealthy, largelywhite families opt out of school integration, racially-concentrated districts are drained of funding, and students of color are left without adequate school resources and often find themselves two-years behind their white peers in test scores and achievement. Further, systemic racial bias has resulted in students of color being disparately targeted by school discipline practices – exposing them disproportionately to the school-to-prison pipeline.
It is crucial that the United States take the obligations of the CERD Treaty seriously and research, develop, and implement strategies and policies at scale to combat school, residential, and economic segregation, end racial discrimination in the administration of school discipline, and foster national, state, and local collaboration to promote school integration.
