Segregation of Latino Students Increases : Education: Their classrooms are less integrated than those that serve blacks, a study finds.

WASHINGTON — Latino schoolchildren, whose numbers have swelled in the last 20 years, are studying in classrooms--particularly in California--that are “significantly more segregated” than those attended by other minority groups, a new study released Wednesday says.

“Hispanics are now significantly more segregated than blacks,” the report by the National School Board Assn. said. “Since 1970, the percent of whites in the school of the typical Hispanic student has fallen by 12%, while the level has remained relatively stable for blacks.”

The study, which was conducted for the association’s urban school districts by Gary Orfield of Harvard University and Franklin Monfort of the University of Wisconsin, suggests that more than three decades after the Supreme Court ordered the nation’s boards of education to dismantle racially exclusive schools, segregated schooling continues for millions of students.

The report is based on 1988 data from 40,000 schools gathered by the Office of Civil Rights in the Education Department.

It said that, since the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision ended separate but equal school programs, the nation’s Latino school enrollment has soared from less than one in 20 students to more than one in 10 in 1989. The demographic change has been especially acute in California, Texas and Florida.

“Particularly striking were the rapid increases in (educational) isolation in California, by far the most important state for Hispanic students,” the report said. “Hispanics in California in 1988 were in schools with fewer non-Hispanic whites than were black students in Alabama or Mississippi.”

Among the study’s recommendations is a call for “large-scale research and the creation of a major commission to study the causes, consequences and alternatives to the increasing isolation of Hispanic students. California and Texas, which educate a substantial majority of the nation’s Hispanic students, need statewide studies as well.”

The report also said that, while the Ronald Reagan Administration attempted to dismantle school desegregation programs, separation of black students in schools actually increased in some Southern and Border states during the 1980s.

Orfield, a nationally recognized expert on school desegregation, said at a news conference that a shift in residential housing patterns has resulted in suburbs with largely white school systems.

In some communities, such as De Kalb County outside Atlanta, Ga., and Prince George’s County in Maryland near Washington, D.C., so many middle-class black families have moved away from the inner city to these suburbs that many schools in their systems tipped to predominantly black, he said.

All the while, Orfield said, “a virtual vacuum of federal leadership” has eviscerated mandatory desegregation programs that were maintaining desegregated schools, and an overall resurgence of school segregation has resulted across the nation.

Ulysses (Van) Spiva, chairman of the Council of Urban School Boards of the National School Boards Assn., said it would be necessary for big-city schools and suburban school systems to work together under unified desegregation plans to reverse a creeping increase in school segregation.

“Urban areas are the most heterogeneous communities in this country,” he said. “When we think of integration and desegregation, we first think of schools.” In a statement released with the report, Spiva said: “A metropolitian-based strategy that involves both city and suburbs is crucial to furthering desegregation.”

Orfield said desegregation programs aimed at integrating black students into schools with whites are imperiled by recent and upcoming Supreme Court decisions. The high court is expected to rule later this year on a case that could end desegregation programs in De Kalb County. Last year, the court described conditions under which schools in Oklahoma City could terminate existing desegregation plans.