Segregated Schools Linger 60 Years After Landmark Brown V. Board Of Ed.

Nearly 60 years after the landmark Supreme Court ruling that desegregated American schools, students are still learning in segregated classrooms.

Black students are attending schools that are becoming increasingly segregated, while Latino students are attending schools that are mostly Latino, according to a Thursday report from the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Associated Press reported.

The report comes just two days before the 60th anniversary of the historic case Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, where the nation's highest court ruled that "in the field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place."

But all of the efforts made since then to desegregate schools no longer seem to be working. More than half of black students in New York, Maryland, Michigan and Illinois attend schools that have a 90 percent or higher minority enrollment, according to the report obtained by the AP.

In 2011, only 23 percent of all black students attended schools that had a white-majority, the lowest percentage since 1968, the AP reported.

The number of Hispanic students in public schools rose 495 percent between 1968 and 2011. But the number of black students increased only 19 percent during that same time period. The number of white students decreased 28 percent, the AP reported.

The reason for the increased segregation, the report claims, is housing segregation in both cities and suburbs.

"Neighborhood schools, when we go back to them, as we have, produce middle-class schools for whites and Asians and segregated high-poverty schools for blacks and Latinos," Gary Orfield, who authored the UCLA report, told the AP.

Housing discrimination, or preventing blacks and Hispanics from moving into mostly white neighborhoods, is also to blame, but "that's been a harder nut to crack," NAACP Legal Defense Fund President Sherrilyn Ifill told the AP.