Education

Michigan has a lot to be proud of - top universities, the Great Lakes, a (now) thriving car industry. Having some of the most racially segregated schools in the country? Not so much. 

When it comes to racial segregation in schools, Michigan tops the charts.

True, Michigan doesn’t have any actual segregated schools on the books, those went out a long time ago. But de facto segregation is very real. And it’s hard to argue that we’re moving toward a post-racial society in Michigan when black kids mostly go to school with other black kids, Latinos with Latinos, whites with whites.

Gary Orfield directs the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. He says one thing people need to understand is it's almost never just segregation by race or ethnicity. "It's almost always what we call 'double segregation.' So high concentrated black or Latino schools tend to have concentrated poverty as well, so there’s a double level of segregation."

And for a lot of Latino students, Orfield says it’s triple segregation: segregation by race, poverty and language.

 As I was working on yesterday's story about charter schools, I came across a problem that must be frustrating for many parents: It is incredibly difficult to find the right information to compare schools in Michigan. The information is all out there. It's just really hard to put it together in a way that makes sense. 

The first problem is figuring out where to look. So, here are five resources to help start the search: 

If you think of the best of what the charter school movement was meant to accomplish – you might think of a school a lot like University Prep Science + Math Middle School in Detroit. It’s attached to the Michigan Science Center in Midtown.

Students fill the hallway, dressed in white shirts, and khaki pants.  The boys wear ties.

Based on state testing, these are some of the top performing students in Detroit.

UPrep Science + Math CEO Margaret Trimer-Hartley is eager to brag.

"Not only do we do well on the data, we are the number one performing free-standing charter middle school in the state of Michigan," she says.

So you might think U Prep Science + Math has a waiting list every year, full of families who want to enroll their kids.

Trimer-Hartley says it’s the opposite.