50 Years After School Integration, A Major Step Backwards

by Lee Hubbard

(PNS) -- It has been 50 years since May 17, 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared that different schools for blacks and white students made education both separate and unequal. The decision was a springboard for the growing civil rights movement in the United States, which helped to put an end to legalized segregation 14 years later across the country.

But what has happened in recent years is perfectly legal, dramatic re-segregation of American schools. A July 2001 study on the state of education by the Harvard Civil Rights Project found that 70 percent of the nation's black students attend predominantly minority schools (with minority enrollment of over 50 percent), up significantly from the low point of 62.9 percent in 1980. And a third of the nation's black students (36.5 percent) attend schools with a minority enrollment of 90-100 percent.

A change in housing patterns has led this re-segregation. Whites have moved out of the cities and into the suburbs, leaving behind blacks and other minorities.

"Our research consistently shows that schools are becoming increasingly segregated and are offering students vastly unequal educational opportunities," says Gary Orfield, the author of the report and head of the Harvard Civil Rights Project. "This is ironic considering that evidence exists that desegregated schools both improve test scores and positively change the lives of students."

The Civil Rights Project report called for efforts to continue local desegregation plans and programs through litigation; more integrated metropolitan-wide magnet schools; creation of expertise on desegregation and race relations training in state departments of education; and a provision of funding for better counseling and transportation for inter-district transfer policies.

However, with the post-Brown focus on integration of schools, schemes such as inter-district busing, out of district busing and racial capping of schools have been tried and have failed due to resistance of whites who have challenged their legality in the courts. This has largely been a black vs. white issue. Some blacks also objected to busing. They felt it took children out of the community and their support network. It was also fought by other minority groups. In cities such as San Francisco, Asian Americans, whose student population makes up 50 percent of the local school district, fought measures to desegregate the schools. They wanted their children to go to schools in the neighborhoods where they lived.

Parents and some educators are increasingly talking about neighborhood schools, the schools around your residences as a way to improve public education. Improving urban and inner-city schools should be the No. 1 focus of school districts 50 years after the Brown decision. Seeing that that tide is turning away from remedies of the past, Arlene Ackerman, the Superintendent of the San Francisco Unified School district, believes the so-called "Dream Schools" idea is a good start.

The Dream Schools project aims improving existing schools in inner city areas of San Francisco where black and Latino students live. Modeled after the Lorraine Monroe Model in Harlem in New York City, children would wear uniforms and have a rigorous curriculum.

Other school districts across the country are also implementing innovative ideas -- from charter schools, to magnet schools, to specialized curriculum schools, such as math and science based schools -- to help bridge the educational gap that has left many behind 50 years after the Brown decision was seen as the final frontier in bridging the educational gap. Brown was a righteous decision that opened the doors of learning to all people. Today, it is time that we work on ways to keep that door open.