Many things have changed since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which struck down “separate but equal” schooling. According to the report, called “The Growth of Segregation in American Schools: Changing Patterns of Separation and Poverty Since 1968,” the Northeast now has the most segregated schools in the country and the South the most integrated. But even in the South, racial isolation is increasing; in 199192, only 39 percent of black students attended predominantly white schools, compared with 44 percent three years earlier.
The national statistics were even more discouraging. Two thirds of black students attended mostly minority schools in 199192, the highest percentage since 1968, when the figure was 76 percent. Big cities face the most acute situations: 15 out of 16 black and Latino students are in schools with few whites. One major problem: there aren’t enough whites left in many big cities to make integration practical. “Too many cities already have a public-school system that’s been abandoned by the larger culture,” says Michael Casserly of the Council of the Great City Schools. Within this bleak picture, there are a few bright spots. Integration efforts have been successful in rural areas, small towns and in the suburbs of medium-size cities.
Many civil-rights advocates now agree that integration alone isn’t the answer. “There’s been a lot of blood spilled over the issue,” says Robert Slavin of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Research on Effective Schooling for Disadvantaged Students, “and they wonder now whether there might be better things to spill blood over, like more quality in educational programs.” School officials in many cities say that forced integration hasn’t made their schools better. “We know one of the key elements to academic success is parental involvement,” says Leland Yee, vice president of the San Francisco Board of Education and chairman of the Council of Urban Boards of Education. “The only way you can get that is through neighborhood schools.” San Francisco has had court-ordered busing for a decade. It may work on paper (no school is more than 45 percent minority), but it’s not working on the playground. “You still see the Asian kids, the Latino kids, the white kids and the black kids in different corners,” he says. “There’s no miracle fix.” That’s a hard-earned lesson worth remembering, whether the goal is making schools colorblind or just making them better.
