As
Affirmative Action Dominates Higher Education News, K-12 Desegregation Orders
Quietly Fall
Desegregation The landmark 1954 Brown v.
Board of Education decision, which declared that "[s]eparate educational facilities
are inherently unequal," did not automatically result in the desegregation of
Southern schools. During the 1963-1964 school year, barely 1% of black children
in 11 Southern states went to the same schools as white children. It took a combination
of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Supreme Court's 1968 Green v. County
School Board decision, in which the Court ordered that school desegregation
plans had to "realistically . . . work now," for substantial changes to occur.
By 1972, over 90 percent of black students in the Deep South went to school with
at least some whites. (For more detail, see "Education
Adequacy, Democracy, and the Courts"). In the late 1960's and early 1970's,
almost every urban school district in the South compiled a desegregation plan,
and these have been operational ever since, and federal courts also required many
school districts in the North and West to adopt desegregation plans. Recently,
however, a number of factors have combined to result in the dismissal of desegregation
orders in Fulton County, GA (includes Atlanta), Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Dallas,
Texas, and other large urban areas. There is little to no evidence that
the articulated reason for the dismissals, a lessening of segregation, has occurred.
In 1999, Gary Orfield argued in "Conservative Activists and the Rush towards Resegregation"
that conservative federal judges tend to dismiss longstanding desegregation orders
without holding evidentiary hearings to consider the educational consequences
of their decisions. In a 1993 article entitled, "Are the Courts Giving Up? Current
Issues in School Desegregation," Chris Hansen asserted that, paradoxically, it
is precisely the courts' frustration at the failure of desegregation orders to
actually desegregate schools that causes them to vacate those orders while schools
are still segregated. Resegregation That school desegregation
has not lasted from the 1970's until today is not seriously in dispute. A 2002
report by the Harvard Civil Rights Project, "Race
in American Public Schools: Rapidly Resegregating School Districts," found
that in the last 10-15 years, the very districts in the Deep South that had been
the most integrated in the 1970's and first half of the 1980's were sliding back
the fastest towards resegregation. In Birmingham, Alabama, for example, while
only 3% of students in the public-school system are white, the average white student
attends a school that is at least 25% white, and the average black student attends
a school that is only 2.1% white. "Race in American Public Schools" found that
the least resegregated districts were those in which desegregation orders were
still operative, but in the last ten months alone, Little Rock, AR (September
2002), San Jose, CA (October 2002), Fulton County, GA, Baton Rouge, LA (all in
May 2003), and Dallas, TX (June 2003), have had their desegregation orders dismissed,
or have settled their long-standing, court-supervised desegregation cases. Dallas
made the "Race in American Public Schools" list of the top 20 districts in which
"white exposure to blacks" shrank between 1986 and 2000; this was partially attributed
to the fact that part of Dallas's desegregation plan was dismissed in 1994. The
events surrounding the dismissals of the plans in the last ten months have been
largely consistent with Orfield's and Hansen's arguments. The Fulton County desegregation
hearing, which led to the end of a voluntary race-based busing program, featured
only one witness, the interim superintendent. In 1970, when the district came
under federal supervision, 70% of its students were white. In May 2003, 44% of
students were white. The attorney for the Fulton schools said right before the
decision that the court's ruling "is a verification" that "the dual" system of
education "has long since disappeared from Fulton County." The lawsuit that led
to court supervision over the Baton Rouge school district, filed in 1956, was
the longest-running active court battle over desegregation until it was settled
this month. The 52,300-student system is currently 71% black. In the same
week that the a federal judge in Kansas City, MO began hearing arguments in that
district's 26-year-old case, a report
by the Education Trust that in Missouri, the achievement gap between blacks
and whites on the National
Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test had widened between 1992 and
1998. The Harvard study reported that Kansas City was among the 20 districts with
the largest decline in percentage of whites in the school of the average black
student between 1986 and 2000. A decision is not expected until July at the earliest.
A case that may settle Chicago's desegregation lawsuit is also in process. Affirmative
Action These dismissals have garnered little national attention; the
news was recently dominated by the Supreme Court's affirmative-action decisions,
yet the two are not unrelated. An October 2002 study of seven preschools in West
Hartford found low-income preschoolers learned vocabulary and other language skills
six times faster when they went to preschool alongside more affluent children.
There is voluminous evidence that preschool
correlates highly with K-12 achievement, and more than one person analyzing the
Supreme Court's undergraduate affirmative action decision have asserted that the
case was really about inequality in primary and secondary schools, without which
affirmative action would not be as necessary. Joan Ryan of the San
Francisco Chronicle wrote this week that "Separation is no longer the
law, but inequality is still the rule." If the trend of dismissing desegregation
orders continues, advocates for equal opportunity will have to look to the school
funding adequacy cases and other advocacy strategies to accomplish their goal.
Prepared June 25, 2003 |
