Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 15, 1994 TAG: 9405150043
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: B6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: SILVER SPRING, MD. LENGTH: Long
Forty years after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision paving the way for school desegregation, these children, aged 5 to 8, sit side-by-side in the classroom, play together in the schoolyard, go to each other's homes.
"The wonderful thing about kids this age is they don't have a lot of preconceived ideas about each other," says Principal Jeff Martinez. "They're very accepting of each other."
It took some innovation and lots of money to turn Rosemary Hills into a magnet school for math and science and to persuade many parents to send children from their mostly white, upper-middle-class neighborhood to a primary school in an area heavily populated by blacks and Hispanics.
Other school districts haven't been as committed.
Schools throughout the country remain segregated, especially in the North and the West. Ironically, the South, once the hotbed of racism, has the most integrated schools in the country, mostly the result of court order. But even there, the degree of desegregation is slipping.
"The vestiges of segregation are not just physical placement of people, but it's the quality of education itself," said Education Secretary Richard Riley.
It's a function of demographics and poverty, as well of race.
"Racial discrimination in our public schools is alive and well and the outlawed dual school system is still with us," said Robert L. Carter, the NAACP lawyer who argued the Brown case and is now a federal judge. "More black children are in all or virtually all black schools today than in 1954."
In 1954, 10 years before the Civil Rights Act, 11 years before the Voting Rights Act, schools were black or white.
A Kansas state law mandated that black children attend segregated schools, so Linda Brown was bused two miles from her Topeka home, even though there was a school - a white school - four blocks away. Her father, the Rev. Oliver L. Brown, and other parents sued. The case was combined with other segregation challenges from Virginia, South Carolina and Delaware.
On May 17, 1954, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled. "We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of `separate but equal' has no place. Separate education facilities are inherently unequal."
"Brown led to a spate of cases that utterly and totally dismantled American apartheid," said Burt Neuborne, civil rights lawyer and professor at New York University School of Law. "Brown spoke to the best we could be and the best we could hope to be."
But reality fell short of expectations.
Today, most minority students attend schools with populations that are predominantly minority, according to the Harvard Project on Desegregation.
"We never really had a legal framework and a national administration committed to desegregate the North and the West," said Gary Orfield, the project's director.
Now, Orfield's research finds "what may be the beginning of a historic reversal" in desegregation trends.
In the 1991-92 school year, 66 percent of black children attended schools that were predominantly minority and 33.9 percent were at schools that were 90 percent to 100 percent minority, the project said. That's up slightly from the 1986-87 school year. There is a similar upswing for Hispanics.
The Harvard center said Southern segregation increased significantly from 1988 to 1991, and that segregation of black students across the country grew as well.
Still, Southern black children are only half as likely to be in intensely segregated schools as black students in the Northeast.
"Segregation is most intense in the largest older industrial metropolises where the central city and its school district were hemmed in by independent suburbs a century or more ago," the study said.
Inner cities, with their low property tax base, can't match the educational spending of the more affluent suburbs. Lacking money, the city schools often are unable to attract the best teachers, purchase educational essentials like textbooks, even maintain school buildings.
Given current housing trends, then, with minorities concentrated in the inner cities, is desegregation possible? Is it what blacks and Hispanics still seek?
"If you ask many African-Americans, they would say no," said Theodore Shaw of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. "They would say quality of education is the most important. But in many instances it's not possible to separate out the two."
Quality education for all children in all schools has become the theme of the Clinton administration's education policies. Riley calls it the "smart up" philosophy - raising standards for every child, rather than "dumbing down" standards so low-achievers will do well.
"It's important to remember what happened in 1954 was valid, was right, was good for the country. It had to be done," he said. "1994 is not 1954. A lot has transpired, a lot of changes have taken place. It is important for us not to try to deal with today's problems in out-of-date ways. Education is much more complex."
That means recognizing the impact of poverty, as well as race, on education, and that busing is not the only way to desegregate schools.
There are new issues, like tracking, that have to be addressed, Shaw said. He calls the practice of grouping children according to ability and special needs "one of the most insidious practices that affect African-American students these days. . . . It's segregation even if the students nominally attend the same school."
The Justice Department's new civil rights chief, Deval Patrick, has indicated that tracking will be challenged in the context of school desegregation laws and rulings.
School systems have to be creative to achieve diversity. Among the tools available to them: magnet schools, charter schools, schools at the workplace, public school choice.
After failing dismally in its first attempt to integrate Rosemary Hills, the School Board added resources to attract white students. It guaranteed that bus rides would last no more than 30 minutes and kindergarten classes would be held to 20 children. Computer and science labs were installed and instructional aides were put in every classroom.
White children now make up 70 percent of the student body, up from nearly 50 percent in 1985-86.
Martinez, the principal, counts 53 nations of origin among the 650 children at his school.
"There's a lot to be learned by being with different people," he said. "They learn how to deal with the world."
by CNB