Overcoming Apartheid, by JONATHAN KOZOL [from The Nation, December 19, 2005 issue]

Apartheid education, rarely mentioned in the press or openly confronted  even among once-progressive educators, is alive and well and rapidly  increasing now in the United States. Hypersegregated inner-city  schools--in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at  the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000--are the  norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today.

"At the beginning of the twenty-first century," according to Gary  Orfield and his colleagues at the Civil Rights Project at Harvard  University, "American public schools are now 12 years into the process  of continuous resegregation. The desegregation of black students, which  increased continuously from the 1950s to the late 1980s, has receded to  levels not seen in three decades." The proportion of black students in  majority-white schools stands at "a level lower than in any year since  1968." The four most segregated states for black students, according to  a recent study by the Civil Rights Project, are New York, Michigan,  Illinois and California. In New York, only one black student in seven  goes to a predominantly white school.

The fashionable reflex nowadays is to declare that integration "failed"  and to settle instead, in Orfield's words, for better ways of "doing  Plessy" in the urban schools as they now stand. Such declarations of  futility ignore the reality that as many as 10 million black, white and  Hispanic children have attended school together in interdistrict  programs in which integrated schooling has become a fact of life for an  entire generation of black children. In large numbers, the inner-city  students in these programs have gone on to universities and colleges and  become civic leaders in their own communities.

In the Milwaukee area, for instance, twenty-two suburban districts  currently participate in a student-transfer program to promote school  integration across district lines, which has been in operation now for  nearly thirty years. Under the program four thousand students transfer  between Milwaukee and its suburbs. In the middle-class suburb of  Shorewood, for example, 11 percent of the student population comes into  the district from Milwaukee. Including minority children who already  live in Shorewood, says Jack Linehan, the recently retired  superintendent, "our school district is about 19 percent black and  Hispanic, and the community has a great comfort level with that.... I  think parents got to know each other as friends.... I think that  evaporated away a lot of the psychological resistance." Linehan also  notes that starting integration in the elementary grades made it much  easier for children "simply to be children with each other." Stereotypes  fall away, he adds. "It's more difficult to conjure up 'the other' when  you're building sand castles together."

In St. Louis also, a suburban-urban interdistrict transfer program has  been in place for more than twenty years. The program, initiated under a  court order in 1983, today enrolls about 10,000 children from the city,  who represent nearly a quarter of the school-age population of black  children in St. Louis, while about 500 children from the suburbs make  the opposite commute. Although recent cutbacks in the funds provided by  the state to underwrite these transfers have imposed a heavier financial  burden on the sixteen districts that participate, most of the education  leaders there have made clear their preference to continue with the  program even in the face of opposition from the state.

In the Louisville area as well, school integration, initially carried  out under court order, has now been in place without court order for a  quarter-century. The sweep of the program, under which the city schools  and county schools have been combined into a single system in which more  than 90,000 black, Hispanic, white and Asian children are enrolled, has  had the effect of rendering Kentucky's public schools the most  desegregated in the nation. The typical black student in Kentucky now  attends a school in which two-thirds of the enrollment is Caucasian.

When a proposal was made in 1991 to terminate or cut back on Kentucky's  integration program, protests were voiced by community groups, the  teachers union, the local press, the Jefferson County Human Relations  Commission and the regional branch of the National Conference of  Christians and Jews. A survey revealed that the number of black parents  who believed their children's education had improved under the busing  plan exceeded those who took the opposite position by a ratio of six to  one. Less than 2 percent believed that education for their children  would be better in resegregated schools. Despite occasional recurrences  of opposition from groups or individuals who represent small pockets of  resistance, support for school desegregation in the Louisville community  continues strong and unabated to the present day.

Public policy has largely turned its back on the aspirations embodied by  these instances of school desegregation. "Even many black leaders,"  notes education analyst Richard Rothstein, are weary of the struggle  over mandatory busing programs to achieve desegregation and "have given  up on integration," arguing, in his words, that "a black child does not  need white classmates in order to learn." So education policies, he  says, "now aim to raise scores in [the] schools that black children  attend." "That effort," he writes, "will be flawed even if it succeeds."  The Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision, he reminds us, "was not about  raising scores" for children of minorities "but about giving black  children access to majority culture, so they could negotiate it more  confidently.... For African-Americans to have equal opportunity, higher  test scores will not suffice. It is foolhardy to think black children  can be taught, no matter how well, in isolation and then have the skills  and confidence as adults to succeed in a white world where they have no  experience."

Nonetheless, programs that promote school integration continue to be  threatened in some sections of the nation. In Milwaukee, for example,  legislation has been introduced three times since 1999 to do away with  or substantially reduce interdistrict transfers. Much of the pressure  has come from those who argue that the money spent for integrated  education should be spent instead to upgrade schools within the city,  the assumption being that the state cannot afford to make both of these  purposes attainable. In the first two attempts, the legislation was  defeated. When on the third attempt, in 2003, the legislation was  approved, it was vetoed by Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle.

There will be further legislative efforts like these in the future, says  Jack Linehan, the former Shorewood superintendent--this, he notes,  despite academic outcomes for the students in the transfer program that  are consistently far better than those of students who remain in  Milwaukee. The four-year graduation rate of inner-city students who have  been attending school in the suburban districts is typically 95 percent  or higher, Linehan observes, while the rate for students in Milwaukee's  schools averages below 60 percent. If the legislature should succeed in  cutting funding for the interdistrict plan, says Linehan, suburban  districts would be forced to raise their local levies up to 25 percent  to keep on with the program. "The only other option is to send these  children back, which I believe would be immoral. We cannot say, 'We  didn't mean it, now there's no more money.'"

In perhaps the most disheartening development, the interdistrict program  in St. Louis is facing the risk of termination in the next three years.  A court-supervised phaseout of state funding for the program, while it  does not prohibit integration, significantly discourages suburban  districts from accepting students from St. Louis after the 2008-09  academic year. The suburbs, for the most part, have wanted to continue;  indeed, students in the affluent community of Clayton walked out of  classes in 2004 to protest a possible withdrawal from the program,  according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The principal of Clayton High  School told the paper he was "proud to be part of a community that  values diversity in a metro area so segregated." But the state,  beginning in late 2004, cut assistance to the district from the full  per-pupil cost in excess of $13,000 to approximately half that sum, a  loss in funding that has led the Clayton School Board, against the  wishes of its students, to vote to terminate the program and accept no  further applicants after 2008.

Other St. Louis suburbs may be driven to the same decision. Already, as  a result of the first stages of the phaseout, the number of city  students going to suburban schools has dropped by about 3,000 from a  peak of 13,000 in the 1990s, while the number of suburban children going  to St. Louis schools has dropped to half the number who were making this  commute during the 1990s. "The state government," Orfield notes,  "beginning under former Governor John Ashcroft, has fiercely opposed the  integration program. It works, so it will be killed, unlike charter  schools, which do not work and will be expanded." As in Milwaukee, the  success of students in the program has been documented thoroughly.  Ninety percent of transfer students graduating from suburban high  schools have pursued postsecondary education, most attending two- or  four-year colleges, compared with only 47 percent of graduating minority  seniors in St. Louis. And the volume of applications by minority parents  to enroll their children in the program has continued to be strong and  is, indeed, increasing. In 2004 nearly 6,000 parents submitted  applications for the 1,300 openings that were available.

Is it accurate then to say that most Americans, and black Americans  especially, as we are told so frequently, have decided to give up on  integrated education? National surveys, Orfield notes, do not bear this  out. More than two-thirds of Americans believe "desegregation improves  education for blacks," and "a growing population is convinced" it has a  positive effect for whites as well. In surveys among young adults, 60  percent believe the federal government ought to make sure that public  schools are integrated. The same percentage of black respondents do not  merely favor integrated education but believe that it is "absolutely  essential" that the population of a school be racially diverse. (Only 8  percent of blacks and only 20 percent of whites say this is not of much  importance.) Opposition to desegregation among whites, Orfield pointedly  observes, is highest among those who have no experience of integration.  Yes, as those who have participated in these programs rightly note,  there are the multitude of challenges that transfer students often do  confront; and these are not always minor problems, nor are they  exclusively, as some may think, "the problems they bring with them."  Many are created by insensitivity or insufficient care in prior planning  on the part of the receiving districts, others by resilient racist  suppositions on the part of educators or administrators even in some of  the most self-consciously progressive white communities.

Still, oral histories of students who experience desegregation usually  reveal that even when the social adaptations may be difficult at first,  the students consider the benefits they ultimately gain to be well worth  the challenges they've faced. And despite the social tensions students  in these interdistrict programs do sometimes encounter--and despite  those famous "separate tables" in the cafeterias to which black students  often gravitate, and in regard to which an awful lot of lamentation is  devoted in the press--many of the white and nonwhite students get to  know each other far too well not to be drawn to one another, finally, as  friends.

Most parents of black and Hispanic students who have asked for my advice  when they were trying to decide upon a school their children might  attend have told me they have rarely thought about the pros and cons of  trying to enroll their children in suburban schools or, indeed, in  racially desegregated schools within their district, because they do not  believe it possible that they would have the chance to exercise this  option if they wanted to. Orfield believes that we can make it possible  on a far broader scale and that we have, in any case, a moral obligation  to devote ourselves to heightening that possibility in any way we can.

In answer to those who say they share this goal but point to the  obstacles presented by the current makeup of the federal courts and the  lack of any apparent interest in advancing such a purpose on the part of  national elected leaders or the leaders of state government, Orfield, a  political scientist by training, gives a clear, unshakable response.  "The notion that apartheid in the South could be dismantled 50 years ago  seemed wildly improbable as well," he noted. "Breaking down the barriers  to interdistrict integration and reducing residential segregation in the  suburbs have at least as good a chance of ultimate success. It will take  a major political thrust in order to achieve this. We will certainly  need some better people on the courts. But look at what Charles Hamilton  Houston and W.E.B. Du Bois and those who worked with them during the  decades long before the Brown decision faced when they were looking at a  system of apartheid in the South which nobody was seriously resisting  and which neither political party was opposing. And they nonetheless  were asking, 'How do you take this thing apart?' And they did it. They  started a movement. They created the intellectual force to make it  possible. This is what we need to do as well."

And, he said, with a determination that is seldom heard within the  discourse of too many tired-sounding liberals these days, "When we do  create that force, it will be successful also."

 http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051219/kozol