Schools Resegregate, Study Finds
By GREG WINTER
CHARLOTTE, NC, Jan. 20
Sanetra Jant still wonders where all the white kids went. Only last spring,
they made up a quarter of her class, not to mention her friends. And then,
poof, they were gone.
"I don't know why they left," said Sanetra, a fourth grader at Reid Park
Elementary School.
Last year, before a federal appeals court ended three decades of
judicial-supervised desegregation by the district, Sanetra's school was 68
percent black. Now it is almost entirely black, and the many white pupils
who once rode in on yellow buses number one in a hundred.
"Maybe they didn't like it here," Sanetra said, knitting her brow in thought.
If there is any one place to witness the changing racial composition of the
nation's public schools, perhaps it is here, in the city for which the
Supreme Court first endorsed the use of busing to desegregate.
Dozens of Charlotte schools have basically changed color in the months
since the appeals court lifted the desegregation order, and though few
other places have seen swings so rapid, the city offers a time-lapse view
of the steady transformation of the nation's schools.
According to a new study by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University,
black and Latino students are now more isolated from their white
counterparts than they were three decades ago, before many of the overhauls
from the civil rights movement had even begun to take hold.
Nationally, the shift is a result of several factors: big increases in
enrollment by black, Latino and Asian students; continuing white flight
from the nation's urban centers; and the persistence of housing patterns
that isolate racial and ethnic groups. But another big factor, the Harvard
study found, has been the termination of dozens of court-ordered
desegregation plans.
Spurred by Supreme Court decisions at the start of the 1990's, lower courts
have lifted desegregation orders in at least three dozen school districts
in the last 10 years. Little Rock, San Diego, Denver and Miami have all
come out from under court supervision, and next month a federal judge will
reconsider the integration plan in Chicago, the nation's third-largest
school district.
A chief principle in the voiding of these orders is one established by the
Supreme Court a decade ago: that school districts can be considered
successfully desegregated even if student racial imbalances due entirely to
demographic factors, like where children live, continue to exist.
Largely as a result, black students now typically go to schools where fewer
than 31 percent of their classmates are white, the new Harvard study found.
That is less contact than in 1970, a year before the Supreme Court
authorized the busing that became a primary way of integrating schools.
Latino students, who have rarely been a focus of desegregation efforts, now
attend schools where whites account for only 29 percent of all students,
compared with 45 percent three decades ago, according to the study, which
draws on Education Department data through the 2000-1 school year.
And while white children increasingly come into contact with minority
students, mainly because of the tremendous population growth among races
that had only marginal representation decades ago, they are still America's
most segregated group, the study found. On average, white students, who
make up about 61 percent of the nation's public-school population, go to
schools where 80 percent of their classmates are white.
The consequence is a nation in which every racial group that is big enough
to be described as segregated generally is: Blacks, though only 17 percent
of public-school children, typically attend schools where they are in a
majority. The same is true of Latinos, who are about 16 percent of the
student population. Even American Indians, a mere 1 percent of
public-school children, go to schools where nearly a third of all students
are Native American.
Asians, the study says, are the most integrated group, attending schools
where the races are somewhat more commensurate with their national
representation. But they, too, are disproportionately grouped together, for
though they are only about 4 percent of public-school children, they
typically go to schools that are 22 percent Asian.
"We call our schools racially isolated, but it's really just a euphemism
for being segregated," said Mary Frances Berry, chairwoman of the United
States Commission on Civil Rights. "It has to be regarded as unhealthy. At
a time when the society is becoming increasingly diverse, it bodes ill to
have increasingly segregated schools."
Many researchers cite sweeping demographic changes, not public policy, as
the leading force behind racial separation in the schools. The percentage
of students who are members of minority groups has almost doubled in the
last 30 years, and, whether as a legacy of enforced segregation, a function
of economics or an expression of personal choice, they live largely apart
from whites, and often from one another.
Not only did the exodus of white families from cities continue throughout
the 1990's, but new suburban enclaves of minorities, particularly
African-Americans, also formed, expanding the ring of largely segregated
communities beyond the urban core.
But demographics alone cannot account for the rapid segregation of schools,
according to the study. As elsewhere, the growth in population among
minority students in Southern states has outpaced that of white students
for years, and yet the region remained among the nation's most integrated
throughout the 1980's, the researchers found. Only in the last decade or
so, as courts have declared the schools integrated enough to dissolve
desegregation orders, has the segregation between black and white students
begun to grow.
"You can't talk about the changes that have happened without talking about
the effects of the court orders, particularly in the South," said Erica D.
Frankenberg, one of the authors. "The correlation is too strong."
Quite apart from the argument that the school districts are not responsible
for correcting neighborhood segregation, some white parents have challenged
desegregation plans for considering race at all. Here in Charlotte, white
parents filed suit in 1997 contending that their children were being
discriminated against because they could not go to schools of their choice.
A federal appeals court ruled in their favor in 2001, lifting the
district's plan. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case last year,
making this fall the first in three decades in which the system did not use
race to help determine where children went to school.
The effect was immediate, as schools quickly began to mirror their largely
segregated neighborhoods. But while Janice L. Lewis, the principal at Reid
Park Elementary here, would welcome the day when she presides over a
diverse student body once again, she has few worries that lacking one hurts
the caliber of her shiny, almost-new school.
Sprawled out over 18 acres of frost-nipped lawns and untouched trees, Reid
Park defies the image of an "inner-city school," as it is often called. Its
spacious hallways echo a kind of focused calm that many private schools
would envy.
Yet it does have a characteristic common to racially segregated schools:
poverty. On average, blacks and Latinos attend schools where roughly 45
percent of the students are poor, compared with 19 percent among whites, a
reflection of racial discrepancies in income, the study found. At Reid
Park, the number is even higher, with more than 8 in 10 students poor
enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.
While few openly question the social importance of integrated schools, as a
catalyst for breaking down stereotypes and encouraging tolerance, the
debate over academic benefits of integration is a fiery one, often infused
with as much ideology as evidence. Some researchers, liberals and
conservatives alike, argue that breaking up concentrations of same-race
children tends to improve academic performance, especially among black
students. Others reject the notion, contending that mixing student
populations guarantees little but longer bus rides.
A conviction that predominantly minority schools suffer from scant
resources remains one reason why civil rights lawyers are determined to
keep desegregation orders in place where they can.
"The bottom line is that all of our experience with desegregation came not
from serendipity but through deliberate efforts to change what had been put
in place," said Theodore M. Shaw, associate director of the NAACP Legal
Defense and Educational Fund Inc. "In that respect, it's also true that if
we're going to do anything about racial segregation in the 21st century,
it's not going to happen serendipitously."
Kim Edward Renz
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Fine Arts Center, Department 1351
615 McCallie Avenue
Chattanooga, Tennessee 37403
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