Under the Bus

Judicial desegregation is ineffective

By Roger G. Waite

In high school in Chicago, I sometimes reported on meetings of the Local School Council (LSC) for our school newspa­pers. The LSCs, boards made up of parents and some community and faculty members, were instituted to increase local control of the public schools. The councils had con­siderable control, in principle, over a good deal of the school’s discretionary spending. I say “in principle” because the budget was so mind-boggling that I’m not sure anyone, including the principal, who served on the LSC ex officio, fully understood it. Anytime a spending issue of any complexity came up, an administrator who had probably been at the school before some council members were born would explain with perfect opac­ity which funds they could use to cover the expense.

“Deseg” was one of the spending catego­ries most frequently mentioned. One might never have guessed it by the seemingly arbi­trary grab-bag of projects on which the this money could be spent, but “deseg” stood for “desegregation,” and the fund stemmed from a 1980 quasi-voluntary, court-monitored desegregation agreement the public schools struck with the U.S. Department of Justice to avoid a lawsuit. Not that Chicago schools are exactly what the layman would call integrated: the majority of black students still go to schools composed almost entirely of blacks. Nor was it even the purpose of the desegregation consent decree to make schools reflect the diversity of the city’s student population. Its principal concern was, rather, to “provide educational and related programs for black and Hispanic schools remaining segregated.”

Whatever exactly this plan was sup­posed to do ended this fall when a federal court decided the school district had suf­ficiently remedied past wrongs and ordered an end to court supervision. Programs of this sort have a tendency to end with more of a whimper than a bang, and this was evident not only in the light amount of local media coverage the development received, but also in the smallness of some of the points given most attention. Will there still be racial quotas at the handful of high schools where entrance is based on examination? some articles wondered.

As I suggested, the Chicago Public Schools were not, practically speaking, highly integrated, nor have they been for some time. From 1862 to 1865 the schools were legally segregated, though the black population was tiny and it seems that about half of black students continued to attend their original schools instead of designated black schools. After that the black student population was quite integrated, but when it began to grow substantially after World War I, school administrators began to pursue an unofficial but quite effective effort to keep schools as segregated as possible. Tempo­rary classrooms were built for overcrowded schools in black neighborhoods while nearby white schools were underutilized. By the 1960s and 1970s the policy of segregation became less active, but with many whites moving to the suburbs it didn’t take much effort to make Chicago schools among the most segregated in the North.

One wonders how exactly the court or­der helped things. What the plan contained that actually touched on what one might call desegregation consisted mostly of small-scale voluntary student transfers facilitated by magnet schools. For the rest, there was monitoring of the equitable distribution of resources. It’s hard to tell how well that went. A 1994 report by a court-appointed commission reveals that one of its members used to negotiate with the public schools for busing contracts—oh the delicate ironies!—and that the commission and its staff went on a three-day retreat, but I can’t make heads or tails of what they accomplished.

The ironies of school integration come easily in Chicago. Many, perhaps even most, of the city’s prominent politicians, includ­ing members of the Board of Education, send their children to private schools. Even Barack Obama sent his children to one of the most exclusive private schools in the city, even though the public schools in his neighborhood of Hyde Park were among the best and most racially diverse.

In the years after the decree was imple­mented, the school district nonetheless sunk to the point that in 1987, then-Secretary of Education Bill Bennett declared it the worst in the nation, and not without reason. Internal reforms and an energetic superin­tendent started to turn things around in the mid-nineties, but this progress had scant relation to racial composition.

The case of Chicago provides some flavor of the complexity of school desegre­gation. Few have any quibble with the idea that intentionally segregating students by race is an affront to the right of equal protec­tion. When simple desegregation has been enforced, the results have been astound­ing. The South went from having the most heavily segregated schools in the nation in 1954, when Brown v. Topeka was decided, to having the most integrated by 1972. This about-face resulted in large part from federal judicial oversight, but the objectives they enforced were generally clear.

When the Justice Department started to take aim at northern schools, matters got much hairier. Like Chicago, many northern districts purposefully intensified the de facto segregation that existed due to residential patterns. But in the eyes of the federal gov­ernment beginning in the 1970s, undoing gerrymandered school district boundaries and giving equal funding to all schools was not enough. For those who believed the aim of Brown was not merely to end segregation as a policy but to achieve a high degree of integration in practice, the increasing move­ment of blacks into northern cities and of whites into surrounding suburbs coupled with residential segregation within cities proved a thorny problem.

To understand the theory underlying judicially enforced desegregation plans one must have some sense of the legal and social understanding of many advocates of court-enforced integration. To those who look to the judiciary primarily to vindicate rights, the more modest reading of Brown is per­fectly sensible. But to the faction that takes a more expansive view, the nerve of Brown was the sociological argument on which it relied. Segregation—blacks being taught only with blacks—lowered the self-esteem of black children and contributed to feelings of inferiority that reinforced their existing social inferiority. The more than slightly illogical but very powerful conclusion they thus reached was that the presence of class­mates of the white race would in some way improve the educational experience and achievement of blacks. While the sugges­tion sounds at least mildly offensive when phrased a certain way, sociological realities lend it a bit of merit. Black students tend to be poorer and are more likely to come from single-parent households. Attempts to remedy these and other disadvantages inevi­tably take up a bit of time from the business at hand in a classroom —and all the more the more students there are in a class who are thus disadvantaged. Naturally then, all students would benefit from an environment in which there are fewer disadvantaged students.

Because of the belief that black students would benefit from being in majority white schools, the plans produced by much of the federal litigation, and threats thereof, against northern school districts focused not on producing schools that reflected the racial balance of the district—if that were the case in Chicago they would be aiming for schools that were about sixty percent black and less than ten percent white—but on sticking as many minorities as possible into schools with large white populations. The problem gets even thornier because urban school districts frequently didn’t have enough whites to go around, so litigators often had to involve the suburbs.

The problem hardly ended there. For a court to produce a judgment against a school district, it had to show that it actually discriminated against minorities. In many cities that demand could plausibly, if some­what laboriously, be fulfilled. To show that a brood of largely white suburbs did the same verged on practical impossibility. So while some mandatory orders were made against urban districts, manipulating suburbs often required a more inventive strategy. In the case of St. Louis in the early 1980s, for example, the Justice Department and the district court asked the suburbs to enter a program that al­lowed voluntary transfers of suburban white students to new, hopefully attractive magnet schools in the city, as well as modest busing of blacks, or else face the same sort of messy proceeding in which St. Louis proper had been snared.

Even when such deals were not explicitly negotiated, many cases ended in a kind of voluntary settlement after prolonged litiga­tion. The problems with these settlements are not hard to see and were often rather ironic. Because they generally relied on voluntary transfers of whites to schools in predominate­ly black areas, they had to make urban schools especially attractive, which frequently cost a good deal of money. So while a great deal of the tragedy of the “separate-but-equal” doc­trine that these plans were meant to undo was the unequal funding given to racial-minority schools, districts had to spend disproportion­ately large amounts of money on schools that were disproportionately white. In the late 1980s, a federal court required the Kansas City school district to make its urban schools more attractive to voluntary white transfers by building a 25-acre farm, a planetarium, and a facility for Model United Nations equipped with language translation technology. On the other end, since transfers were voluntary, the black students who transferred were fre­quently those who were better off to begin with and had the savviest parents, and thus tended to denude black neighborhood schools of some of their better pupils.

Integration did not turn out to be the motor of black success many had speculated. Studies dating from 1984 have found that integration per se correlates with only slightly higher reading and unchanged math scores for blacks. Any improvement is always good in itself, but in light of the cost of many of the desegregation plans, which in Nashville, for example, involved busing many students an hour each way, one wonders whether the same resources could have been devoted to directly improving minority education.

Even though ambitious judicial integra­tion plans are questionable from both a legal and policy standpoint, many are still eager to defend them. Their proponents are quick to label as “resegregation” any attempt by courts to declare a school district “unitary”—i.e., not segregated into two or more systems—and to end federal judicial oversight. In this many see the supposedly nefarious hand of the conservative movement and the judges of a more strict-constructionist persuasion appointed by Reagan and the two Bushes. Observations like that of Chief Justice John Roberts that “the way to stop discrimination based on race is to stop discriminating based on race,” rather than engaging in compen­satory schemes of reverse discrimination, are to some but a mask concealing white supremacy.

This curious outlook is well portrayed in a recent article by Jomills Henry Braddock, Jr., professor of sociology at the University of Miami, who laments that the modesty of educational gains from integration has sapped much of the vigor of “public support, education policy, and judicial commitment to school desegregation.” However, he argues, the educational outcome is not the point; instead, one ought to consider increased racial pluralism: black students who attend integrated schools are more likely to attend majority white colleges and work in more di­verse workplaces—not that they necessarily attend better colleges or have higher paying jobs, they’re just more diverse. Why these should be goals of the judiciary, he doesn’t quite say. But in the final analysis, this is all too factual for him. Since Brown represents a “ruling on African Americans’ moral, ethi­cal, and fundamental right to citizenship,” he argues, “research on school desegregation should be more appropriately framed as ‘as­sessments of the implementation’ of an im­portant new direction in education rather than ‘summative evaluations’ of the efficacy and appropriateness of desegregation policies.” In other words, one should not be overly concerned with how well desegregation does what good educational policy is supposed to do, but with how well it does what it does, whatever that is.

In fine, Professor Braddock suggests it is simply inappropriate to “evaluate” civil liberties: “Voting rights, for example, were not, nor should they have been, ‘assessed’ in terms of whether racial gaps in registration or voter turnout declined.” Here we have the key to the confusion of many hardliners on the issue. That a child’s school choices should not be limited on account of race is a matter of principle, as is the proposition that all children have access to quality educational opportunities. But desegregation plans need to be measured by the extent to which they allow the actualization of those principles. The right to vote is not contingent on how many in a group exercise it, but if voting rates in the South had increased only slightly over forty years after the Voting Rights Act, it would be absolutely perverse not to investi­gate whether the policies mandated in that act were the best way to secure those rights.

The same is true of school desegrega­tion. In Chicago, the court-monitored plan seems to have done relatively little to actu­ally integrate the schools or improve educa­tional quality. But the judicial imprimatur of “desegregation” here and elsewhere made challenging its provisions like attacking motherhood and apple pie. Instead of letting the people elected or appointed to run local schools have the latitude of action normally accorded to policymakers, the happily fading craze for court-ordered school desegregation plans has tied districts to flawed educational and sociological ideas approved by judges who know little of the subject. In Chicago, at least, that craze has come to an end.