Racial Divide Returns To US Schools

The Telegraph(UK) ^ | 1-19-2004 | David Rennie

[blam]

Racial divide returns to US schools

By David Rennie in Washington
(Filed: 19/01/2004)

A creeping return to segregation of American schools has left its classrooms as racially divided today as they were in 1969, at the height of the civil rights movement.

A Harvard study has found that most white schoolchildren now have "little contact" with ethnic minorities.

The study, timed to coincide with Martin Luther King Day today, a federal holiday honouring the assassinated civil rights leader, found that America's schools reached a high point of racial integration in 1988.

Since then a string of court rulings and federal policy changes have handed autonomy back to school districts, effectively abandoning forced integration of classrooms.

In the South, state courts have gone further, banning programmes that consider race in the formation of school populations. The effects have been dramatic.

Prof Gary Orfield, the primary author of the study, said: "Nationally, more than a third of African-American students are at schools that are more than 90 per cent non-white.

"The situation is much better than it was 50 years ago, but the trends are bad," said Prof Orfield, a Harvard professor of education and social policy.

"Apart from the army and higher education, we don't have any institutions trying to build a multi-racial society."

The forced de-segregation of American schools began half a century ago this year, with the Supreme Court's Brown v Board of Education decision, which found that "separate but equal" schools were "inherently unequal".

The schools' policy led to the most bitter conflicts of the civil rights era.

The 1950s and 1960s saw armed stand-offs and riots on school doorsteps across the South, and federal troops ordered to escort black children to their classrooms, past angry lines of white parents, Southern police and national guardsmen.

The 1970s was the high-point of bussing, the controversial court-ordered policy that transported students into white neighbourhoods from black areas on the "wrong side of the tracks".

That policy sparked protest even in the north of the country, with violent rioting in Boston.

In 1988, 43 per cent of black children in the American South attended mostly-white schools, which just three decades before had been off-limits.

Following a 1991 Supreme Court decision allowing a return to "neighbourhood schools" instead of bussing, black children have started vanishing from white schools.

The driving factor behind segregation in much of America is the de facto division of residential areas into black, white and Latino neighbourhoods, and the long-term exodus of white families from many urban areas.

The racial divide is stronger than mere economics, with middle-class blacks still often living cheek-by-jowl with their poorer racial compatriots.

Richer white parents in the most isolated pockets of the rural South simply took themselves out of the public school system, moving to private academies which are almost all-white.

[Jaysun]

Segregation? I thought that segregation involved the forced separation of races. This isn't segregation, it's people choosing where they'd like to live. Everyone is free to move wherever they'd like. I say let the deck fall as it may and let people move and go to school wherever they'd like.

[Future Snake Eater]

What a damn shame...black kids don't get to experience mayonnaise and white kids don't feel quite so threatened from day to day...

[groanup]

My daughter goes to a high school that is 50-50 white/black. The students rarely date interracially though it is not unheard of. But the social lives of the students are, for the most part, segregated. These are children in a VERY liberal community who left to their own devices are quite content to mingle only with their own race. It is NOT the choice of the white students alone but of both races.

[Little Bill]

My daughter did her student teaching in Livingston, AL, the school system was very political and very bad, the private schools we marginally better.

[FormerLib]

The problem is that busing was a horrible idea that used the coercive power of government to force it on other people's children. It didn't do squat for improving poor schools and it helped pit two segments of the population against each other.

Where I live, the public schools are a joke, and a sick one at that! All of the private and religious schools have long waiting lists as people attempt to escape the public schools. Fortunately for us, our children were admitted early and we've maintained their private education.

[montag813]

A Harvard study has found that most white schoolchildren now have "little contact" with ethnic minorities.

And in most areas are better off for it. Blacks and Hispanics who are brought in undeservingly typically disrupt the school environment.

[liberallarry]

Not a word about the successful integration of the Japanese - or the situation of other, more recent, Asian immigrants.

[3catsanadog]

Mark my words, some liberal is considering that a moratorium on whites moving from urban areas to suburban and forcing whites to move back to urban areas will be part of the solution to this vexing problem.

[Lancey Howard]

"The situation is much better than it was 50 years ago, but the trends are bad," said Prof Orfield, a Harvard professor

Why is segregation by choice "bad" (and therefore, integration "good")? Orfield is a professor, but he uses the adjective "bad" without any explanation. I suppose it could, logically and by extension, be inferred that the professor believes that it would be "good" if every school in America had a student population which was 12% black. But I would still like to know WHY?

You would think that a Harvard professor would be savvy enough to take his own words, quoted for publication, a lot more seriously.

[RJL]

Mark my words, some liberal is considering that a moratorium on whites moving from urban areas to suburban and forcing whites to move back to urban areas will be part of the solution to this vexing problem.

The liberals call it "urban sprawl" when people leave their big cities. They are already fighting mightily to stop anyone from leaving the big cities that they control with an iron fist.

[HennepinPrisoner]

Not quite sure why multiculturalists think that blacks can only succeed if they attend schools that are majority-white.

A movie called "Stand And Deliver", based on a true story, comes to mind.

[RJL]

You would think that a Harvard professor would be savvy enough to take his own words, quoted for publication, a lot more seriously.

Prof Gary Orfield and his brother Myron, a former Minnesota State Rep from Minneapolis are so far left it clouds all rational thought.

[July 4th]

Not a word about the successful integration of the Japanese - or the situation of other, more recent, Asian immigrants.

Absolutely true. 50% of Asian-Americans marry Caucasians. There has been little to no difficulty in combining numerous aspects of the two cultures.

On a side note, I'm at Wisconsin law school, which has a black student population of about 5-7%. They rarely mix with others of different races. They have "their table" in our commons area, and their own extracurricular programs at the law schools where they spend most of their time. I think they'd be perfectly happy with segregation.

[liberallarry]

I think they'd be perfectly happy with segregation

If they could achieve absolute isolation from others, no contact whatsoever, then yes. Otherwise no. Jealosy over the achievement of others is too strong.