`The best thing that`s happened to Buffalo is court-ordered
desegregation. We`ve restored confidence in the Buffalo public schools.`
Supt. Eugene Reville
Quietly, as a decade of dramatic conflicts over urban school desegregation drew the nation`s attention, officials in some cities have begun finding ways to make desegregation work.
As Boston`s years of boycotts, riots and recriminations became a recurrent drama on the evening news, other cities locked in less dramatic struggles were having very different experiences:
— In Wilmington, Del., a federal judge consolidated the 92 percent minority city schools with 10 suburban districts and then divided them into four new districts. None of the four has a minority student population of more than 29 percent, and the percentages are stable.
Not only that, white children are returning to the public systems from private schools and middle-class families are renovating houses in crumbling city neighborhoods. This is a reversal of the white flight so widely publicized in other cities, in which families move to other school districts to avoid having their children bused to other neighborhoods.
”There`s no longer any place to hide,” said Joseph Johnson, who headed the old Wilmington District and is superintendent of the new Red Clay District. Wilmington is in the forefront of an emerging trend as urban districts–including Milwaukee; Kansas City, Mo.; and Little Rock, Ark.–are back in court contending that it is impossible to desegregate unless the judge orders suburban districts to share the burden.
— In Buffalo, the school district has added programs so attractive to middle-class parents that 300 to 400 children have left private schools to enter public schools in each of the last six years. The district has established 22 magnet schools and 43 full-day kindergartens that get parents committed to the public schools early.
”The best thing that`s happened to Buffalo is court-ordered desegregation,” Supt. Eugene Reville said. ”We`ve restored confidence in the Buffalo public schools.” Officials in Buffalo and some other cities say the dramatic improvement in their public schools has enhanced the national images of their cities.
Efforts employing many ideas used in Buffalo have attracted white children back to public schools in such diverse places as Montgomery County, Md., in the Washington suburbs, and Memphis, where the nation`s most extensive network of white private schools sprang up in the 1970s after a busing order. — In Cleveland, a 1976 court ruling produced a desegregation plan that not only emphasized racial composition but also set the objective of improving reading scores so that both black and white children are exceeding the minimum standards. Over the last four years, the scores of 4th- and 5th-graders have improved dramatically, and judges in many desegregation cases have ordered more money spent to improve class size and for remedial education, and the results are beginning to show in the test scores in cities like St. Louis.
”The money they`re getting under these orders is having a positive impact on the kids,” said David Tatel of Washington, a leading lawyer in desegregation cases. With years of hardening positions in conflict over busing and neighborhood schools, he said, ”it`s easy to forget that the point of all this is to get a better education for minority children.”
As improved test scores begin to flow in, the first thorough long-term study of the broad effects of desegregation underscored its effectiveness for blacks. The 15-year study conducted by Johns Hopkins University and the Rand Corp., made public last month, showed that blacks educated in
predominantly white suburban schools in the Hartford area made greater strides toward social equality and acceptance than those attending mostly black city schools.
Despite this emerging evidence that the long ordeal is beginning to pay off, three decades after the Supreme Court in 1954 ruled that officially segregated schools were illegal, the picture of the national effort to give minorities equal access to good schools is hardly encouraging.
According to Orfield, most urban school districts are at least as segregated as they were in 1954. Nowhere is this truer than in the nation`s bigger cities, including Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, where desegregation efforts have gone almost nowhere. The bigger cities present the most intractable problems.
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Since 1954, the nation has endured a cat-and-mouse game that has wound howling and squeaking through a maze of legal distinctions, disrupting the lives of thousands of families and playing havoc with faltering city economies.
Loud political scuffles raised clouds of dust that hid many aspects of the full picture, and the public has ended up with what many experts who follow desegregation issues regard as a profoundly distorted view.
According to these experts, there are two basic misunderstandings:
— That desegregation efforts have uniformly been counterproductive at best and disasters at worst.
— That very little more will happen on this front now that the Reagan administration has reversed the federal government`s long advocacy of desegregation programs, particularly if they call for students to be bused to schools outside their neighborhoods.
But the experts say neither is true. Hundreds of desegregation orders have been given, and all but a few have been implemented without conflict or national attention.
The first great wave of orders affected small districts in the South, which had been 100 percent segregated and is now the most integrated region. The racial balance there is mostly stable, and many experts agree that the region now offers blacks a far better education.
The second wave affected urban districts primarily in the Northeast and Middle West. Some urban areas–including Charlotte, N.C.; Seattle; and Milwaukee–have had reasonably smooth and little-publicized experiences with desegregation. But others, like Boston, had such profound difficulties that they riveted the nation`s attention on them. Now, a decade after most of these decisions, many cities have assimilated the shock and are beginning to polish up their battered schools.
The third wave began all but unnoticed as the upheavals set off by the second still were playing out across the nation`s television screens. Several districts, not satisfied with the schools they ended up with after initial desegregation attempts, went back to court.
This is possible because of the little-understood fact that once a federal court gets jurisdiction over a school district, it rarely entirely lets go. This means that citizens can sue even if the president and his administration oppose them. The judges still make their decisions based on the precedents that have accumulated since the 1954 decision known as Brown v. Board of Education (of Topeka, Kan.).
A case from Wilmington, for example, was one of three that the court consolidated with the historic case from Topeka. A succession of approaches proved unsuccessful in Wilmington, and in 1978 the judge was convinced that Wilmington`s schools were so heavily black that they could not be
desegregated. He also found the suburban districts could be held responsible for past segregation and he ordered them combined.
Even Topeka, whose schools provided the basis for that first decision, is back in court. Its case went back to the Supreme Court in 1955, but that wasn`t the end of it. The initial efforts may have seemed like a lot back then, but now the city`s black community is pressing for new action.
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How do you desegregate when you have such a large proportion of minorities that no matter how much you bus them around the district, they still dominate every school?
A few years ago, as middle-class whites nationwide flocked to new suburban developments and left central cities almost entirely to minorities, many saw that as a cruel question with no real answer. Shifting demographic patterns had conspired to make a mockery of urban desegregation attempts.
But a handful of cities have found an answer. In addition to Wilmington, judges have consolidated city and suburban districts in Louisville and, in effect, in Benton Harbor, Mich. The Supreme Court sanctioned the Wilmington case and a mandatory plan in which black Indianapolis students attend suburban schools. These precedents helped a judge in St. Louis persuade 23 outlying districts to agree voluntarily to allow city students to attend suburban schools, and more than 8,000 city students take part.
However much this may encourage other urban districts, several others have abandoned or lost legal attempts to gain consolidation, most notably Detroit and Houston. A city that is pressing ahead is Milwaukee, where a 1976 plan has been hailed as proof that desegregation could work.
Milwaukee is back in court saying that continuing population shifts have made suburban participation necessary. Kansas City and Little Rock are pursuing similar approaches. Wilmington`s experience might provide a clue to what the other cities might expect.
The Wilmington area`s new districts resemble four pie slices. The points come together in the center of Wilmington`s inner city, meaning that each slice gets about a quarter of the area`s minority population.
Children are bused to different schools in different grade groupings, and are assured that they will spend three years attending school near their homes. No child rides the school bus more than 35 minutes.
Neither parents nor children like the busing, but they do like their schools and their approval is growing. A 1983 poll found a 79 percent opposition to busing, but 60 percent of parents rated their schools as good or excellent.
”We`re in our fifth year now,” Johnson said, ”and people have been coming back for the last two.
”Our board meetings aren`t dominated by court-order discussion any more. Now our elementary schools are overcrowded, and the parents are involved in the schools and the programs.”
Al Homiak of Century 21 real estate company said middle-class families were moving back into several city neighborhoods and putting their children in public schools. Homiak said this movement wouldn`t be possible without the desegregation order.
”People are buying shells and rehabbing them,” Homiak said. ”It`s happening every day. It`s a pleasure to drive into the city now.”
This is not to say there are no problems. Of the four high schools in Red Clay, one has grown to about half minority students because so many of the white students who live in its zone choose to attend a county vocational school. This leaves the school underused. A districtwide parents group is considering how to adjust district lines.
”The problems are manageable,” he said, ”and can be addressed without any help from the court.”
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The Zoo school is one of the 22 magnet schools that Buffalo created four years ago in response to a judge`s finding that the city`s schools had to be desegregated. It is for science students, and its curriculum is built around the animals in the city`s zoo.
Other magnet schools include Traditional High, with a dress code and mandatory homework, and the nation`s largest public Montessori school. Some have proven so popular that they have waiting lists. Several have gained national reputations.
These are among the kinds of programs that have drawn hundreds of children out of private schools in favor of the Buffalo system. Other districts have had similar success.
Milwaukee has 40 magnet schools. The Red Clay district in Wilmington opened a 600-student kindergarten center this year and Johnson reports that it is helping get parents quickly bonded to the public school system. What counts, he said, is making the schools so appealing that the bus ride is worth it.
Much of Buffalo`s success has been made possible by federal desegregation funds, which are threatened by budget cutbacks. In other districts, notably St. Louis and Kansas City, judges have ordered districts and states to spend more to improve the schools.
Buffalo, St. Louis and Wilmington are among the cities where test scores have improved after desegregation plans were implemented. When schools opened in Kansas City this fall, so many children signed up for a new full-day kindergarten that is part of a new desegregation plan that officials had to scramble to find enough teachers and classrooms.
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Before the desegregation order was handed down nine years ago, reading was not even defined as a problem in Cleveland.
The court ruled that it was a problem. Years of concentration are beginning to yield results. Test scores are rising.
”I think it`s nothing more fancy than principals and teachers paying more attention,” said Leonard Stevens, whose title is director of the Office of School Monitoring and Community Relations. Less formally, he refers to himself as the hair shirt of the school board. The board has often not been as eager to pursue desegregation as the judge would like, and Stevens is appointed by the judge.
Orfield said the Cleveland district resembles Chicago`s, and in a lot of ways it has more difficult problems.
”It`s a lot poorer city than Chicago,” he said. ”The district was terrible before the court order.”
”We had reading scores that were at a depressing level for years,”
Stevens agreed. Now, he said, ”The district is right at the threshold of making substantial progress on the educational front.”
Stevens said the standard pattern after desegregation was for black students` reading scores to improve and white students` to remain about the same. In Cleveland, he said, now all students are improving.
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Whether more cities will be able to dig out of their dilemmas with updated desegregation orders will depend on the courts. The experts are waiting to see how two very different cases work their way through the appeals process.
In Little Rock, the consolidation with suburban districts is being appealed. The Reagan administration opposes it.
In Norfolk, Va., officials want a judge to end busing on the grounds that it is no longer needed. They have the support of the administration.
Many experts expect the Supreme Court to decide which direction the next wave of school desegregation suits will take.
