Theoretically, the Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is Education. What he must remember is that there is no magic, either in mixed schools or in segregated schools. A mixed school with poor and unsympathetic teachers, with hostile public opinion, and no teaching of truth concerning black folk, is bad. A segregated school with ignorant placeholders, inadequate equipment, poor salaries, and wretched housing, is equally bad. Other things being equal, the mixed school is the broader, more natural basis for the education of all youth.... But other things seldom are equal.... -- W.E.B. DuBois, 1935

Charlotte- Mecklenburg Board of Education, that busing was a legitimate means to end segregation in the public schools.

What happened in Charlotte-Mecklenburg is the most recent example of an accelerating and overwhelming abandonment of mandated school integration. This past summer the Boston School Committee voted to stop desegregation there. Buffalo, Minneapolis, and Cleveland are among other Northern cities following a similar path. Mobile, Ala., and Jacksonville, Fla., are phasing out their desegregation policies. Recent surveys show that across the South fewer and fewer black children are attending schools with white children, and vice versa. It is as if Brown vs. Board of Education -- the milestone 1954 Supreme Court decision that pronounced separate but equal education as, in fact, unequal and discriminatory education -- had never existed.

But is this a good thing? Decades of research show that test scores of minority children improve when they attend school with substantial numbers of white children. Education experts fear that, as the tide turns, and as segregated neighborhood schools replace court-ordered integrated ones, the academic progress made by blacks could fade. No one knows whether all- black neighborhood schools, even well-funded ones in communities where blacks have enough political power to oversee them, can match the academic achievement of integrated schools. And there are broader questions too, beyond the goals of education. Some sociologists worry that the retreat from integrated schools could set back race relations by further cementing residential and social segregation.

James McPartland, the director of the Center for Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, says, "There are things that only race-mixing can affect. Kids in integrated schools do better in integrated settings later in life. That's the shame of losing this.

Social desegregation doesn't occur by watching The Cosby Show."

To be sure, not all cities or school districts are abandoning Brown vs. Board of Education. Earlier this year, a group of mainly suburban middle-class school districts from around the country banded together in a new network dedicated to making integrated schools work. These districts intend to share knowledge of their successes and failures in an effort to ensure that the gap between white and black achievement continues to narrow. But these districts represent a conspicuous minority, a collective small voice raised against a trend that no one expects to see reversed in the near future.

The Demographics

According to a report by Harvard University sociologist Gary Orfield, released last June, resegregation is on the rise throughout the country, with the sharpest changes occurring in the South. After climbing for three decades and peaking in the late 1980s, the percentage of black and white students attending integrated schools began to decline steadily in the 1990s. The recent figures still show far more integration than during the pre-busing era. But the numbers are returning to levels not seen since the 1960s or 1970s.

In the 1996-97 school year, the average white public school student attended a school that was more than 80 percent white. Meanwhile, 69 percent of black students were attending a school defined as majority-minority -- a school whose nonwhite population ranges from 50 percent to 100 percent of the student body. And 35 percent of black students were attending a school with a student body that was overwhelmingly minority -- defined as 90 percent to 100 percent -- a figure not seen since the mid-1970s.

Ironically, regions that initially required the most integration after Brown vs. Board of Education are now seeing the most resegregation. In the South, after decades of growth, the portion of black students attending integrated schools with a majority-white population fell from a peak of 43.5 percent in 1988 to 34.7 percent in 1996, according to Orfield's report, which is based on data from the federal National Center for Education Statistics.

Yet the trend is not limited to the South. In Northern states, decades of white flight to the suburbs have left city school districts with few options. They simply do not have enough whites to effectively integrate the schools. This is the case in Boston. Faced with a pending legal battle and a city population that went from 82 percent white in 1970 to 56 percent white in 1995, the Boston school board had to overhaul its racial desegregation plan this past summer. On the eve of the decision, the school population was only 17 percent white, down from 52 percent in 1974, when busing began.

Other demographic trends in the past 30 years have also added to the difficulty of integrating schools in cities, and some suburbs. Growth in non-European immigration -- specifically a growing population of Hispanics in urban areas -- has made it harder to achieve racial balance. Low birthrates among white women and continuing residential segregation in all parts of the country also impede desegregation.

Changing Black Attitudes

Another piece of the resegregation puzzle is a shift in attitudes among blacks. White support for integration has grown markedly over the past half-century. In recent years, however, increasing numbers of blacks -- frustrated by the persistent gaps between black and white academic performance and fed up with the inconvenience of racial busing -- have promoted a return to all- minority, nonbused neighborhood schools.

During the 1990s, black community leaders in several school districts pushed for an end to busing as a means of leveling the academic playing field for blacks and whites. In Yonkers, N.Y., Seattle, and Prince George's County, Md., school boards dominated by blacks have chosen to dismantle their desegregation plans in favor of better-financed neighborhood schools.

"Blacks were tired of being bused out of their communities," explains Alvin Thornton, professor of political science at Howard University and chairman of the school board in Prince George's County, a suburb of Washington, D.C., and home to one of the largest black middle-class populations in the country. "We signed a consent decree in 1998 in which we put in place a neighborhood schools plan. A key part was to rebuild schools in black areas to increase the sense of community," Thornton says. The plan also includes additional money from the state and county for the new schools.

Busing fatigue was accompanied by a rise in Afrocentric pride; in many black communities, the old notion that integration necessarily meant better came to be seen as a species of racism in itself. Black leaders began to re-evaluate and reject "the theory that racially identifiable [all-black] schools generate inferiority in African-American students and reduce their motivation to learn," Thornton wrote in an article titled "Academic Achievement vs. Busing," which appeared in a 1995 issue of the journal Government and Politics. Increasing numbers of black parents preferred to send their children to African- centered schools, where they might gain racial and cultural awareness -- knowledge that, as Thornton puts it, "is not measured by SAT and other national test scores."

Michael Nettles, the director of research at the Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute, an arm of the United Negro College Fund, says that segregated schools aren't necessarily doomed to failure. "We have historical examples of black segregated school successes everywhere," he says. "You don't have to go very far to see black people over the age of 55 who are successful."

The Wharton Arts Magnet School, for example, a public institution in Nashville, Tenn., was a haven of black achievement in the 1950s and '60s. Located in the heart of the city, Wharton was constructed in the early 1900s, originally as an elementary school that served a predominantly white neighborhood. By the late 1940s, the neighborhood had changed, and Wharton educated only black children. Many prominent people graduated from Wharton during its all-black era, which ended when Tennessee's school system became integrated in the 1970s. Oprah Winfrey is the school's most celebrated alumna.

In recent years, Wharton has operated as a middle school with both a regular curriculum and a magnet program for the arts. As a result of busing and a city lottery system for the arts program, the overall school population has been about 55 percent black, 45 percent white. But Nashville, too, is beginning a five- year program to move away from busing and racial quotas, and Wharton is becoming more of a neighborhood school, now about two- thirds black and one-third white. Barbara Crawford, Wharton's principal, herself a graduate of Nashville schools that were all- black at the time, is not happy about the change.

Crawford fears the end of school desegregation will bring an end to social integration. "Many of my students are going to be shortchanged," she says. "Nashville's neighborhoods are still segregated. I'm worried that the type of friendships I have developed while working in integrated schools will no longer take place."

Crawford isn't the only black leader worried about the trend toward neighborhood schools. The NAACP, which has been pro- integration since its founding 90 years ago, doesn't like the idea of going back to segregated schools. But even here, there are stirrings of dissent. In 1996, the board of the national NAACP fired Robert H. Robinson, the president of the Bergen County, N.J., branch, after he challenged the organization's stance on school integration. Similarly, Kenneth Jenkins was dismissed as president of the Yonkers branch in 1995 for questioning the use of racial busing.

NAACP leaders are determined to resist the trend toward resegregation. "Once the NAACP adopts a policy, all its members have to comply," says Maxine Waters, the chairwoman of the NAACP's National Education Committee. "After blacks reached a token state in the education system, we may have stopped pushing for integration. But we're not going to retreat. We can't go back to where we were before school desegregation. Resources have always followed the white child. If we go back to separate facilities, that will happen again."

Neighborhood Schools

If blacks are divided on the wisdom of returning to neighborhood schools, so, too, are the experts. Many thinkers, left and right, applaud the return to neighborhood schools as a way to strengthen communities and to use education resources for something more valuable than yellow buses. Bruno V. Manno, a senior fellow at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization in Baltimore that promotes research about disadvantaged children, says that the shift away from racial busing will make schools better community institutions. "The issue is not race, it's community," Manno says. "Neighborhood schools create links between families and schools. Community involvement is an important ingredient to enhancing school performance and increasing family strength. If the community aspect is not there, it's pointless to bus kids across the city to boost performance."

Charles L. Glenn, a professor of education at Boston University, who oversaw Boston's original desegregation plan in 1974, says, "I'm quite comfortable moving beyond race in making decisions. Integration should be a goal, but there is no obligation to create diverse school systems."

Conservative think tanks generally agree that returning to neighborhood schools is appropriate. "Experience shows that integration doesn't work," says Nina S. Rees, an education policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "Desegregation disrupts the system. We spend a lot of money busing blacks into white schools.... It's not a natural process. You're forcing integration. The first order of business is to make sure that you have good, quality schools." But Christopher Jencks, professor of social policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and co-editor of The Black-White Test Score Gap, says: "A return to segregated schools is dangerous. Blacks who attend integrated schools do better than those in segregated schools. If you're committed to closing the gap between black and white students, you don't want to give ground."

Orfield of Harvard says, "There is considerable evidence that the resegregated schools of the 1990s are profoundly unequal," and "the costs of passively accepting them are likely to be immense."

Furthermore, liberals and education researchers say that integration is about more than academics. Jencks, for example, says, "There's more to worry about in segregated schools. Resegregation has all types of consequences that go beyond vocabulary scores. Such a trend leads to the general erosion of social ties in society. The more you let society pull itself apart, the less commitment the haves have to the have-nots."

The Law

The Supreme Court has been a major factor in the move away from busing and integrated schools; in several decisions during the 1990s, the Court has undermined the legal apparatus underpinning court-ordered desegregation plans.

In its 1991 decision Board of Education of Oklahoma City vs. Dowell, the Court ruled that desegregation orders -- some of which had been in effect in school districts for 25 years -- should be temporary, not permanent, as long as cities tried to remedy past discrimination "as far as practicable." In 1992, the Court ruled in Freeman vs. Pitts that individual components of desegregation plans, such as faculty or student assignment, could be evaluated separately and dismantled in stages. And in its 1995 decision Missouri vs. Jenkins, the high court rejected a lower- court decision that said desegregation must be maintained in Kansas City schools until it produces beneficial results for black students. These decisions encouraged other lawsuits challenging desegregation orders, and many school boards chose to settle out of court. That's what happened in Boston. "The Supreme Court has shifted from being the leading edge of desegregation to being the leading edge of resegregation," says Orfield. "White parents who disapprove of desegregation can sue the school system. They have more power than the school boards, and that's dangerous."

The Supreme Court decisions have also been helped, and driven, by the fact that Brown vs. Board of Education did not mandate integrated schools; it mandated only the dismantling of forced segregation. Legal experts say that desegregation and integration are not legally synonymous. "There has never been an obligation to create integrated, diverse school systems," says Glenn. "There has only been an obligation to cease and desist forced segregation. School systems only have to take remedial actions to undo the wrongs of segregation."

Indeed, the purpose of desegregation was to undo the damage done by legal segregation, not to mandate diversity. Diversity is not a compelling government purpose, says David J. Armor, research professor at the Institute of Public Policy at George Mason University and author of Forced Justice: School Desegregation and the Law. And racially unbalanced school districts are not illegal. "The only reason we had integration is because we first had legal segregation," says Armor, who advocates more school choice and magnet schools to accomplish desegregation "Stopping racial busing plans brings us back to de facto segregation. . .Some say that diversity should be a compelling government purpose, but the Supreme Court says no."

The legal future for mandatory desegregation does not look promising. The next question the high court is expected to face is whether school districts should be allowed to use race at all when deciding which schools children will attend -- an issue at the heart of the affirmative action debate. In fact, the Sept. 10 ruling on the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina could end up before the Supreme Court on appeal on that very issue, bringing the desegregation legal debate full circle. Busing as a tool to achieve school integration in the United States was first given the green light nationwide by the Supreme Court in 1971 in the landmark case Swann vs. Charlotte- Mecklenburg Board of Education. In that case, black parents had sued the Charlotte schools in 1969 to force integration, on the ground that Charlotte's separate schools for whites and blacks were discriminatory.

But two years ago, after almost 30 years of forced integration, a white parent sued the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system, charging that his daughter was twice denied admittance to a magnet school because she is not black. Six other white parents joined the case, arguing that race-based policies are discriminatory and that the district had successfully desegregated its schools. Judge Potter agreed, calling the argument for ongoing desegregation a "bizarre posture." He said that today's focus on "racial diversity" in education forces students to serve "as cogs in a social experiment."

In The Charlotte Observer, Karen Bentley, one of the seven white parents, calls Judge Potter's decision "a home run. It's a grand slam." Larry Gauvreau, another of the white parents, says, "I personally believe [that] in a countywide school district the only way to [assign students] is through neighborhood schools." He says Potter's decision "means we've fulfilled the Constitution's promise to our children and that segregation is a relic of the past."

The school system, two black parents, and many of the original lawyers from the 1969 Swann case joined forces to fight the white parents, arguing that desegregation policies are still needed. After Potter's ruling, one of the black parents told The Observer, "This is a very sad, dark and dreary day in our history here in this community."

The Achievement Gap

As the Supreme Court and lower courts grapple with the legal issues surrounding racial quotas, resegregation continues to expand. And the academic achievement gap between black and white students, which narrowed in the 1970s and '80s, and remained constant during the early 1990s, may now be starting to grow. Education experts agree that many factors contribute to lower academic achievement among blacks, such as income and parents' level of education. But this is certain: When black children and white children attend the same schools, the achievement gap between them shrinks, and the performance of white children does not suffer. Although scholars disagree about exactly how much desegregation improves test scores for black students, data from the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress show that blacks made gains at the elementary school level during the 1970s and across all grade levels in the 1980s -- the peak of desegregation.

Robert L. Crain at Columbia University's Teachers College studied the impact of school integration on black achievement during the 1970s. "We found that desegregation removed between one-quarter and one-third of the gap between black and white students," he says. "But the integration has to occur at the first-grade level. If it occurs later, the gains diminish."

Certainly other factors besides integration in the 1970s and 1980s helped shrink the gap between whites and blacks. According to Jencks, class sizes got smaller, curricula got better, and the disparity between the education levels of black and white parents narrowed during that period. Then, in the 1990s, the achievement gap began growing again. Black reading scores declined while white scores went up. Black math scores were stable or rose slightly, but white scores for math rose more. "There's been a retrogression of the gap," says Jencks. "Things have improved over the long run, but we've hit a plateau."

Is this wider gap caused by the resegregation of American schools? "No one can say exactly why the gap has grown in the 1990s, but a good hypothesis is that it's related to the decline in desegregation," says Meredith Phillips, assistant professor of policy studies and sociology at the University of California (Los Angeles) and co-editor of The Black-White Test Score Gap. In 1996, Crain re-examined the relationship between integration and black test scores in 32 states. He reported that the gap between black and white fourth-grade reading scores was largest in Michigan and New York, states where the percentage of blacks in the schools was highest and blacks were more racially isolated, and smallest in West Virginia and Iowa, where blacks made up a much lower percentage of the school population and were the least isolated from whites.

In Prince George's County, where school board Chairman Thornton has pushed for neighborhood schools, even he acknowledges the black-white gap. "There is a twoness that has developed," says Thornton. "Poor black kids attending all-black schools are doing poorly. Black kids that can afford to get proximity to white students are doing better."

But Thornton says that returning to busing as a means of desegregation is not an option. "I don't have any choice in the matter," he says. "I don't have any white kids in my county, and I can't bus them in from other counties due to the Supreme Court's stance. When the demographics and jurisprudence of the Supreme Court have overwhelmed you, you have to use other strategies to integrate your community."

So Thornton and other black leaders have turned to campaigns to get more money for their neighborhood schools, usually from state legislatures or city councils. Indeed, research indicates that differences in funding and in community resources affect student achievement. Predominantly minority high schools are "on average, more than twice as large as predominantly white schools and reaching 3,000 students or more in most cities," reports Linda Darling-Hammond in a 1998 paper, "Black America: Progress and Prospects," published by the Brookings Institution. "On average, class sizes are 15 percent larger overall; curriculum offerings and materials are lower in quality; and teachers are much less qualified in terms of levels of education, certification, and training in the fields they teach," according to Darling-Hammond.

To bring minority neighborhood schools up to the level of white schools will require urban school districts to undertake sustained efforts to obtain more money from state and local governments. In areas where blacks are politically powerful, such as in Maryland, that may indeed be possible.

A Different Approach

Not everyone is giving up on the integrated ideal. In some communities, school boards and administrators are fighting to narrow the academic achievement gap between black and white students and to maintain integrated classrooms. The best example is the Minority Student Achievement Network, a group of 15 middle-class, integrated school districts across the country that joined forces last February in an unprecedented effort to eliminate the disparity in test scores. Blacks in all of these districts generally perform above the national average for their racial group, but still at lower levels than their white counterparts.

The network has made a commitment to work with the College Board's National Task Force on Minority Achievement, which was established in 1997 to address the test-score gaps. The network plans to incorporate the board's research into its local curricula. In its mission statement, the network promises to share individual staff and district successes, and failures, through regular communications, exchange visits, special teacher seminars, and discussion focus groups. The network will also serve as a national clearinghouse for information about practices that are most effective in raising the achievements of minority students. Chapel Hill, N.C., White Plains, N.Y., and Evanston, Ill., are among the districts involved.

Allan Alson, superintendent at Evanston Township High School, launched the network after years of observing a racial divide between students in the school's honors and lower-level classes. Honors and advanced-placement classes are made up mainly of white students, and lower-level and special-education classes mainly of black students. "We recognized that the degree and scope of progress we were making on our own wasn't quick or good enough," Alson says. Evanston, with a population of 73,000, is 70 percent white and 23 percent black. The city has a long history of addressing white-black achievement gaps since self- imposed integration began in the 1960s. In any given primary school, a racial group cannot exceed 60 percent of the student body Both white and black students are bused across town to achieve this goal at the elementary- and middle-school levels. The town has only one high school.

Evanston has consistently resisted the pressure to return to neighborhood schools. Changing demographics have periodically forced the Evanston school board to redraw the neighborhood lines used to shape busing plans. During several of the debates over these changes, black community leaders have suggested abandoning the city's integration plan in favor of neighborhood schools. In 1995, for example, Terri Sheppard, who later became a member of the school board, proposed an African-centered neighborhood school. Under consideration at the time was a new busing plan that would have required black and white students to literally crisscross town in order to uphold the racial guidelines. Sheppard, whose children would probably have been affected by the plan, said she was tired of "drive-by diversity." Yet the board stood firm and refused to OK the proposal.

In addition to working within the new nationwide network, the Evanston high school has implemented its own programs specifically aimed at boosting black achievement. Steps Toward Academic Excellence and Advancement Via Individual Determination are two of the programs that are up and running. The first strives to move black students into honors-level classes by providing tutorial support in English and math. The second targets minorities who are good students, but not likely to be considering college. To steer them toward a college career, they are enrolled in a midday learning-skills class. The school has also enriched the math curriculum in an attempt to address minority students' low test scores. Instead of enrolling in a single math class, students attend double periods of algebra and geometry.

Board members and Alson say that these programs are working. "We've seen gains," says Alson. "We are seeing increases in minority enrollment in honors and [advanced placement] English and history classes." And thus far, Evanston's education community, including Sheppard, is pleased with the superintendent's initiatives. "The board is fully supporting Alson's efforts," Sheppard says.

Polls on integration suggest that more communities would favor initiatives such as Alson's. Despite lawsuits brought by white parents against individual busing plans in cities across the country, national support for desegregation has grown over the past few decades and now appears to be strong and unwavering, according to a report released by the American Association for Public Opinion Research in 1998. In the 1960s, one-fifth of white parents objected to "a few" members of the other race in their child's school. In 1998, virtually all parents, black and white, express no objections. Fewer than 15 percent of whites object to having their children attend schools in which members of another race constitute half the student body. A Gallup Organization Inc. poll for CNN/USA Today released  in July found that 59 percent of Americans say more, not less, should be done to integrate the nation's schools, up from 54 percent in 1994.

Growing public support for school desegregation may be the result of an increased interest in social mixing. Integration has a positive impact both inside and outside the classroom, says McPartland of Johns Hopkins University. His tracking of both black and white students who have attended integrated schools indicates, he says, that "they are more likely to live in integrated neighborhoods, attend diverse colleges, and work in integrated job settings. That's the danger with abandoning desegregation. You can't rehearse living with other races."

Although some evidence suggests that a return to segregated school systems could hurt minority achievement, most education researchers say that the effects are unlikely to be catastrophic. Orfield, at the end of his report on resegregation, holds out some hope for natural integration because of the rapid suburbanization of the black and Latino middle class. "Whether or not this will produce lasting integration or merely a vast spread of suburban segregation is one of the great questions of the period, " he wrote.

Christopher Jencks points to the significant impact that other kinds of education reforms, such as smaller classes and higher standards, can make on both white and black children, even if they attend segregated schools. "Small classes in the early grades help all students, especially blacks," Jencks says. And even though the learning gap between black and white students has begun to expand, Jencks says that the progress made by both races since the 1950s serves as a reminder that overall achievement has "improved in the long run," and that "everyone is better off than they were a generation ago." ¨

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