Black schools white schools
Copyright 2003 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution
June 22, 2003 Sunday Home Edition
SECTION: @issue; Pg. 1E
LENGTH: 1789 words
HEADLINE: black SCHOOLS white SCHOOLS;
With court-ordered busing fading and races choosing to live separately, classrooms are heading back to where they started --- segregated
BYLINE: MAUREEN DOWNEY
SOURCE: AJC
BODY:
Are segregated classrooms more acceptable when they are by choice rather than law?
The growing demand among black and white parents for "neighborhood" schools, coupled with metro Atlanta's residential segregation, means that fewer and fewer children experience integrated classrooms. This increasing racial isolation in schools is called resegregation.
It's happening fastest in the South, according to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. Once willing to make sacrifices for integration, both white and black parents now question the costs of sending their children across town for the sake of diversity.
The courts, too, have lost their will to compel integration. The U.S. District Court this month released Fulton County schools from a 34-year-old desegregation decree.
As part of the court settlement between the county and black parents, the district will slowly phase out a minority-to-majority busing program that transported black students in south Fulton to higher-performing, predominantly white schools in north Fulton. The final year of the phase-out will be the 2011-2012 school year to accommodate students currently in the "m-to-m" program, says Chinh Quang Le, assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
Fulton was the last metro system under a race-based desegregation order, and its release ends all federal supervision of school integration efforts in the area. "The courts are increasingly less sympathetic to reasons for maintaining a court order over a school system," says Le. Despite the dreams of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, court-ordered school desegregation never fostered full community integration.
"Our nation, I fear, will be ill served by the court's refusal to remedy separate and unequal education, for unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together," wrote Marshall in his dissent of a 1974 Supreme Court decision. That decision effectively blocked drawing from heavily white suburbs to integrate city districts with high minority populations.
In a prophetic passage, Marshall warned, "In the short run, it may seem to be the easier of course to allow our great metropolitan areas to be divided up each into two cities --- one white, the other black --- but it is a course, I predict, our people will ultimately regret."
The white flight forecast by Marshall is apparent in Clayton, the county that Harvard researchers found is experiencing the fastest resegregation nationwide. Today, white students in Clayton County schools constitute 17 percent of the 48,000 students. Twenty years ago, whites made up 66 percent of the student body.
The percentages reflect the county's racial shift from white to black. Twenty years ago, Clayton County was 92 percent white; today it's 37.9 percent white.
Gary Orfield, co-director of Harvard's Civil Rights Project and author of several books on race and education, says metro Atlanta's suburban residential segregation is the driving force behind its school resegregation.
Even in urban DeKalb and Fulton, black people tend to live in the south and white people in the north. "When we moved to south Fulton 20 years ago, the school down the street was all white," says Eddie Martin, an African-American parent in south Fulton whose two children rise at 5 a.m. to travel across town to north Fulton schools. "Now, the school is totally black."
Another factor in resegregation is private school enrollment. Between 1960 and 1999, private school enrollment fell everywhere in the United States, with two exceptions: the South and the nation's southwestern border states.
While the city of Atlanta's population is 33 percent white, only 7 percent of its public school students are white. And though Avondale Estates in DeKalb is 88.8 percent white, Avondale High School is just 5 percent white. The numbers reflect the choice by many white parents in Atlanta and Avondale for private education for their children.
"If left up to the communities, we will migrate back to all-black and all-white schools. I think school integration has become a lost cause," says Martin.
The rising resegregation of schools comes at a time when the United States is on the brink of a seismic demographic shift from a predominantly white population to a multiracial one.
"White people who grow up in racially isolated schools, however excellent, are increasingly going to be out of step in the world in which they are going to live," says Jack Boger, deputy director of the University of North Carolina Center for Civil Rights.
As Southern schools resegregate, they are becoming more consolidated in their poverty. Almost a third of black and Latino children live in poverty, compared with 13 percent of white children.
Divisions along socioeconomic lines produce the same results as divisions along racial lines: More than two-thirds of black and Latino students sit mostly beside other students of color in their classes.
Middle-class parents often purchase homes because of the schools, and a top-scoring district enhances real estate prices. As a result, less affluent families can't afford to buy their way into the best schools. Parents paying a lot to live near quality schools oppose tinkering with attendance lines for racial balance.
And parents certainly don't want their children riding a bus for 45 minutes for an ideal they no longer believe is relevant. White parents, however, have been willing to abandon their neighborhood schools if the alternative is an academic magnet such as the award-winning Kittredge in DeKalb.
Even politically liberal Decatur --- the Berkeley of Georgia based on its voting record and well-educated citizenry --- resisted any combining of the seven small elementary schools within its 4.2 square miles.
A pairing plan had been suggested in response to the declining enrollments in Decatur's mainly African-American schools. In the race-conscious debate that ensued, white parents succeeded in preserving "neighborhood" schools, even though the partner school was a mere 1.08 miles down the road.
The parents had legitimate reasons: Their school posted higher test scores and had more parental involvement than its predominantly African-American counterpart, where 60 percent of the students were poor enough to qualify for free and reduced lunches.
It's those very factors --- the stronger academic environments and involved parent base --- that make middle-class schools better learning environments for all kids.
Research shows that low-income children attain higher academic performance when they attend classes with middle-class peers. Many experts now suggest that socioeconomic desegregation --- either through public school choice or mandatory assignments --- ought to be the next civil rights battlefront.
"What I say to black parents is that it's not magic to sit next to a white kid," says Harvard's Orfield. "But to be in a middle-class school rather than a poverty school makes a huge difference."
Schools of concentrated poverty have proved to be the least able to provide an adequate education to children. One reason is that impoverished families grapple with many problems --- lack of health care, poor nutrition, housing evictions, job losses, drug and alcohol struggles --- that follow and hinder their children in the classroom. "The difficulties that these students bring to school are compounded when they're with other students dealing with the same economic problems," says attorney Le.
In promoting school integration, Justice Marshall's goal was more than a rainbow-hued classroom. "If the majority is educating its children and making sure every benefit is available, then minority children can also get those benefits if they can attend those schools," he said.
Parent Sharon Cribbs is committed to her south Fulton community, yet her daughter travels an hour each way to attend Crabapple Middle School in Roswell rather than nearby Camp Creek Middle.
"I would have preferred her to attend her neighborhood school," says Cribbs, "but the fact of the matter was the school performance didn't stack up. I also value the experience of diversity that she has at Crabapple."
Camp Creek is virtually all black, while Crabapple is 19 percent African-American. At Camp Creek, three out of four students are eligible for free/reduced lunches; only 17 percent of Crabapple's students qualify.
The state Department of Education report cards reveal vast differences in academic achievement. Forty percent of Camp Creek's sixth-graders failed to meet standards in reading last year; only 7 percent failed at Crabapple. While Fulton County may spend the same at both schools, Cribbs says dollars aren't necessarily the key, explaining, "The PTA at Crabapple is very involved in ensuring the needs of the pupils are met, and there are corporate partners who provide services and goods in support of efforts of the PTA."
Predominantly white schools also benefit from more stable staffing. Georgia State University researchers found that white teachers --- who compose 80 percent of the state's teaching force --- are much more likely to leave schools that serve higher proportions of black students. The study found that 32 percent of white elementary school teachers left predominantly black schools in 2001. This revolving door leads to less experienced teachers in the classrooms at black schools.
"Given our results, I have to believe that black students in predominantly black schools are getting worse teachers because they're getting the rookie teachers," says economist Ben Scafidi, a member of the GSU team and now education adviser to Gov. Sonny Perdue.
Duke University researchers found that even in integrated schools, black students are placed in classes with the least experienced teachers. And UNC sociologist Roslyn Mickelson found that academically qualified black students are not steered into the accelerated classes.
"Many African-American parents are aware of in-school segregation, and that's why they no longer support making a car ride an hour across town to a high-achieving school with white kids and their kid ends up sitting in the basement," said John A. Powell, director of Kirwan Institute on Race & Ethnicity at Ohio State University, at a national convention on school resegregation.
In the 1968 case of Green vs. County School Board of New Kent County, Va., the U.S. Supreme Court called for education systems "without a 'white' school and a 'Negro' school, but just schools."
Thirty-five years later, America has yet to attain that goal and may, in fact, be retreating from it.
GRAPHIC: Graphic: Rear view of several school buses. Staff photo illustration. / Photo by KIMBERLY SMITH / Staff; Photo: JOHN A. POWELL, director of Kirwan Institute on Race & Ethnicity at Ohio State University; Photo: EDDIE MARTIN (center), with son Corey (front), 9, daughter Courtney (rear), 12, and wife Florence. The Martins live in south Fulton County but send their children to north Fulton schools. / REBECCA REID / Staff; Photo: Gary Orfield; Photo: Jack Boger; Graphic: A GROWING GAP
A chief cause of school resegregation is residential segregation, often the result of white families leaving neighborhoods as minorities move in. As the races segregate, so do the schools, reflecting the racial makeup of the immediate neighborhood rather than the county as a whole. Here are the percentages for seven metro counties and a high school in each.
Cherokee County....White..Black..Other
Countywide....... 92.4....2.5....5.1
Sequoyah High......94.4....1.2....4.4
Clayton County... White..Black..Other
Countywide....... 37.9.. 51.6.. 10.5
North Clayton High..0.9.. 90.1....9
Cobb County........White..Black..Other
Countywide....... 72.4.. 18.8.. 8.9
Harrison High......93......4.5.. 2.3
DeKalb County......White..Black..Other
Countywide....... 35.8.. 54.2....9.8
Cedar Grove High....0.2.. 98.4....1.4
Fayette County... White..Black..Other
Countywide....... 83.9.. 11.5....4.6
Starr's Mill High..87.6....6.8....5.7
Fulton County......White..Black..Other
Countywide....... 48.1.. 44.6....7.3
Westlake High..... 0.2.. 98.2....1.6
Therrell High..... 0.2.. 99.1....0.7
(Atlanta Public Schools)
Gwinnett County....White..Black..Other
Countywide..........72.7..13.3....14
Grayson High........85.7.. 6.6... 7.7
Sources: 2000 U.S. Census, Georgia Department of Education (2001-2002 school year).
Numbers may not total 100 because of rounding.
*..See more extensive list of high schools at www.ajc.com/opinion
