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Still, test scores dropped at the 10 target schools after the end of busing. In 1991 black third-graders in the target schools scored 5 percentage points lower than black third-graders in the remaining integrated elementaries on a battery of tests. Last year black third-graders in the target schools tested 10 percentage points lower.
Young Park Elementary occupies a well-kept building set among the barracks-like structures of Norfolk's Young Terrace public housing project. Of its 341 students, 98% are black and 94% are poor enough to qualify for the free-lunch program. This year so far, the parents or guardians of 60 to 70 kids have joined the PTA. "Some of the children arrive at school not knowing their full name; they just know their nickname," says principal Ruby Greer, who has managed to improve test scores and attendance. "They don't know how to hold a pencil or a book. And it seems like you never catch up."
A five-minute drive away from Young Park stands Taylor Elementary. This is the neighborhood school of white children from the large houses on the surrounding tree-lined streets; and of black children from nearby, mostly working-class neighborhoods. Sixty-one percent of Taylor's 433 children are white, and only 30% qualify for the free-lunch program. One hundred percent of the children's parents are in the pta, which runs 22 committees. In 1994, 88% of Taylor's fourth-graders surpassed national norms on standardized tests. At Young Park, 7% did.
"The whole discussion of desegregation is corrupted by the fact that we mix up race and class," says Harvard sociologist Orfield. "You don't gain anything from sitting next to somebody with a different skin color. But you gain a lot from moving from an isolated poverty setting into a middle-class setting." National statistics provide suggestive evidence that desegregation raises blacks' academic achievement (without lowering whites'), despite its apparent failure in such high-profile cases as Yonkers--where middle-class flight left low-income students concentrated in high-poverty schools. A massive 1993 Department of Education study of Chapter One, the compensatory-education program for poor children, found that recipients of Chapter One services in schools where at least three-quarters of the children were poor scored substantially lower in math and reading than recipients attending schools where fewer than half were poor.
And, in fact, since the onset of widespread desegregation in 1971, black 17-year-olds have closed roughly a third of the reading-score gap that separated them from whites. A soon-to-be-released study by Debora Sullivan and Robert L. Crain of Teachers College, Columbia University, reports that among 32 states, the gap between black and white fourth-grade reading scores is narrowest in West Virginia and Iowa, where blacks are least isolated from whites, and largest in Michigan and New York, where blacks are the most racially isolated.
Crain and others have found, however, that academic-achievement tests are only one measure of what schools offer--another important one being what researchers call "life chances." The "great barrier to black social and economic mobility is isolation from the opportunities and networks of the middle class," Crain says. School desegregation puts minority students in touch with people who can open doors to colleges and careers.