(8 of 9)
In 1966 a randomly selected group of kindergarten-through-fifth-grade low-income students in Hartford, Connecticut, nearly all of them black, were offered the opportunity to attend school in a dozen virtually all-white suburbs. Sixteen years later, researchers tracked down more than a thousand of those who had been tapped for the program and a like number of those who had not. Crain found that males in the test group were significantly more likely to have completed two or more years of college and less likely to have dropped out of high school or got in trouble with the police, and females were less likely to have had a child before age 18.
School desegregation also leads to housing desegregation, not only by promoting tolerance but also, to put it bluntly, by making it impossible to avoid an integrated school by choosing where you live. According to a study by Louisville's Fair Housing Council, Jefferson County's school- desegregation program reduced residential segregation to such an extent that by 1990, though only 17% of the area's residents were black, a mere one-quarter of 1% of the population lived in a census tract without black neighbors.
But in the case of Louisville, a great desegregation success story, the city and suburbs are in a single school district. In most Northern cities, white flight has undermined even the best efforts at racial balance, and the measurable benefits of desegregation programs have been spottier--while the burdens, particularly on black students, have often been enormous. There has always been some preference in the black community, as in the white, for neighborhood schools (though these may be more an ideal than a reality for the children of the poor, who tend to move, or be moved, a great deal). And there is a realistic pessimism about the prospects for integration. Says the Legal Defense Fund's Shaw: "My sense is a lot of people are saying, 'We're tired of chasing white folks. It's not worth the price we have to pay.'"
Edward Newsome, an African-American lawyer in the real estate business who himself attended a segregated school in Texas, is a leader of the anti-magnet plan coalition that has dominated the Kansas City school board since 1994. He feels the underlying assumptions of desegregation are patronizing to blacks--as does Justice Thomas. "It never ceases to amaze me," wrote Thomas in his Missouri v. Jenkins concurrence, "that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior."
Says Newsome: "I welcomed the Supreme Court decision. I saw it as an opportunity for the first time in years to focus on removing the vestiges of segregation. For 10 years we've concentrated on bringing in white kids. There's been no Afrocentric-themed magnet school because it doesn't appeal to white folks."