Our View: Equal access to schools fails to equalize education

When the U.S. Supreme Court ended school segregation 50 years ago, the decision did more than expand educational opportunities for black students. The Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka ruling on May 17, 1954, also marked the beginning of the end of government-sanctioned discrimination. That same year, the last segregated unit of the U.S. military was phased out. And in 1955, Rosa Parks launched a revolution by refusing to give up her seat on a segregated city bus in Montgomery, Ala.

The Brown decision helped turn the nation into a multiracial society where the rights of minorities, women and other groups are respected and protected. Even so, the schoolhouse gains from Brown are more modest than those produced by some of the spinoff actions it inspired. The order to integrate the military led to an Army in which 22% of the officers today are black or Hispanic. Yet equal access to public schools has not produced equal education.

Despite improvements in such factors as high school graduation rates, up nearly 30% for black students since 1967, vast gaps still separate the academic achievement of black and white students. One statistic stands out: On average, black students who graduate from high school are equipped with the skills the average white student mastered by the eighth grade, according to federal tests.

Racial gaps exist even in well-integrated schools where children come from families of equal incomes. In the suburban school system of Shaker Heights, Ohio, outside Cleveland, for example, the gaps show up in measures ranging from failure rates on state exams to enrollment in advanced courses. Fewer than a third of blacks opt to take honors or college-level Advanced Placement exams, compared with nearly 90% of whites.

That sad reality is shifting the national conversation away from forced busing that ensures integration to new education strategies that deliver more equal education results. Can a diverse range of students receive equal education? Based on a few dozen successful experiments, the answer is yes. But achieving that goal requires highly motivated teachers, long hours, lots of homework and soaring expectations for students.

Those are radical changes that public educators have been reluctant to adopt. Until the resistance abates, millions of students will continue to be cheated out of the 50-year-old promise of Brown .

Researchers now realize that factors such as birth weight, how much parents read to their children, the amount of TV kids watch and teacher expectations influence educational achievement more than integrated classrooms. But 31 public middle schools that arose out of a successful 1994 experiment in Houston called the Knowledge is Power Program have had impressive success educating urban students in 13 states and the District of Columbia.

Some factors found to boost classroom learning regardless of the racial mix:

Teacher quality. Parents in suburban schools accustomed to strong teachers have a hard time imagining the low quality of teaching in poor districts. In schools serving affluent families, 70% of the students have teachers who majored in the subject they instruct and hold a teaching license in the topic. In schools where most kids are poor, that holds true for only half the students. Drawing on multiple studies, the non-profit Education Trust calculates that if students were assigned highly rated teachers for five years, test-score gaps separating poor and middle-class students would disappear.

High-quality preschools. When black students arrive in kindergarten, only 20% have the skills needed to learn to read, compared with 50% of their classmates, according to the U.S. Education Department. Only high-quality preschools that focus on learning skills have proved capable of closing that gap. Children attending Chicago's Child-Parent Centers, for example, enjoy lifelong academic and social gains, long-running research shows. The key to their success is college-educated teachers who focus on pre-reading skills.

School accountability. For years, no one asked how minority groups performed, as long as a school's average test scores were acceptable. All too often, though, they lagged other groups of students.

Requiring schools to highlight minority students' test scores holds them responsible for ensuring that all students learn at higher levels. That's one goal of the federal accountability law, No Child Left Behind. But a revolt by states risks leading to watered-down reporting requirements that could dampen the effectiveness of performance standards for improving minority achievement.

Competition. The schools in the experimental Knowledge is Power Program offer more than better educations for 4,000 urban students. They also serve as laboratories that more schools could imitate. Other competition options include allowing students in failing schools to transfer to adjoining school districts, and giving students vouchers to attend private schools when public schools are failing.

Some of these changes are costly. Though more money doesn't guarantee a better education, poor students suffer when per-child spending on them falls well below the national average. Typically, that means they won't get the extra resources they need, such as reading tutors and high-quality preschools. Last year, schools spent an average $8,260 per student, excluding school construction. By contrast, Albuquerque spent only $5,399 per student. A district in Dillon, S.C., part of a lawsuit by rural schools that claims the state denies the schools adequate funding, spent $6,332 per student.

Boosting spending in poor districts means changing school-funding formulas, which typically are based on property taxes and, consequently, punish poor communities. But governors typically run from this task.

Studies of students who attended well-integrated schools in the 1960s show racial diversity in classrooms brings considerable benefits, such as learning to succeed in multicultural work places. Parents who attended integrated high schools want the same for their children, according to a report this month from Columbia University and the University of California-Los Angeles. The study tracked 1980 graduates who attended desegregated schools.

But today's students also need the academic skills to prepare for demanding universities and workplaces. That elevates the importance of eliminating racial-learning gaps — regardless of a school's makeup.

Opposing View: End schools' racial isolation
By Angelo Ancheta
Without question, Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, is the most important case of the past century. It started the chain reaction that toppled America's system of racial apartheid — not just in public education, but also in all areas of civic life.
Yet, Brown 's promise of equality has never had a chance to be fulfilled. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that segregated schools are inherently unequal. But just one year later, the court put the brakes on remedying segregation by instructing lower courts and school districts to proceed with "all deliberate speed" — a contradiction in terms that led to years of massive resistance.

Court orders and civil rights legislation ultimately brought schools into line, so that by the 1970s, Southern schools were becoming the most integrated in the country, and achievement gaps between white students and minority students were closing. But school segregation persisted outside the South because of the limits of the law in addressing unintentional, de facto segregation, and "white flight" from cities undermined attempts at voluntary integration.

Since the mid-1970s, conservative court rulings have undercut Brown by limiting the reach of the U.S. Constitution and by gutting desegregation remedies.

The Supreme Court has ruled that education is not a fundamental right and that inequalities in school financing are presumed to be constitutional. Courts cannot address white flight by ordering school desegregation across city-suburb district lines. Successful court orders can be undone because of relaxed standards that give school districts the benefit of the doubt — even when their student bodies remain segregated.

Instead of being a national priority, desegregation has taken a back seat to high-stakes testing, school choice and vouchers, even though there's little to show that minority students are learning more under the new policies. Many of today's schools are as racially segregated as the schools of earlier decades, and districts that have abandoned court-monitored plans are quickly resegregating. At the same time, voluntary desegregation plans are being attacked as unconstitutional, achievement gaps are widening, and increasing numbers of Asian-American and Latino students — among the most segregated students in the country — have made the picture even more complex.

Minority students are not the only ones hurt by inadequate integration policies. White students in predominantly white neighborhoods attend some of the nation's most segregated schools. Studies show that all students benefit from attending racially diverse schools, and students who are deprived of the learning experiences that come with integration will be less prepared to enter an increasingly diverse workforce and society.

What needs to be done? As a start, we must grapple with the longstanding problems of housing discrimination, which are at the root of segregation. We need to combine educational strategies promoting excellence and accountability with strategies addressing inequality and racial isolation. We need to overhaul policies that lead to disproportionately high numbers of minority students' failing and dropping out of school, such as high-stakes testing and zero-tolerance disciplinary policies, and to adopt policies that ensure adequate resources, strengthen teacher quality and equalize school financing.

Without a commitment to strong civil rights enforcement and sound educational policies, the promise of Brown will remain unfulfilled. There are no easy solutions, but if Brown teaches us anything, it is that integration ideals are meaningless without the leadership and the will to translate them into reality.

Angelo Ancheta is the legal director for the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University.