Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 1, 1994 TAG: 9405020150
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN A. MURPHY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Milliken provides that schools too isolated to be integrated by busing receive extra resources to meet the needs of poor minority students, such as lower student-staff ratios, after-school tutorials, summer enrichment programs, improved computer instruction and active partnerships with parents.
Orfield's report argues that such programs fail because they do not live up to the legal obligation to ``restore the victims of discriminatory conduct to the position they would have occupied in the absence of such conduct.'' But in fact, no remedy in our nation's 200-year history would do such a thing. And Orfield's own remedy of choice - court-ordered busing - would fail miserably.
The promise of court-ordered busing has fallen short where it matters most: in improving learning for African-American students. That doesn't mean desegregation does no good. Living and working with people of different races profits both children and society. But there is not a district in the nation where student achievement skyrocketed after busing. Herbert Walberg of the University of Illinois, an expert tracker of the effects of busing for 20 years, sums up the research: ``Sometimes it [busing] helps, sometimes it hurts, and sometimes it doesn't do anything.''
Orfield's relentless emphasis on the numbers is a betrayal of the original promise of the civil-rights movement. The sole focus of court-ordered busing is numbers that look good - the right number of students of each race in a school.
Ironically, once students are bused, the demands of Brown vs. Board of Education and of Swann vs. Mecklenburg - the landmark school-desegregation decisions - are met: As a nation we can then wash our hands of any further action to really improve education for minority children. Never mind that children, once integrated by school, are often resegregated into separate classrooms. Or that more often than not, black children are relegated to the worst classes - the least challenging, the least interesting, those headed by the least experienced and least motivated teachers.
Never mind that the true purpose of integration - equal opportunity to learn - can so easily get lost in the statistics of color.
Orfield is no doubt well-intentioned, but he deflects us from our real goal: educating all Americans to high levels. Underlying his thesis is the chilling idea that black kids can learn only in the presence of white kids. I cannot let that stand. While I favor integrated schools, I agree with the black Prince George's school board member who said:
``If one goes back to the initial concern of the black community, it was not about being with white people. It was about quality education. ... They are willing to let racial intermingling take its natural course.'' The numbers that count are test scores, measures of the gap between black and white students, enrollments in higher-level classes and college, suspensions, expulsions and dropouts.
Progress on these fronts is messier, takes more time and is more difficult to measure than simply loading students on buses and achieving the right racial proportions. But that's no excuse to let this intemperate and premature Harvard report put at risk the good will and hard work of practitioners and parents alike to achieve quality education for all.
John A. Murphy is superintendent of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg (N.C.) schools, and former school superintendent for Prince George's County, Md.
The Washington Post
by CNB