ROLLBACK
School Integration Efforts Face Renewed Opposition
Supreme Court RulingSways Milton Battle; Off to Private School
Supreme Court RulingSways Milton Battle; Off to Private School
By JOSEPH PEREIRAOctober 11, 2007; Page A1
MILTON, Mass. -- Last spring, town officials in this affluent Boston suburb changed the elementary-school assignments for 38 streets -- and sparked outrage. Some white families had been reassigned to Tucker, a mostly black school which has historically had Milton's lowest test scores.
Among those reassigned is Kevin Keating, a white parent who is talking to lawyers about going to court to reverse the plan. I "just don't feel good putting [my son] in an inferior school," he says. His ammunition: the U.S. Supreme Court's June ruling that consideration of race in school assignments is unconstitutional. Without the backing of the Supreme Court, Mr. Keating says his effort wouldn't have "much of a standing."
AP
A segregated school in Summerton, S.C., in the early 1950s, shortly before the Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education.
Five decades ago, federal courts began forcing reluctant districts to use race-based assignments to integrate schools. But in June, a bitterly divided Supreme Court reversed course, concluding that two race-based enrollment plans in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle were unconstitutional. "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," Chief Justice John Roberts declared.
Now, in an era when schools nationwide are becoming increasingly segregated, the ruling is affecting local school districts in ways large and small. Some districts are sidestepping the ruling by replacing measurements of race with household income. But many others, such as Milton, are adjusting their programs in the face of opposition that's been emboldened by the Supreme Court decision.
In Georgia, the Bibb County School District, which encompasses Macon, has decided to abandon a balancing plan between whites and minorities at one of its top magnet schools next year. A broader school-board redistricting plan aimed at promoting integration is facing a host of opposition, including a threat of legal action by a lawyer citing the Supreme Court decision.
The 58,000-student Tucson, Ariz., school district dropped its race-based assignment system after a federal court judge declared it unconstitutional in August, citing the Supreme Court case. Tucson is holding public hearings to gather parent opinion on assignment plans.
Parents have gone back to federal court seeking to reopen their challenge to a race-balancing plan in Lynn, Mass., another Boston suburb. They lost that case last year, but now are citing the Supreme Court ruling as grounds for a rehearing. An overturning of Lynn's program could lead to the dismantling of similar ones in more than 20 other school districts in Massachusetts, says Chester Darling, an attorney for the plaintiffs.
Push to Integrate
Although the push to integrate public schools is often associated with the civil-rights movement, these days many school administrators want to integrate schools for a more practical reason: to raise test scores. Studies show black and other minority students tend to perform better academically when they learn alongside white classmates. Districts face the threat of losing government funds if school test scores fail to meet a certain threshold.
But the Supreme Court's June ruling handed opponents powerful ammunition, and some experts say the ruling could further accelerate the resegregation of America's schools. While the famous 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education concluded that racially segregated schools are "inherently unequal," a string of federal court decisions in the 1990s curbed desegregation plans. In 2004, 73% of black students nationwide attended schools where minorities were the majority, compared with 66% in 1991, according to the Civil Rights Project at the University of California at Los Angeles.
In 2000, a group of parents sued the Seattle school district because their white children were denied admission into certain popular schools. Officials at those schools had imposed a racial quota to reflect the district's racial composition. Three years later, a group of white parents sued the Louisville school district for basing admissions on a plan that aimed to maintain black enrollment at any school between 15 percent and 50 percent.
Constitutional Violation
In June, the Supreme Court ruled that in both cases -- Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Crystal D. Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education -- the student-assignment systems were in violation of the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause, which says that "No state shall...deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
The battle of Milton pits the two opposing forces against each other. On one side was a vocal, strong-willed school administrator committed to integration. On the other were Milton's mostly white residents, who clamored to keep everything more or less as it was before.
Founded in 1664, Milton, just south of the Boston city line, is a town of 26,000. There are no malls or movie theaters, and about half the town is made up of conservation park land. The town, which is home to Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and the prestigious Milton Academy boarding school, is an enclave of above-middle-class affluence with a per-capita household income of around $102,000 to $119,000.
Milton's black population is concentrated in the northwest section of town, sometimes referred to locally as "Miltonpan" because it adjoins Boston's predominantly black Mattapan neighborhood. The student body at Tucker elementary school, which serves this area, is 65% nonwhite, up from 51% seven years ago.
As the number of black students in Milton grew, so did concern about their lower relative performance to whites on state tests. Minority representation at the three other elementary schools in town, located in slightly more upscale, mostly white neighborhoods, averages about 17%. Test scores at these schools are generally 20% higher than those at Tucker.
Last summer, a group of parents started pressing school superintendent Magdalene Giffune to narrow the achievement gap. Dr. Giffune shared their concerns -- and believed the answer partly lay in better integrating Milton's schools. While 57% of Tucker's black students fell into the "needs improvement" category in fourth-grade English in the 2005-06 academic year, only 30% of black students attending the three other schools did.
There have been efforts to make the American educational system a fairer one for African-Americans and other minorities, but "the plain truth is that it isn't even-steven," says Dr. Giffune, a silvery-haired, 56-year-old whose voice carries traces of her New York origins.
It was a good time to reconsider school assignments. Tucker was overcrowded, and the district was nearing the end of a $150 million renovation project that will add new capacity at other schools. As last school year began, Milton school officials began discussing who would be going where this fall.
In December, the school board named a 24-member Student Assignment Committee, made up of parents, teachers and school officials. The next month, 600 parents responded to a district survey about their assignment priorities. While a majority of nonwhites ranked classroom diversity first or second on the list, a majority of whites ranked it last or second-last. White parents' first priority was having kids attend their neighborhood school -- the status quo.
At about that time, the Supreme Court held oral arguments. Milton school officials paid close attention, and realized the court was leaning toward striking down race-based assignments. As a result, the committee found itself trying to balance two seemingly opposing missions: improving diversity while also making its assignments "race neutral."
To do that, the committee devised three alternative plans, none of which required consideration of a student's racial background. The first, called the "consolidation" plan, called for grouping all second- through fifth-grade students together in a single campus. The second "sister schools" plan would also group children townwide in a slightly different arrangement.
A third choice, called "neighborhood schools," kept students at the four schools, but with different attendance boundaries.
Neighborhood Schools
During public meetings, parents outside the Tucker district heavily backed "neighborhood schools" -- the plan that would result in the least amount of integration. White parents whose children attended schools Cunningham and Collicot pointed out that many of them had voted for higher property taxes in ballot initiatives to pay for renovations at the schools. Opponents of the consolidation plan also frequently cited the then-pending Supreme Court case.
Tucker parents who favored the more-integrated consolidation plan included Karen Horan, an African-American former financial analyst on the assignment committee. "The greater good was for the children of the entire town to go to school together and learn how to get along with each other starting at kindergarten," she says.
In April, the school board sided with the white parents, voting 4-to-1 for the neighborhood school plan. Board Chairman Beirne Lovely, who was away on vacation at the time, said he would have sided with the majority, whose votes reflected "the overwhelming consensus of the community." The board also felt, he says, that the Supreme Court "was going to come down hard on the issue of not using race as a factor."
Dr. Giffune was disappointed with the board's decision. If it wasn't for the Supreme Court decision, Dr. Giffune says, diversity advocates like herself would have had "a bit more of a fighting chance to do the right thing....The Supreme Court really put us at a disadvantage."
To determine how many streets would be reassigned, school officials used a computer program that considered such factors as the addresses of children attending Milton public schools and school building capacities. In June, the school board voted on the 38 streets whose students would be reassigned to new schools. While the racial make-up of students was not considered, some in white neighborhoods were switched to Tucker. Some minority-heavy streets previously belonging to Tucker were switched to Glover, which is 87% white.
But the plan made the switch gradual. The assignments only applied to new students, allowing those already enrolled last year to stay where they were. Despite those efforts, Ms. Giffune says most of the white families reassigned to Tucker elected to send their children to private school instead.
One of them is Mr. Keating, a real-estate broker. His street abuts a pond and the town forest, and has newly built homes and well-manicured lawns. It had previously been assigned to the Cunningham School, which has a 20% minority enrollment, less than a third that of Tucker. From 2003 to 2006 test scores at Cunningham topped Tucker's by 8 to 24 percentage points.
Although he says his objections have nothing to do with any racial bias and that he supported consolidating the schools, Mr. Keating says the purpose of the reassignment is to make Tucker "a whiter school." "I'm just being used to fix the scores problem at Tucker, and I have a problem with that," he adds. "It's a townwide problem that a small neighborhood shouldn't be expected to shoulder."
Mr. Keating has been looking for other parents in his neighborhood to join him in seeking a restraining order from federal court to quash the reassignment plan. If successful, he says he might switch his child from private school back to Cunningham.
"We really feel vindicated in this struggle, especially with the Supreme Court fully behind us," he says.
Another critic living near Mr. Keating is Anthony Polimeno, a property manager whose daughter is due to enter kindergarten in 2009. He says he is "outraged" at the prospect of her having to go to Tucker. Mr. Polimeno says he checked out the school and "wasn't impressed." If the reassignment plan isn't stopped, he says, his options are to move to another town or send his daughter to private school. "Clearly the Supreme Court is saying one thing and our schools [in Milton] are doing just the exact opposite," he adds.
About 10 white parents interested in Milton's French immersion program also rejected Tucker for the upcoming school year, Dr. Giffune says. They had applied for the program at Glover, but because the program there was full, they were offered slots in the immersion program at Tucker, about a mile away. Most turned the offer down -- and two of the families opted for private schools, Dr. Giffune says.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line: There's been no change in Tucker's racial mix this year. School officials say that's largely because of the grandfathering exceptions in the redistricting plan, white rejection of the school and heavy minority enrollment.
The failure to mix more black and white students has left some black parents in town with bitter feelings. Average household income of the neighborhood that feeds Tucker is $102,000 -- not much lower than the whiter areas of town. "At all the town meetings...the feeling us folk from Tucker got from the rest of the town was, 'We don't want your kind,'" says Richard Fischer, an African-American investment adviser and a parent of three Tucker students.
Ms. Horan says she moved her family to Milton from Boston 10 years ago seeking open-minded neighbors, only to be confronted by the same prejudices that she had hoped to leave behind. "Hurtful as it is to admit, racism is alive and well and living in Milton," she says. Mr. Lovely, the board chairman, denies any racial tension.
Meanwhile Drew Echelson, Tucker's principal, says the school is moving to improve its academic performance. It's offering full-day kindergarten instead of the half-day offered at the other schools. The staff is visiting students' homes prior to the start of the new school year to encourage greater parental participation. Tucker teachers have formed a collaborative designed to boost teaching skills. Test scores for 2007 are already showing improvement.
Now in her last academic year before retirement, Dr. Giffune admits to leaving on a somber note. "I did the best I could but I feel I failed those kids at Tucker," she says. "Maybe I trusted the process and the goodness and idealism of everybody."
Write to Joseph Pereira at joe.pereira@wsj.com
Vea artículo del GRLO "Educación: El dilema de la Raza". sobre este tema
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