Brown vs. Board of Education, 50th Anniversary: Many children still go nearly all white or all black
by eleanor chute, pittsburgh post-gazette
when the u.s. supreme court ruled in 1954 that separate schools for black and white students were illegal, naacp attorney thurgood marshall, who had led the charge, predicted that school segregation in america would be eliminated within five years.
today, the tar paper shacks once designated for black students are gone, but school segregation is still here, and in some places has been growing.
"we've walked in a circle," said barbara sizemore, a former professor at the university of pittsburgh and retired dean of the school of education at depaul university.
since the brown v. board of education decision, she said, "most of our urban areas are just as segregated, if not more so, than they were in 1954."
you probably don't have to travel far from your own home to find a pattern of segregation, desegregation and resegregation.
even though the state human relations commission ordered 26 school districts to desegregate in the 1960s and 1970s, pennsylvania schools today are among the most segregated in the country, according to a report this year by the civil rights project at harvard university.
nearly half of the state's black students are in schools that are at least 90 percent black.
in pittsburgh public schools in 1979, the year before it began its major desegregation program, 27 percent of students attended integrated schools, as defined by the state human relations commission.
the percentage of integrated schools climbed to 61 percent at desegregation's height in 1986. but by last fall, the figure had dropped to about 39 percent.
some black children in pittsburgh, such as those who go from lincoln elementary to milliones middle to westinghouse high school, can spend their entire education in schools that are more than 95 percent black.
racial balance matters, the harvard report says, because intensely segregated minority schools also tend to have high concentrations of poverty, and that is strongly related to achievement and school opportunities.
homer floyd, executive director of the state human relations commission since 1970, said it was sad that segregation and resegregation occur when "our society is becoming more diverse than ever before."
about half of the american population will be made up of minorities in 2050, according to the u.s. census bureau, compared with about 30 percent in 2000.
while talk often centers on how integration can help black children get an equal opportunity, it's also important for white students as they compete for jobs in a global economy, said esther bush, president and chief executive of the urban league of pittsburgh.
she questioned whether some white parents were preparing their children for a multicultural world. "racist parents are stifling their kids," she said.
still, the brown decision has resulted in the disappearance of legalized segregation, laws that prevented black students from going to a particular school because of their race.
"the fact is, nobody can close the door on black families who choose to live in certain neighborhoods," said lawyer ed feinstein, who represented parents in the black-segregated general braddock school district. general braddock became part of woodland hills school district under a court order in 1981.
"there are examples now of schools that do work on a racially integrated basis, a desegregated basis. that wasn't the case even 10 years after brown."
at the same time, feinstein said, "if you take a macro approach and look at the percentages, it's very discouraging that we haven't made more progress in academic integration, but it parallels housing segregation. it's very difficult to put the burden on education to totally make up for the segregation that's occurred in housing patterns."
that segregation might have been avoided if the courts had ordered desegregation across school district boundaries, said gary orfield, co-director of the civil rights project at harvard.
for example: even though 22 percent of allegheny county's public school students are black, about half of the county's 43 districts have fewer than 5 percent black enrollment.
wilkinsburg borough is 66.5 percent black and the district's student body is 97.9 percent black, making it impossible to desegregate with the current student body.
and the percentage of minority residents of the metropolitan area, including allegheny, beaver, butler, fayette, washington and westmoreland counties, is comparatively low. the region has the highest percentage of white people of the 50 largest metro areas in the nation, 89.1 percent, according to the lewis mumford center for comparative urban and regional research at the university of albany.
orfield predicted that metropolitan desegregation could be the next integration frontier.
civil rights attorney ross wiener said he believed that political leadership, not court order, was the way to ensure equal opportunity.
"if it's just a court ordering it, the court's focus is too limited, too narrow. there are too many ways to satisfy the court demands without fundamentally changing the educational opportunities," wiener said.
urban explosion
as enrollment in pittsburgh has dropped, the racial makeup of pittsburgh's school enrollment also has changed from 48 percent black in 1979 to 56.2 percent black today.
the minority population in other urban districts also has grown. in boston, where violence followed court-ordered busing more than 30 years ago, the student body has changed from 36 percent to 86 percent minority.
but orfield said some whites had left cities even where no desegregation plans were ordered, such as in atlanta, where 30 percent of the district's students were black in 1958 and 89 percent are now.
researchers at the lewis mumford center attribute much of the racial change in the nation's schools to changing demographics in the 1990s, rather than deliberate resegregation.
sizemore, who was married to the late city school board member jake milliones and watched the system closely when she was at pitt from 1977 to 1992, said she thought a mistake was made at the start of pittsburgh's desegregation.
"we accepted the assumption that anything that was all black was all bad. i spent a lot of time in pittsburgh trying to disprove that theory," sizemore said. "what [the desegregation plan] did was to promote the society's value of white superiority and confirm its value of black inferiority."
she chose to send her son to a black private school in chicago in the 1960s where he could learn of black achievements and wouldn't be bused into a hostile white neighborhood.
"i didn't want him spending his time fighting black inferiority in a neighborhood where he was called 'nigger.' "
kim williams, a hill district parent who works at and sends her daughter to lincoln elementary school in larimer, a school that's 99 percent black, said she found some racism in mostly white schools her older child attended.
"i believe in good schools," said williams, who considers lincoln one of the best in the city. "i don't believe in all-black schools or all-white. i believe parents should have a choice to send their child based on how they feel the school is. i don't believe a parent should be made to put their child in a school where they don't want their child."
pennsylvania desegregation plans and orders remain on the books, but the state human relations commission no longer asks for annual compliance reports or enforces the terms to rectify racial imbalance although it does take on some cases dealing with the racial achievement gap.
pittsburgh's desegregation plan never would have desegregated all schools. some schools, such as the nearly all-black westinghouse high school in homewood and the largely white carrick high school, were deemed too difficult to desegregate.
today, the district has many schools that wouldn't meet the commission's desegregation formula. the formula considers the percentage of black students at elementary, middle and high schools; and then permits a range of 30 percent more or less than that.
because the percentage of black students in the system has increased, the percentage of black students for a school to be considered desegregated also has grown.
the biggest resegregation pattern is at the middle school level. the plan was designed to create fully integrated schools in grades 6 through 8, and it largely worked. in 1989, 83 percent of the district's middle school pupils were in desegregated middle schools.
today, the percentage is back to 45.5 percent, about where it was in 1979 before the full desegregation plan took effect.
the resegregation is due in part to some of the redistricting decisions the school board made in the late 1990s.
in 1994-95, milliones school in the hill district was 61 percent black, but since then, the school board has opened two middle schools in the south hills -- south hills middle in 1996 and south brook in 2001.
now the mostly white students from the south hills area are no longer sent across the river to milliones, and, as a result, milliones is 96 percent black, and south hills and south brook are about 14 percent black.
perhaps the most enduring legacies of city school desegregation are magnet schools, which offer special programs such as international studies or languages. except for auditions for middle and high school arts programs, pupils who apply are selected by lottery and racial balance.
today, the district has magnet programs in 25 of its 86 regular schools.
keeping white parents
nearly all of the elementary magnet schools and all of the middle schools with magnets would meet the commission's integration standards.
cindy goldstein, a white shadyside parent, sends her three children to linden international studies academy, a magnet elementary school in point breeze, because of its diversity and academic reputation.
"what i have found at linden is there are many different cultural opportunities that are brought to the classroom when you have children of different racial and economic backgrounds. ... i think the kids benefit from that exposure," she said. her children, she added, are just as likely to bring home a black friend as a white one.
helen faison, a former longtime city school administrator, said there were concerns that the magnets drained some of the higher-achieving students out of schools such as westinghouse, which has been 99 percent black through the desegregation years, and reizenstein, which was 67 percent black in 1979 and now is about 92 percent black.
the creation of magnet schools kept some parents in the city, according to faison. "it did address some problems. i think it held in the district some families the district would have lost. whether that was sufficient to override the cost, i'm not in a position to say," she said.
the state human relations commission's floyd said school enrollments were always changing and needed to be regularly addressed to avoid large imbalances that might result from a change in one school.
but now, he said, a 1996 state law limits the commission's power to order students to be reassigned.
the commission cannot require a school district to assign students to any public school other than the one closest to the student's home unless there is a "specific violation" to the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment of the u.s. constitution.
but joyce haws, communications director for the national organization for neighborhood schools, which has fought desegregation orders throughout the country since 1976, welcomes a shift toward neighborhood schools, saying she is against using schools for "social engineering."
the courts, haws said, "went beyond desegregation. they defined desegregation not as freedom to go to the nearby school or school of your choice, which is what they should have done."
she said that money that could have been spent on education was spent for busing, and more money would be needed to reopen neighborhood schools. "it's just a long road back," she said.
floyd remains a steadfast believer in integrated schools. "we never thought that just putting a black child and a white child in the same classroom in and of itself was a solution. it's simply the beginning of a process of interrelationship that will improve their ability to get along with each other."
