WHITE FLIGHT & POLITICAL RETREAT

...q 58...

...3 Other than during riot situations similar to Boston's, decline of white enrollment in bigcity school systems has been at a much lower annual rate than is indicated by Ravitch's figures for Boston in 1974 and 1975...

...Efforts to evaluate the results of this experience are beset with extremely complex problems that defy quick and easy conclusions...

...Racial minorities remain sharply underrepresented in suburban populations, even when the potential minority residents are considered to be only those with incomes at, or over, the average for all residents of a given city's suburbs (or limited to only those minority households already paying as much, or more, for housing than is the average for all residents of a given city's suburbs).' The extensive and persistent discrimination against racial minorities by brokers and rental agents in 40 selected metropolitan areas was elaborately documented in a recent survey by the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing, under contract to the U.S...

...Obviously, if the number of white households disappearing from the city of Chicago were more than twice as many as the number of white pupils disappearing from its school system, dissatisfaction with schools cannot be the main, or even primary, cause for movement of whites out of the city...

...In 1975 Coleman announced a startling change of opinion on the implications of his 1966 report, much to the dismay of his erstwhile adherents and to the glee of his former conservative critics...

...54 New York City, with one of the largest percentage increases of minority enrollment (14.3 percent), has one of the smaller percentages of white loss (29.8 percent...

...The first, and most dangerous, is to assume that were we racially homogeneous the cities would have none of the crucial problems that they face...

...The complexity of urban demographic phenomena suggests caution in the use of the term "white flight...

...In Baltimore, Cleveland, Washington, St...

...Ravitch notes that there was a loss of 88,693 whites from the Chicago school system between 1968 and 1976...

...He followed this statement with a paper arguing that court-ordered desegregation was proving disastrous to city-school systems by causing an exodus of white pupils...

...Robert C. Weaver, "The Suburbanization of America," in School Desegregation: the Courts and Suburban Migration (Washington...

...Since 1950, he points out, employment in suburbs began to increase at a more rapid rate than that of their central cities and "in many of the large metropolitan areas the central city recorded an absolute loss in number of jobs, while their suburban rings gained spectacularly...

...D.C.: U.S...

...Ravitch advances the Atlanta solution as a model...

...Nor could it possibly be justified on educational grounds for either white or black students...

...It is the juxtaposition of percentages of change for both groups that undermines Coleman's assumption as to cause and effect...

...In a paper presented at a day-long "consultation" of the U.S...

...That whites, to varying degrees, have a desire to separate themselves from blacks and that, therefore, varying numbers of whites will exercise this option under certain circumstances has to be accepted as a given in race relations and should serve as an initial assumption in anticipating the likely consequences of change...

...3Fulfilling the Letter and Spirit of the Law— Desegregation of the Nation's Public Schools, Report (Washington, D.C.: U.S...

...Exactly...

...One can easily be misled by the appearance of race as a surrogate for economic class...

...Is she arguing that racial balance destroys the prospects for quality education...

...Commission on Civil Rights, December 8, 1975...

...Ravitch's table shows the percentage of white loss in each of the 29 largest cities in the United States from 1968 to 1976...

...Though whites tend to move when outnumbered, and when attractive alternative locations are available elsewhere, it is still necessary to examine changing population distribution in terms of income levels...

...Bureau of the Census...

...Philadelphia experienced a white loss of 25.1 percent, but a minority gain of only 1 percent...

...This calculation does not reflect those mover households that withdraw two or more pupils from school, thereby necessarily shrinking pupilrelated households and increasing households without pupils...

...It would help to hold these whites even more if laws forbidding discrimination in housing were repealed...

...Another 86 schools had less than 10 percent minority enrollment...

...What is there about integrated schools that undermines quality...

...The solution is not to retreat to an acceptance of segregation, but to advance to where the Court feared to tread, viz, inclusion of suburban schools in metropolitan integration orders...

...And still, the whites fled...

...Weaver warns against concluding that because racial factors cannot explain all urban phenomena, racial factors shoud be 56 dismissed as noneffective...

...The second, in a large measure a reaction to the over-emphasis on the racial issue, is the assertion that race is not relevant to the city's problems...

...This situation also suggests that the movement of whites out of the city is not primarily schoolrelated...

...It might be argued that whites flee in reaction to how many blacks are present in a given school, not in the system as whole...

...The role of income in population distribution is evident in the increasing number of middle-class blacks locating in the suburbs...

...In Nashville and Indianapolis, minority enrollment remained virtually unchanged during these years—again without halting white flight...

...If Coleman and Ravitch are not proposing racially segregated schools as a cure for "white flight," what are they proposing...

...This can hardly be disputed...

...White Flight, Demographic Transition, and the Future of School Desegregation, by David J. Armor with the assistance of Donna Schwartzbach (Santa Monica, Calif: Rand Corp., 1978), p. 17...

...SAnnual Housing Survey: 1975, Current Housing Report, Series H-170-75-22, U.S...

...For the 90 percent black enrollment in Atlanta's school systems, there is obviously no other course than, to quote Ravitch, "stressing the kind of curriculum and values that will enable black children (and white children) to succeed in the mainstrean of American life...

...The poor who entered, however, and the upwardly mobile working-class populations that moved outward were increasingly likely to have a darker skin than their predecessors in the earlier history of American cities...

...Coleman, however, is sure that the reason is school desegregation, and Ravitch, making reference to Coleman's "econometric model," is ready to endorse his conclusions, because, in addition to his "mathematical models" (which she finds "too technical to summarize easily"), they "also seem to conform to common sense and experience...

...Commission on Civil Rights, occasioned by the controversy over Coleman's critique of desegregation policy, at which Coleman was a participant, Dr...

...In recent years the poor still entered at the center of cities, and the upwardly mobile still moved outward as they moved upward, and the middle and upper classes still opted for the least densely developed outer areas...

...Coleman and Ravitch would obviously spurn such proposals...

...Recognizing that "the controversy over Coleman's findings is a struggle over the future of policy," she is prepared to join him in applying the brakes to desegregation, at least in big-city school systems, despite the above quoted confession of uncertainty as to the causes of "white flight...

...But it has been steady and seemingly unending, until few such cities have white majorities in their schools today...

...It is necessary, therefore, to see population movement primarily in terms of the historic role of economic class, and only secondarily in terms of racial patterns that distort basic economic determinants...

...Though the table achieves this with dramatic impact, it offers no evidence as to cause...

...Coleman's abandonment of his earlier position created a gap in the civil-rights defenses through which the neoconservatives now seek to charge, hoping to overpower affirmative measures for integration, such as busing for racial balance, and perhaps even to undo the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which held that "separate but equal" schools are unconstitutional...

...2 Reynolds Farley, School Integration and White Flight (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Population Studies Center, August 1975...

...Nor has it just been discovered...

...Oddly, Ravitch makes passing reference to this phenomenon by parenthetically adding "some middle-class blacks" to the whites who are fleeing the city, without, however, feeling called upon to explain this contradiction of Coleman's thesis about the "degree to which whites are exposed to blacks" as cause of movement out from cities...

...This is no argument, however, for keeping the 10 percent of white students in 100 percent white schools out of fear they might leave the system if, in Coleman's words, they are "exposed to blacks...

...If anything, ghettos have extended their boundaries as the minority population has grown and as whites have shifted to the suburbs...

...It was income, not race, that historically determined the dynamics of mobility within American cities—the poor entering the oldest neighborhoods near the center, and the rich exiting over the boundaries to new suburban areas...

...Her table does not show percentage of minority increase in these systems...

...Many represent new family formations and movement from other parts of the country...

...Segregated residential patterns have not changed appreciably in the big cities whose school systems are under discussion here...

...She could hardly have expected them to have declared that quality education for Atlanta's black children would be impossible for lack of white children with whom to integrate...

...For there is no pattern or correlation between percentage of white loss and minority gain...

...Ravitch marshalls figures to demonstrate that integration efforts in Boston schools caused white enrollment to drop sharply in 1974 (16.2 percent of that of the previous year) and in 1975 (19.3 percent...

...To argue this would fly in the face of the fact that many all-black primary and secondary schools have achieved outstanding records of quality performance, the names of some of these schools having become legendary...

...But this is not a new phenomenon...

...Obviously, all of the 22,500 additional minority households that appeared in Chicago's suburbs did not move there from the central city...

...If anything, her data undermines Coleman's easy assumption that the cause of white loss is "an increase in the degree to which whites are exposed to blacks...

...White parents had a choice of 142 elementary schools in which white enrollment was over 70 percent (in a school system in which whites constitute 25 percent...

...Ravitch presents a table of figures to demonstrate the decline in white enrollment...

...More than half of San Antonio's white enrollment disappeared during a time when its minority enrollment was dropping by 2.8 percent...

...Louis, New Orleans, San Francisco, Cincinnati, San Antonio, Pittsburgh, and Kansas City, minority enrollment decreased between 1968 and 1976, but white flight was as great in these cities as in those in which there was an increase in minority presence...

...The study's voluminous report, Equality of Educational Opportunity, was accepted by most judges and educational administrators as the most authoritative documentation of the subject available...

...On the other hand, the vast majority of Chicago's minority children attended 310 schools with minority enrollments of 80 percent or more (with no less than 201 of these schools having 100 percent minority enrollment...

...The Potential for Residential Integration in Cities and Suburb: Implications for the Busing Controversy, paper by Albert I. Hermalin and Reynolds Farley (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Population Studies Center, 1973...

...Ending desegregation efforts will, however, constitute a setback to the struggle of racial minorities for equality...

...But as the U.S...

...Until then, preserving segregation in school systems will serve no useful purpose...

...4 Weaver's paper traces the historical pattern of metropolitan development to document the declining weight of the central city within its urban setting and notes that "the year 1900 marked the apex of preponderance of population for a number of central cities in relation to their suburbs...

...Quality education in black schools does not, however, contradict the validity of the Supreme Court's finding that "separate"—for racial minorities in a predominantly racist society—is inherently "unequal...

...Detroit with a massive white loss (61.9 percent) had a minority increase of only 5.2 percent...

...Ravitch's formal disclaimer is but a parry by a debater whose main thrust contradicts it...

...Total enrollment in parochial schools, however, as reported in the New York Times, June 8, 1978, has declined at the same rate as the public system...

...Robert 55 C. Weaver warned that because we are a racist society, there is a tendency to attribute all or most of the problems of our cities to the presence of racial minorities...

...The broad historical, social and economic context within which Weaver treats the declining significance of central cities and its impact upon the opportunities and status of whites and blacks is singularly absent from the Ravitch article, a crippling defect it seems to share with the contributions of most of the other antagonists in the Coleman controversy, whether pro or con...

...7 Fair Housing Evaluation—Background Paper on the Housing Market Practices Survey (Washington, D.C.: Office of Policy Development and Research, Department of Housing and Urban Development, April 1978...

...Though the parochial schools' minority enrollment has grown, the increase is at a rate far less than that in the public schools...

...Though race distorted this economic pattern of residential location, the latter remained the dominant factor shaping population distribution in American metropolitan areas...

...Commission on Civil Rights reported to the President in 1976...

...Busing per se is not the issue...

...q Notes 'James S. Coleman, Sarah D. Kelly, and John A. Moore, Trends in School Desegregation, 1968-73 (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute, August 1975...

...Based on the internal evidence of Ravitch's article, even without recourse to the voluminous literature generated by the controversy, their position leads to no other conclusion than that less integration and more segregation is the remedy for shrinking white enrollments...

...Department of Housing and Urban Development...

...This causes one to ask why white enrollment dropped by over 40 percent in the Chicago school system from 1968 to 1976, though it remained the most segregated large-city system in the country...

...segregation is wrong and should not be tolerated...

...But with reference to those thousands of minority families that did move from Chicago to its suburbs, it is necessary to ask of Coleman and Ravitch to explain what caused this minority flight...

...In 1974, the latest year for which figures were available, Chicago still had five elementary schools without a single minority child enrolled...

...This argues for giving up on desegregation and concentrating on quality education, regardless of racial balances...

...It is puzzling that Ravitch should find it so remarkable for Atlanta's black educational leadership to have chosen this course...

...One cause of this loss of white households is the 16 percent decrease in jobs in manufacturing in Chicago between 1963 and 1972 (see City Need and the Responsiveness of Federal Grant Programs, Subcommittee on the City of Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs, House of Representatives 1978...

...Coleman was quoted as saying that the courts had read more into his 1966 report than was warranted...

...Where minority enrollment constitutes an overwhelming majority of the school system (90 percent in Atlanta), "integration" by parceling out the remaining whites throughout the system would obviously have no practical effect in meeting the court's injunction against the inequality of "separate" schools...

...Commission on Civil Rights, August 1976...

...School Desegregation and Resegregation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University, Institute of Policy Sciences, 1978...

...Typical of this neoconservative thrust is Diane Ravitch's defense of Coleman's new position in the spring 1978 issue of the Public Interest...

...in most communities desegregation has gone peacefully and smoothly—for every Boston and Louisville there are dozens of other communities, which have received no headlines and attracted no television coverage, where desegregation is proceeding without major incident...

...Upper-class whites fled from lower-class whites long before blacks became a factor in city population shifts...

...Take the matter of population decline of major cities, a condition affecting almost all of them except those in the Southwest and West...

...Given the fact that school buildings and grounds were turned into bloody battlefields by the policies of an irresponsibly intransigent school board and by a vacillating mayor (with the publicly expressed aid and comfort of Presidents Nixon and Ford), there should be little suprise that large numbers of white parents withdrew their children from the public schools during the worst years of turmoil...

...7 An additional piece of evidence that contradicts the Coleman / Ravitch thesis is the sharp drop in enrollment in Chicago's Catholic parochial schools, consisting of 386 elementary and 21 high schools...

...Though the number of white-occupied housing units in the suburban areas outside of Chicago increased by 144,500 between 1970 and 1975, compared to an increase in minority-occupied units of only 22,500, the latter represents a rate of increase of 45.8 percent, compared to the whites' rate of increase of only 14.4 percent...

...As Ravitch observes about one aspect of the results: It seems unlikely that we will ever know with any degree of certainty whether whites (and some middle-class blacks) are leaving the city because of concern about desegregation or crime or poor services or racial tensions or the quality of life or for some other reason or combination of reasons...

...Advocates of desegregation of schools have never argued that quality education of 57 minority children is impossible in all-minority schools...

...Ravitch's article is devoted to a refutation of the sharp criticism directed at Coleman by a number of his peers in the social sciences, the most prominent among them Reynolds Farley, Thomas F. Pettigrew, Robert L. Green, and Christine H. Rossell, with the latter singled out by Ravitch for most attention...

...Above all other considerations, including the voluminous statistics marshalled by Coleman and his critics, the Court's decision stands as principle...

...Because the mobility of blacks was inhibited by discrimination, they were severely restricted in their ability to move outward through the successive residential rings within which the population was stratified, more or less by income...

...Ever since Africans were brought to these shores, whites have either determined the conditions of propinquity or exercised the option of separating themselves to the extent that this was possible...

...Christine H. Rossell, The Unintended Impacts of Public Policy...

...How can one attribute causes for the declining number of whites in city schools if one's view is restricted to the Office of Education's computer printouts of school enrollment by race...

...In 1966 Coleman, a sociologist then at Johns Hopkins University and now at the University of Chicago, directed a massive congressionally ordered study to determine how the education of minority children is affected by segregation and integration...

...Nowhere in the Ravitch article is there any indication that the economic viability of a city and/or its metropolitan area might be related to population movement by race and, consequently, to changes in the racial composition of school enrollments...

...As Ravitch notes, "Coleman argued that, independent of 53 the specific causes (e.g., a court order) leading to it, an increase in the degree to which whites are exposed to blacks seemed, under certain circumstances, to reduce the number of whites...

...z In anticipation of the inescapable charge that her defense of James Coleman's opposition to large-scale integration of big-city school systems amounts to endorsement of a segregated status quo, Ravitch cautiously enters a disclaimer: "Certainly, no one—least of all, Coleman—would propose maintaining racially segregated schools as a way of inducing whites to remain in city schools...

...This finding constitutes a landmark on the historic battleground against segregation...

...This cannot be denied...

...This answer, given by a white parent opposing busing in Richmond, Va., as quoted in the Washington Post, January 17, 1972, was, "It's not the distance, it's the niggers...

...It might still be argued that though whites leave central cities for a number of reasons unrelated to schools, the maintenance of racially segregated schools could influence some white families to stay...

...Should this principle then be abandoned, or even compromised, to reduce white flight...

...Viewed within the context of the historic struggle of blacks for equality in American society, arguments based on the "practical" consequences of school integration shrivel...

...The answer to this question given by most parents fighting proposed integration of all-white schools is not likely to be acceptable to Ravitch...

...Similar action with regard to public accommodations, voting, and employment is likely to further slow down the white exodus...

...Thomas F. Pettigrew and Robert L. Green, "School Desegregation in Large Cities: A Critique of the Coleman, 'White Flight' Thesis," Harvard Education Review, February 1976...

...The majority of whites who oppose busing will see it that way, as will the majority of blacks who continue to favor busing for racial balance in schools...

...One wonders, therefore, how they can permit themselves to become trapped in a thesis that would result in a policy of applying the brakes to school desegregation...

...Or maybe they didn't—at least not as whites...

...Statewide desegregation in Florida, effective in cities, suburbs, and rural areas, by state-court order was accomplished without white flight from either the state or its schools.' To the extent that the exodus of whites from cities is primarily racial in motivation, it will stop when whites are convinced, in the words of the spiritual, that "There Ain't No Hiding Place Down Here...

...Has it no relevance for this phenomenon that between 1970 and 1975 (a mere five years compared to her eight-year school enrollment period), the number of housing units occupied by whites in Chicago declined by 123,400?5 This represented a loss of about 24,680 white-occupied housing units per year, compared to a loss of about 11,086 white pupils per year from the school system...

...The signal for the attack was James S. Coleman's recent repudiation of his findings that had for some 12 years served as the main factual and analytical underpinning of the prointegration argument...

...The Chicago school system is certainly the example par excellence of adherence to the Coleman/ Ravitch policy of "a cautious and deliberate approach that takes into account the possibility of white flight and desegregation...

...This is why the NAACP board chose to suspend its Atlanta chapter, rather than to condone surrender of this principle...

...This leads to two equally misleading conclusions...

...The actual experience of the last two decades with large-scale efforts to reduce racial segregation in public-school systems, however, is new...