Black and White Together Is Still the Point
Shapiro, Walter
Black and White Together Is Still the Point by Walter Shapiro For years finding a liberal who opposed school integration was as unlikely as finding an admirer of Golda Meir in the El Fatah....
...After a year of busing, she admitted, “Until I had to teach these other kids, I didn’t know I didn’t know how to teach...
...But the book wasn’t published until right before the election, when it was interpreted as another clarion call to dismantle the 1960s...
...Armor believes that the increases in “black consciousness and solidarity” and support for “black power” he discovered meant a decline in racial understanding...
...Yet the failures of desegregation in places like Washington have led many to wonder aloud whether it would be possible to actually enforce widespread busing even if it were upheld by the courts and not challenged by ‘Congress...
...Metropolitan busing also tends to slow-if not reversewhite exodus to the suburbs because it carries the important symbolic message that you can no longer buy your way out of urban problems...
...But the black leadership conspicuously did not support an ACLU suit calling for metropolitan desegregation, which would create schools with roughly a 70-30 white-black racial balance...
...Such Supreme Court action would bring anti-busing legislation to the floor of Congress with the speed of a prairie fire...
...One Thing Everyone Agrees On Both Jencks and Armor have been subjected to rigorous criticism-Armor in particular...
...But you cannot debate the issue in the same dispassionate way you would discuss a subject like the energy crisis...
...Obviously, busting district lines can have little relevance for concentrated ghettos like Bedford-Stuyvesant, Watts, and the South Side of Chicago...
...As patterns of residential segregation in the North show no signs of abating, we are steadily moving toward a dual school system there almost as farreaching as the one which existed until recently in the South...
...Recognizing these areas as exceptions, the Courtor HEW, if it ever gets back into the civil rights business-should not try to mandate busing with the same sense of statistical precision demanded, say, for congressional redistricting...
...It is significant that the arguments of those who have defended busing have leaned toward the limited and the legalistic...
...And the thing you would probably value most is the way the teacher ran the classes and the rapport he or she had with the students...
...One reason why liberals succumbed so easily to the “cult of the expert” was that they were convinced that social science would obediently justify their gut feelings that school segregation was wrong...
...Many may see this admittedly bleak political landscape as further evidence that busing should be abandoned as a tactic...
...Poor blacks in Atlanta tend to realize the implications of the tradeoff between the education of their children and the desire of the black leadership to share in the spoils of a prosperous and growing Atlanta“The City Too Busy to Hate...
...But I realized that it would have been far more devastating to be able to lean forward and say with my best William Buckley sneer, “You of course know, Senator, that science has proved that segregated schools do irreparable damage to the education of children-both black and white...
...The model compensatory education program is Title I of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which has given local school systems more than $1 billion a year to create special programs for disadvantaged pupils...
...It is a serious fear, and the best assessment of it that I’ve heard came from Tom Pettigrew, who said: In the South in the 1950s there was at least as much opposition to integration as exists in metropolitan Detroit right now...
...In response to my questions, which tried to convey the horror of extensive school segregation 19 years after Brown v Board of Education, Brock mechanically used a whole set of meaningless phrases like “fullest and fairest and equal treatment,” and “quality education” to justify his support for the racial status quo...
...The only consoling evidence in the Coleman Report was that within the schools a student’s achievement was most affected by the socio-economic background of his fellow students...
...Those were the days when anyone who doubted the rectitude of the cause was dismissed as a “racist” or harangued for giving way to “backlash...
...And, with only one exception, Armor is dealing solely with the first year of busing, when confusion and dislocation would be at their peak...
...Babbitry Over Bigotry Yet it is striking how widespread and ingrained is the belief that education can be improved principally through bureaucratic solutions and administrative changes...
...cities such as Richmond, Cleveland, and Detroit...
...There is no way to minimize how threatening such Gonclusions are to education bureaucrats...
...But the real problem is the growing crisis of the liberal spirit as many question whether busing is defensible as a tactic, whether school Walter Shapiro is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...By defining success this way-rather than, for example, comparing black scores to black norms-Armor creates a situation where busing could be judged highly successful if white test scores plummeted to black levels...
...Admittedly, teachers may have to go through the motions of adopting a new curriculum or accepting some other administrative decision, but, in reality, the independence of most teachers all but guarantees that these changes don’t have to be more than token or minimal...
...Eliminating all predominantly black schools might therefore reduce the overall black-white gap from 15 to 12 or 13 points...
...As the smoke from the reviews, the “responses,” and the “final words” have begun to settle, it is apparent that Armor’s study is almost a classic case of how not to conduct social science research in a volatile situation...
...I’m certain Jencks wanted to write a book about the non-cognitive aspects of schooling and desegregation...
...Given a classroom of bright, interested students, a mediocre teacher will take great pride in how much they learn-little realizing that it is in spite, rather than because, of his instruction...
...One, “The Evidence on Busing,” by David Armor, published last summer in The Public Interest, was a study of the results of five Northern busing experiments and claimed that integration did little to help black academic achievement or improve racial attitudes...
...Some of these second thoughts are triggered by political timiditysomewhat understandable when even a poll by the U. S. Civil Rights Commission shows that 70 per cent of those sampled opposed busing and another nine per cent had “no opinion...
...Against the backdrop of the Coleman Report, liberals came to believe that segregation was wrong for objective reasons (it deprived black students of a middle-class environment and thereby lowered test scores) and forgot the fundamental principle that segregation is wrong because it is morally repugnant...
...The one exception to this is a single footnote in Brown v Board of Education...
...Although it has its smattering of success stories, the program-like the Law Enforcement Assistance Act and revenue sharing-demonstrates the propensity of local governments to squander unrestricted federal grants...
...Nineteen years after the Brown decision, I still choose integration...
...While predicting the behavior of the Court is riskier than reading entrails, the omens seem propitious for the civil rights forces, especially in the Richmond case...
...Trillin puts his finger on the reason why-black leaders fear that metropolitanism “might lead to the dilution of black political power.’’ Why Hucksters Love Title I Generally when anguished whites shout “Anything but busing,” what they are thinking of is some form of compensatory education and the “anything” is the money to pay for it...
...At the root of much of the opposition to busing is parental fear for their children’s safety...
...Yet no bureaucrat is more immune to centralized direction than a veteran teacher...
...Published under the title, Equality of Educational Opportunity, it unfortunately undermined liberal preconceptions by revealing only miniscule differences between segregated and desegregated schools in terms of facilities (a catch-all term which encompassed everything from the presence of a physics lab or a school nurse to the credentials of the teacher and the amount of money spent per pupil by the school district...
...The headlines read “Study Casts Doubt on Busing,” but few readers realized how subjective these doubts actually were...
...The dominance of gimmickry and lack of imagination in Title I programs underlines Jencks’ conclusion that “we can see no evidence that either school administrators or educational experts know how to raise test scores, even when they have vast resources at their disposal...
...Louis-with a school system which is two-thirds black, metropolitan busing is virtually the only way of achieving desegregation...
...Nowhere is this paucity of imagination more evident than in the three most widely discussed alternatives to busing and 3 further school desegregation-hiring more black administrators, compensatory education, and community control of the schools...
...But at the same time one should not minimize the impact of busing as a catalyst for creating fundamental changes in teachers’ attitudes toward their work and their students...
...In social psychology there is something called the fait accompli effect...
...Moreover, thanks to strong, aggressive unions, teachers have job security equal to the most indolent of bureaucrats...
...Interestingly, in many schools one of the major beneficiaries of the new arrangement were non-academically inclined white students who‘had previously felt out of place and pressured in a highly competitive school environment...
...Yet these changes in black student attitudes could be seen by another researcher as a positive step toward an improved black self-image...
...The major problem with urban schools is that they are locked into a series of patterns-destructive for the students and numbing for the teachers...
...In contrast, the Roth decision, if upheld by the higher courts, would create schools throughout the entire Detroit metropolitan area which would be three-quarters white and one-quarter black...
...What Jencks is really trying to demonstrate is how small the relationship actually is between academic ability and schooling and vocational and financial success...
...Boston, for example, he said “would need little busing to desegregate because the ghetto is long and thin” and adjoins such prestigious suburban schools as those of Brookline...
...They averaged 15 points below the white mean on standardized tests...
...It is important to remember that Jencks believes that desegregated schools do make some I difference...
...In response to cries of paternalism, one should not be embarrassed about clinging to the still touching 1950s image of black and white children playing together in a schoolyard...
...My own personal conviction that busing must be defended has little to do with the 14th Amendment or separation of powers...
...What they could not measure is the only variable which is really important-teacher quality and dedication...
...In all likelihood, a Richmond case, Bradley 1.1 School Board of the City of Richmond, will be even more important...
...A Denver case, Keyes v School District No...
...Every school I visited saw this as a major priority,” Orfield said...
...Jencks has instead become, in part, the victim of the peculiar rhythms of both publishing and politics...
...But demographic factors help explain why metropolitanism and massive busing are not automatically synonymous...
...Jencks’ discussion of desegregation and the impact of other educational factors on test scores plays an important role in the busing dispute, but it is peripheral to t h e main point of his book...
...And industry was out to sell the relevance of what they had, rather than to stop and consider the irrelevance to slum and isolated rural children of their white middle-class material and gadgetry geared to successful college-bound students...
...Last fall, Senate liberals choked off a stiff anti-busing bill with an end-of-the-session filibuster, but few are optimistic about a repeat performance...
...To him it is simply an expedient necessary “to enforce the 14th Amendment...
...Students adjust rapidly to the new situation,” Orfield said, “but for teachers and administrators it takes a considerable amount of time...
...What it means is that when something happens which is unalterable, people adjust to it...
...While the new appointments may be politically significant, it is difficult to see how these black administrators -most of them likely to be veteran leachers-will be able to significantly affect realities in the classroom...
...Today, in at least 70 per cent of all elementary schools and 85 per cent of all high schools, there is “tracking” or “ability grouping” designed to create homogeneous classrooms...
...Jencks’ book is primarily statistical, building on the data from the Coleman Report-already subjected to extensive reanalysisand combining it with the results of other studies...
...He finished his manuscript on the eve of the Democratic Convention, during a time of intense discussion of alternative strategies for liberal reform...
...The busing plan produced by Judge Roth, working with a map and a ruler, would increase the number of students bused daily by 38 per centfrom about 210,000 to 290,000...
...Another example of the ambiguities of Armor’s study revolves around what constitutes improved race relations...
...This is not to say that there is nothing to be learned from current busing programs...
...Everything else-the school budget, its policies, the characteristics of the teachers-is either secondary or completely irrelevant...
...An aide to a liberal senator recently complained, “If we were to oppose busing, they’d call us ‘racists...
...Not surprisingly, divining the feelings of the black community has played an integral part in the whole busing dispute...
...Busing has far less to do with education than with whether we want an integrated or segregated society...
...Moreover, as the Atlanta bargain illustrates, programs like community control are not only bureaucratic in conception, but also are far more likely to provide new jobs to be doled out by black leaders than to create real change in the classroom...
...Whites in Pontiac could find some consolation in the Roth decision, which linked the schools of Grosse Pointe with those in the inner city...
...Additional teachers, for example, could be brought into each classroom with the money now spent on educational hardware...
...Although there are obviously conspicuous exceptions, these veteran teachers tend to be set in their ways and unwilling to modify their methods to meet the educational needs of their students...
...But in most places desegregation has profoundly changed the tenor of innercity schools...
...The only real question is what impact it has on black test scores...
...Talking with him, I not only received an impressionistic glimpse of what happens after a school desegregates, but was also provided with some hints about the unexpected long-term effects of busing...
...In understanding this entire debate, which largely revolves around the relationship between desegregation and test scores, it is important to realize that there is general agreement that neither desegregation nor busing has a negative impact on white students’ test scores or academic achievement...
...Not Capone, But Jencks From the point of view of school administrators, Jencks is fairly close to being Public Enemy Number One...
...Even the most ardent integrationist must realize that there are areas of the country where more than token desegregation may, unfortunately, be impossible...
...Busting school district lines would mean that many black students in Richmond could attend these currently all-white suburban schools, often by just walking a few blocks beyond the city limits...
...These days cries for community control seem to come primarily from those-white and black-who see in busing the “paternalistic” notion that blacks can be educated only in majority white schools...
...This kind of city-wide plan isn’t desegregation, it is merely a kind of excessively officious tokenism which gives busing a bad name and hastens white flight to the suburbs...
...When teachers and administrators react to this new student environment by displaying leadership and a sense of mission about their craft, the result is a far healthier and more responsive school...
...Although Armor’s conclusions purportedly apply to “mandatory” busing, three of the five busing experiments he cites were actually “voluntary...
...The second year of busing generally signaled a vast change in teacher attitudes...
...As John F. Hughes and Anne 0. Hughes point out in their recent book, Equal Education In a very real sense, the education industry has performed much of the “thinking” for the schools in terms of educational programs [for Title I...
...The Supreme Court,’’ Jencks said, “realized that they can’t change their minds every time a new article appears in The American Journal of SociologY...
...But just as Jencks does not conclude from his study that the school budget of New York City should be reduced by 50 per cent or that the public schools should be closed, we should not see the failures of Title I as immutable evidence that federal money cannot improve school quality and actually affect the realities in the classroom...
...Such a gain would not be completely trivial, but it would certainly not have much effect on the overall pattern of racial inequality in America...
...What Jencks and Coleman were measuring were thc bureaucratic factors in education, things like physics labs, which are easily countable...
...Wrong” to me is a moral judgment, rather than an outgrowth of any elaborate theory about the effects of segregation on children’s test scores...
...Consequently, rather than increasing the constituency for income redistribution, he was linked with the slogan “schools don’t make a difference...
...But what the sad history of Title I illustrates is that black parents should not regard promises of additional money for ghetto schools as an irresistible bribe...
...Most white parents have rather fixed images of all-black urban schools-heroin in the hallways and muggings in the parking lot...
...During our conversation, he said, “If you were to go into schools in different major cities around the country and wander into classrooms randomly, I suspect what you would discover is that the richest schools are not necessarily the best...
...Despite the heavy use of test scores to measure academic success in Inequality, Jencks stresses in conversation that “there is a strong non-cognitive feeling to the book...
...In 1970, 57 per cent of the black students in the North attended segregated schools, while in the South the figure had declined to 40 per cent...
...And as he explains in the book’s first chapter, “While cognitive tests have many obvious defects, most measures of attitudes, values, and characte: structure are even worse...
...Because of precedents they are willing to go much further on school integration than any other issue...
...The New York Times called it “Atlanta’s integration bargain” and suggested that it could alter “the course and theory of school desegregation...
...integration is laudable as a goal...
...movement, it has been fashionable for most liberals-and virtually all radicalsto obsequiously defer to the wishes of the black community on any question that even remotely touches on race...
...In the other, Inequality: a Reassessment of the Effects of Family and Schooling in America, Christopher Jencks disclosed that not only do factors like racial composition and school expenditures have a minimal effect on test scores, but academic achievement and high test scores have relatively little impact on vocational and economic success...
...Perhaps ideally, we could attack segregated schools by trying to change housing patterns, but as Bill Taylor, former chairman of the U. S. Civil Rights Commission, points out, “The courts are currently very hesitant to take on new social and economic issues...
...Busing, like amnesty and abortion, is one of those issues which is almost completely visceral, almost entirely non-rational...
...Unable to pierce Brock’s carefully cultivated public image, I sat there tongue-tied and repressed the strong temptation to resort to epithets (“racist” unfairly, but predictably, sprang to mind...
...What administrator visiting a regional office is confronted with as artificial and unrealistic a setting as a principal observing classroom teaching...
...Already the situation has become sig&ficantly worse above, rather than below, the Mason-Dixon line...
...But let those who consider this option have no illusions about its consequences...
...Even Clarence Mitchell, the veteran Washington lobbyist for the NAACP, is not effusive in his praise of busing...
...The prime example of this is Washington, D. C., where both black and white leaders-including the bulk of the city’s liberals-promptly abandoned the school system...
...It seems difficult to believe that schools with vast resources and the latest curricula aren’t significantly better than schools with much less money and traditional course structures...
...In urban areas, curriculum directors were often shocked to find veteran teachers coming to them voluntarily in search of new approaches and methods...
...Busing is certainly not a panacea for all our educational problems...
...Although they are sometimes mistakenly lumped together, Jencks is taken far more seriously than Armor by his colleagues and does not agree with Armor’s findings...
...Money Can’t Buy Rapport Against this backdrop of teachers insulated from both real supervision and critical self-evaluation, it is possible to see why there is so little correlation in Jencks’ study between elements like expenditure levels and student achievement...
...To Armor, busing is successful only if it narrows the gap between white and black test scores...
...By non-cognitive, Jencks means virtually everything which can’t be measured by the standardized tests that are the basis of so much of Coleman’s-and Jencks’ own-data...
...Racism or Paternalism...
...I believe that busing should be defended simply because segregated schools are wrong...
...Either you see something fundamentally wrong with widespread school segregation or you don’t...
...His work is an outgrowth of the continuing debate over the guaranteed annual income and income redistribution...
...Yet suits have been brought in cities like these to “integrate” the school systems by apportioning out with mathematical exactitude the few remaining .white students and allotting them to overwhelmingly black schools...
...Busing has faded from the headlines in this year of the permanent Watergate Crisis, but by the end of June the Supreme Court is expected to decide two cases which will bring the whole dispute back into the forefront...
...In Pontiac, Michigan, for example, busing involved only residents of this grimy industrial town, leaving immune those whites affluent enough to escape to the suburbs...
...For teachers, the elements of self-fulfilling prophesy inherent in tracking can serve as a way of avoiding painful self-evaluation...
...He praises the Supreme Court-in contrast to some of the lower federal courts-for recognizing this and not buttressing any of their school desegregation decisions with social science evidence...
...But, Orfield noted, busing has instead served as a catalyst in most schools to abolish ability grouping and create heterogeneous classrooms...
...Yet on reconsideration, Jencks’ conclusions aren’t all that contrary to common sense...
...1, will provide the Court with its first opportunity to decide whether to apply to the North the same standards used in desegregating Southern school systems...
...They burned the buses in Pontiac only one week after Nixon went on television to oppose busing-he should have been a defendant in the case...
...I suspect that this is not primarily a racial problem and that veteran black teachers tend to be as remote and as intractable as their white colleagues...
...As Mrs...
...As names like Jencks, Coleman, Armor, and Pettigrew are bandied about by ‘all sides in the busing dispute, it is important to understand this deeply felt need to make social scientists “expert witnesses” on school desegregation...
...Where then does social science leave us in regard to busing...
...In line with Coleman, Jencks found: About 80 per cent of all blacks were in predominantly black schools in 1965...
...What the bargain entailed was that Atlanta’s black leadership would drop their city-wide desegregation suit in exchange for the white leadership’s promise to appoint blacks to half the administrative positions in the school system and name a black as the next school superintendent...
...Sitting across a Senate desk from Republican Senator Bill Brock of Tennessee, one of the most articulate congressional opponents of busing, I suddenly realized why liberals had believed that they needed social science evidence to justify desegregation...
...In a Northern city like Detroit, with the black population concentrated in its inner core, Pettigrew believes that the most efficient metropolitan desegregation plan would require about 25 per cent more busing than exists today...
...Findings like these seem at first to be quite otherworldly and encourage the easy conclusion that Jencks’ book is about numbers rather than real children and real schools...
...There were other changes in more predictable directions, such as drastic modifications in social studies curricula...
...Argued in April, it is the first metropolitan cross-district busing case to go before the Supreme Court...
...If black leaders ever had moral superiority in this regard, recent events in Atlanta show how equal things have become...
...And, to others, the compromise was not an epic breakthrough in administrative control, but “$500,000-worth of jobs...
...For the only reasons needed to justify integration are moral, rather than educational...
...They may not like it, but they accept it...
...Since the rise of the “black powei...
...Et voila, a book about cognitive tests...
...Instead of taking a careful look at their own failures-the deprived children of the schools-the administrators turned first of all to the symbols of learning, the teacher’s classroom equipment...
...Admittedly, they did measure factors like credentials and length of service, but even educational traditionalists will admit that such elements have little or no relationship to teacher quality...
...Although opinion polls-perhaps not the most reliable of barometers for determining the sentiments of minority groups-show that blacks strongly support busing, anti-busing leaders take great pains to demonstrate their own black support...
...Our best guess is that desegregation raises black scores by two to three points...
...For example, Senator Brock conspicuously referred to the messages he’d received from black parents, and Republican Senator Robert Griffin, Michigan’s gift to the anti-busing movement, read in a recent speech the entirety of a year-old letter from the black mayor of Insker, Michigan, urging him to “vote against massive busing...
...But with the emergence of “busing” as a noun which triggers the...
...Jencks puts it bluntly, “The only thing I’m sure about is that social scientists don’t have a shred of relevant evidence to bring to this whole busing debate...
...In Richmond, for example, large numbers of blacks live on the city’s borders adjoining the white suburbs...
...Many liberals now doubt whether ’further school desegregation is worth fighting for...
...Since white schools tended to be much more middle-class than black schools, these findings were widely advertised as an endorsement of desegregation...
...Teacher quality is not an irrelevant subject in a discussion of busing and school segregation...
...Ralph Abernathy put it recently, “If this is a ‘City Too Busy to Hate,’ I hope I’m not around when they get some time...
...but this is buried in the book’s shortest-and only non-statistical -chap t er...
...The fist real attempt to mobilize “proof’ was the 1966 Coleman Reporta massive study of school facilities, racial segregation, and academic achievement, funded by HEW and conducted by James Coleman of Johns Hopkins...
...One of the conclusions of Inequality is that the “non-cognitive effects of schooling are likely to be more important than the cognitive effects...
...Consequently, it was easy to understand liberal dismay when two studies bearing the imprimatur of Harvard announced last year that desegregation had, at best, only a minor impact on black students’ test scores...
...A teacher who fails to reach students in the “slow” track can justify his failure by reminding himself that they are certified dullards...
...Teachers faced the obvious problems of readjusting their racial attitudes, but far more significantly, they also had to come to grips with the need to modify their teaching methods...
...Less than 10 per cent of black students in Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, or Detroit attend schools with a majority white enrollment...
...But as a quantitative social scientist, Jencks can write only about that which he can measure...
...Writing in The New Yorker, Calvin Trillin quotes one group of poor black parents, who termed the agreement “trading off quality education for a few big jobs for a few big Negroes...
...Probably the most valid objection to busing is the argument that it is often “class legislation”-integrating blacks primarily with working-class whites...
...These studies touched off two distinctalthough often confusing and occasionally overlapping-academic disputes which were routinely cited in Washington to buttress each side of the busing debate...
...Learning That You Can’t Teach Gary Orfield, on leave from Princeton to serve as “scholar in residence” at the U. S. Civil Rights Commission, recently completed an extended examination of more than 15 school systems around the country, which currently employ busing...
...Since, according to Jencks, “the average white child scores about 15 points higher on standardized tests than the average black child,” or, to put it another way, “the average black 18-year-old has scores comparable to a white 14- or 15-year-old,” this is not a minor question...
...The easiest way to thwart the purpose of busing is to create segregation in the classroom through the use of tracking or ability groups...
...Situations like Pontiac gave rise to the notion that the only people supporting busing were affluent liberals who knew their children wouldn’t have to be bused...
...Where there was firm leadership, it came off well...
...so we support busing and they call us ‘paternalistic.’ ”) The tragic history of Ocean HillBrownsville and the guaranteed antipathy of the powerful teachers’ unions to future experiments along this line are some of the reasons why it is so difficult to take community control seriously as a practical alternative...
...A brilliant tactic, save for the lack of agreement among social scientists...
...Described by a supporter as “one hell of a snake-oil salesman, but our snake-oil salesman,” Pettigrew stressed that this pattern was not unique to the South...
...By now, it should be obvious how tentative and narrow the results of these muchpublicized studies really are...
...For example, the American Associa tion of School Administrators has published a pamphlet, “Christopher Jencks in Perspective,” which is largely a series of responses to quotes from Inequality like this: The character of a school’s output depends largely on a single input, namely, the characteristics of the entering children...
...It may not exude radical chic and may seem naive in this justifiably cynical age, but it has the rare virtue of being right...
...The spectre of bus burnings in Pontiac and the actual attack on a jammed school bus in Lamar, South Carolina, are cited as harbingers of national violent resistance to school busing...
...But the shock waves Jencks has caused demonstrate how few people really understand the degree to which schools are different from other large organizations in our society...
...Who else performs his daily tasks not only free from administrative supervision, but in a work environment entirely devoid the presence of any other adults...
...Catering to the educational needs of all the childreninstead of aiming the curriculum primarily at the college-bound-also gave rise to a strong emphasis on the teaching of reading and math...
...Inherent within them are some important implications about the relationship between educational bureaucracies and the classroom...
...Coleman also distressed liberals by reaching the not surprising conclusion that in determining academic achievement, home environment plays a much greater role than anything that happens in the schools...
...Frustrated by the rhetorical limitations of emotional arguments, liberals appealed to a higher authority for a final decision-the social scientist...
...Defenders of the Atlanta settlement may argue that the city-wide busing suit would have accomplished little, anyway, since the city’s school system is currently three-quarters black...
...Where desegregation has failed it has generally been because the middle class has pulled their children out of the public schools instead of giving integration a chance...
...Despite his facility with path diagrams and statistical analyses, Jencks is one person who senses the importance of the individual teacher and his attitudes...
...The tradition that the teacher is king in his own classroom means that an instructor determines his own working habits or teaching style virtually independent of all outside authority...
...Obviously, no parent should be expected to send his child to schools like these...
...The problem is at its worst in our largest cities...
...Orfield quoted one veteran teacher who had spent her career teaching the off-spring of academic families in Berkeley, California...
...White violence is very rational, it occurs only after there are signals from white politicians that it might help...
...Orfield found teachers considerably more willing to change their techniques as heterogeneous classes forced them to switch from lecturing to a style of teaching far more oriented to individual students...
...Housing patterns in the Richmond area are such that Tom Pettigrew, a professor of social psychology at Harvard, believes that a metropolitan desegregation plan could be drawn up which would actually mean less busing than exists today...
...Actually, in a city like Detroit-or Atlanta, New Orleans, Newark, Baltimore, or St...
...In any bureaucracy, those on top have extreme difficulty in controllingor even finding out-what actually happens on the lower levels where the institution actually intersects with the outside world...
...Hawking Busing, Not Snake Oil Some of the rationale behind the massive opposition to such metropolitan plans is the widespread conviction that this method of desegregation means a sharp increase ,in busing...
...Although some of the current liberal malaise over desegregation stems from considerations like these, probably the most potent factor behind their despair is the prevalent impression that social science has shown that integration accomplishes little...
...Here, too, there were problems, as almost all teachers-both white and black-had themselves never been taught black contributions to American history...
...Obviously, it would be easy to overstate the results of this preliminary research...
...For a school superintendent trying to coax more money out of the state government, it is less than reassuring to read, “We found that when we compared an impoverished high school to one that spent twice as much, students in the rich school gained no more between ninth and twelfth grades than students in the poor school...
...But while such findings can be revealing for what they say about improving education for children of all races, they should not be seized on as a new rationale for desegregation...
...Senate liberals justified their filibuster because they contended anti-busing legislation was unconstitutional...
...same parental fears once reserved for LSD, times have begun to change...
...The two studies relied on entirely different types of data...
...Black and White Together Is Still the Point by Walter Shapiro For years finding a liberal who opposed school integration was as unlikely as finding an admirer of Golda Meir in the El Fatah...
...Since both Coleman and Jencks found that there is a far greater range of abilities within a given school than between schools, the practical impact of tracking can be severe...
...Evidently, Jencks’ hope was that by demonstrating that such indirect approaches as educational reform would do little to end economic inequality, he would strengthen the case for direct income redistribution...
...In the schools which had abolished tracking, the first year of busing was literally hell...
...It is not predicated on elaborate constitutional grounds, nor does it reflect the fatalism of “the Court has spoken...
...This is not necessarily the case, partially because more than 40 per cent of all children are already bused to school for reasons of distance, not racial balance...
...not just in Atlanta but also in other predominantly black...
...Short of public sexual misconduct, it is extremely difficult for any tenured teacher to lose his job...
...What desegregation doesespecially when accompanied by the end of tracking-is to shake up these established relationships and force new patterns to emerge...
...The best answer to this objection was last year’s ruling by federal Judge Stephen Roth (currently pending in the U. S. Court of Appeals, awaiting the outcome of the Richmond case), ordering widespread busing between Detroit and more than’ 50 suburban school districts...
...There is something quite condescending in the prevalent belief that black leaders are more likely to put the interests of the group they represent ahead of their own short-term political self-interest than are their white counterparts...
...Inner-city schools tend to disproportionately attract veteran teachers-largely because salaries are highest in urban areas, due to the presence of strong teachers’ unions...
Vol. 5 • June 1973 • No. 4
