Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge
Introduction
The
country has experienced a large increase in students attending
multiracial schools, defined here as schools with more than a tenth of
students from each of three or more racial groups. These are schools
that can either be integrated across racial and class lines or schools
that combine three highly impoverished communities of different racial
backgrounds. They offer both challenges and possibilities, but almost
no attention is being paid to studying them or to developing curriculum
and training to help realize their possibilities. The substantial
increase of whites attending multiracial schoolsÑthe percentage of
white students in such schools has doubled in less than two decadesÑ
may well be one of the reasons why whites tend to believe that progress
is being made on integration even as segregation deepens, on average,
for black and Latino students. The report also indicates that the frontier of racial
change and school resegregation is now in the suburbs, where about a
third of black and Latino students attend school. Even though there is
a large white majority in suburban schools, two million black and
Latino suburban students currently attend highly segregated schools. By
contrast, only 2% of suburban white students attend these same
segregated minority schools, while a majority attends suburban schools
with at least 80% of white students. After two decades of a hostile
Supreme Court and two terms of a presidency committed to reversing
civil rights gains, only the nation's small towns and rural areas
retain substantially integrated schools. The report concludes that efforts to make separate
schools equal, which have been the dominant approach since the federal
government abandoned significant positive support for integration
almost three decades ago, have failed. This failure includes No Child
Left Behind, which was supposed to quickly equalize achievement across
racial lines but has fallen far short. Instead, it is sanctioning
scores of segregated minority schools without providing them enough
help to make a difference. The report notes that too often the high
hopes accompanying a racial change in leadershipÑwhen, for example,
black or Latino mayors and school superintendents were first
appointed--were often disappointed since the underlying racial barriers
to opportunity were not addressed. Orfield, the report's author, calls
on the incoming Obama Administration to "make the first serious
commitment since President Johnson's Administration and build
successfully integrated communities and schools wherever there are
feasible opportunities." The report includes a discussion of a number
of possible tools and techniques with the potential to extend past
successes. Finally, the report calls on the new administration and
Congress to review the evidence and provide the needed leadership, for
example, to support integrated communities and to avoid the large-scale
ghettoization of suburbia.
