Promises Unfulfilled

Originally published on May 16, 2004.

In May 1954, Thurgood Marshall was a newly famous African American lawyer flush from victory before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the justices had handed him and the nation a decision that arguably was their most important in the 20th century: Racially separate education was inherently unequal education, and the segregation of schools by law was unconstitutional.

With that, a door closed on a body of Southern state statutes that mocked the ideals of post-World War II America. And a door opened for the civil rights movement.

Marshall, the NAACP's lead counsel, told reporters afterward that classrooms nationwide would be integrated in "up to five years." He went on to predict that, by the 1963 centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, the country would be free of segregation.

It did not happen in five years.

It has not happened in 50.

As the nation marks the anniversary of the Brown ruling tomorrow, public education in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, as in many Northern states, is dramatically segregated. Far more segregated, in fact, than schools today in the old "Jim Crow" states targeted by the high court in 1954. The latter, which include Delaware, are among the most integrated in the country.

"Brown dealt with the South," said William Taylor, a renowned civil rights lawyer who got his start working for Marshall that year. Elsewhere in America, "there were different stories."

One needn't leave home to find them.

New Jersey and Pennsylvania turn up near the top of the school-segregation list. A study by the Harvard Civil Rights Project puts them, respectively, in fifth and sixth place, behind Michigan, Illinois, New York and Maryland.

Here, one of every two black and Hispanic children goes to a school that is at least 90 percent minority, the formal threshold for "racial isolation."

The concentration of minorities in schools that are also usually poor and underperforming is so intense that integration, many experts suggest, may be a goal whose time has gone.

"The Brown decision ended a pernicious system of racial division by law; it did not end segregation in fact," U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige said in a speech earlier this year. "There is an emerging de facto educational apartheid in this country. It is a tragedy and a scandal."

If the color lines are boldly drawn through New Jersey and Pennsylvania, they are starker still in the Philadelphia region.

The school-age population throughout the eight counties is more diverse than ever, with 445,000 white children, 208,000 African American and 54,000 Hispanic (the area's fastest growing ethnic group).

Yet in an analysis of the 166 districts, The Inquirer found that six in 10 black students and five in 10 Hispanics go to schools almost wholly minority. Four in 10 whites are in schools racially isolated on the flip side.

"The central cities of the large metropolitan areas are the epicenters of segregation," the Harvard study reported.

Philadelphia bears that out.

More than 30 years ago, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission went to Commonwealth Court to try to force a desegregation plan from the district. At the time, 70 percent of the city schools were racially isolated, either black or white.

The district dug in its heels at the commission's demand for mandatory busing. But since the early 1980s, when Constance Clayton became the city's first African American school superintendent, the district has bused tens of thousands of children in a voluntary program and poured millions of extra dollars into heavily minority schools.

Whatever integrating effect that might have had over the years has been all but neutralized - in part by white flight from the city, and in part by a parochial and private school tradition with few equals in the country.

Today, 169 of Philadelphia's 263 public schools, or about two-thirds, are almost exclusively minority. Two are 90 percent or more white. The Human Relations Commission lawsuit, still in Commonwealth Court, is no longer focused on desegregation but on resources for poor schools.

The story in the suburban ring is scarcely better.

Bucks, Montgomery, Delaware and Chester Counties have 63 districts and about 38,000 black students. One-third of those children are clustered in just three troubled, predominantly minority systems: Chester Upland and William Penn in Delaware County, and Norristown Area in Montgomery County.

The three area South Jersey counties - Burlington, Camden and Gloucester - are uncannily similar. Of their 45,000 black students, more than one-third are in three of the 102 districts: Camden, Willingboro and Winslow.

Ask why things are as they are, and the stock answer has been parental decision-making.

"The Northern argument was that people chose where to live based on market decisions, that it was a free market. It wasn't," said Tom Sugrue, a University of Pennsylvania historian and authority on race in urban America.

Often behind private decisions have been public policies and practices that have allowed and even encouraged segregation, particularly in Northeast states with many autonomous local governments. Pennsylvania has 2,566; New Jersey, 566.

When it came to zoning laws that kept out affordable housing by prescribing large house lots, or property tax systems that led to vast school-funding inequities, Brown did not level the playing field for blacks and whites.

"In many respects, government has acted at cross-purposes here," said Bruce Katz, a specialist in metropolitan growth for the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

"On one hand it says, 'We don't want segregation in the schools.' On the other, it has almost dictated - through housing, infrastructure, land use - that there will be segregation."

For a couple of decades after Brown, activists argued to the courts that such policies were just less blatant Northern versions of the Southern laws that had been found unconstitutional. They had little success.

One case in particular closed off what many integrationists in big Northern cities considered the only remedy for segregation: the creation of regional districts.

J. Richardson Dilworth, Philadelphia's mayor from 1956-62 and then its school board president, maintained that the state needed to reconfigure the districts in the five counties. Otherwise, the suburbs would form a "white noose" around the city.

"Instead of these little suburban districts and this one massive Philadelphia district," he said in 1965, "we should set up about 12 districts in the area."

Milliken v. Bradley settled that. In the 1974 case, out of Detroit, the Supreme Court ruled the suburbs off-limits to the desegregation plans of cities where the schools had become majority-black - unless it could be proven that the government had deliberately created the segregation. The vote was 5-4, with Justice Thurgood Marshall among the dissenting justices.

"You could say the real story was Milliken," said Sugrue. "White opponents of school desegregation in the North won. Whites could move, and most did. They may have lost the skirmish, but they won the war. They continued to send their children to all-white schools with better resources than black schools."

In striking contrast, federal courts did turn up the enforcement heat on the Southern states at which the Brown ruling had been aimed. Schools there were ordered to undo the effects of their "separate and unequal" pasts, even if it meant mandatory busing.

Delaware was one of those states. After a long fight that the state lost in 1978, the Wilmington district was disbanded, cut into four wedges, and melded with its New Castle County suburbs. As many as 24,000 students, black and white, have been bused daily for desegregation.

Today, although one-third of Delaware's public-school students are African American, only about 8 percent go to schools that are 90 percent or more minority.

In National Assessment of Educational Progress tests from 1998 to 2003, Delaware's black fourth graders scored greater gains than any other state's in reading. Black eighth graders' math scores also leapt significantly, to above the national average for African Americans.

In Delaware's public schools, as throughout the country, the test-score gap between black and white remains. But it is smaller than in most states - and much smaller than in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

How much, if any, of that is attributable to the desegregation, no one has been able to say.

Delaware, however, might not be the model of classroom integration for long.

In the last decade, federal judges have ended most of the desegregation orders that flowed from Brown, declaring the states had done all they could to eliminate the "last vestiges" of segregation.

Delaware's was lifted in 1995. When districts did not stop their busing fast enough, the legislature in 2000 passed the Neighborhood Schools Act, forcing them to draw up plans to send children to schools nearest their homes.

That process is still going on, among predictions that it could jettison some schools back into racial isolation.

Being against neighborhood schools "is like being against motherhood and apple pie," said Nancy Doorey, school board president in the Brandywine district."But people had no information what would actually happen. It would create winners and losers" - the losers being "the children who are society's most vulnerable."

Fifty years after Brown, "separate" has become almost a given in the debate over equal education for minority children across wide sections of the country.

In the quest for high-quality instruction, and a way to close the racial achievement gap, the talk is less of mixing black and white than black and green.

"A lot of the thinking says is the way it is, and there is nothing to do about it," said Taylor, the civil rights lawyer."If you have public schools so isolated by race and class, how do you introduce fresh efforts of equal opportunity?"

One answer has come from New Jersey.

While it hasn't managed to achieve widespread integration in its schools, New Jersey has dealt with poor, mostly minority districts in a radically pioneering way.

In the landmark Abbott v. Burke case, the New Jersey Supreme Court opened the funding floodgates for 30 such districts, including Camden and Trenton.

Since 1997, the New Jersey Department of Education has poured $22.4 billion into them. In testing, a handful of districts now have scores rivaling their once-wealthier counterparts'.

Abbott "represents the most comprehensive effort to improve the education of disadvantaged children in the nation," said David Sciarra, director of the Newark-based Education Law Center, which represented the state's children in the case.

At the same time, Abbott is no homage to the spirit of Brown, he said. It is, instead, the legal descendant of the 1896 case, Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the high court decided that railroads could put blacks in separate cars as long as accommodations were equal. In that ruling, which Brown overturned, are Abbott's roots, Sciarra said.

He added: "The idea we should be celebrating Brown v. Board of Education in New Jersey is, frankly, ridiculous."

Perhaps no more so than in Pennsylvania, though.

The state has not only one of the highest school-segregation rankings in the country, but also one of the lowest achievement levels for African American students and one of the least equitable education-funding systems.

"The courts acted on the worst excesses of segregation in the '60s, but after that did nothing about issues of real equality," said Michael Churchill, an attorney with the Public Interest Law Center of Pennsylvania.

The commonwealth has what once was the most powerful state agency in the country with the authority to impose desegregation orders. Six years after it was formed in 1961, in a court case involving the Chester City schools, the Human Relations Commission won the right to force student reassignment and busing, even if the segregation was deemed unintentional.

After that coup, it intervened in more than two dozen districts, including Philadelphia.

"Some developed plans, others developed insufficient plans, others ignored us," said Michael Hardiman, the commission's regional counsel.

From time to time, the legislature threatened to take away the commission's power to force reassignments - and finally did in 1996, after an unpopular busing order in the Pittsburgh area.

Since the 1990s, lawmakers have instead embraced privatization, charters and state takeovers - namely, of the Philadelphia and Chester Upland districts - as a way of dealing with low-achieving, often minority districts. None of those strategies has equalized funding.

Proposals to reform the state's property-tax system, which benefits wealthier districts and wallops the poorest, have gone nowhere in Harrisburg.

Gov. Rendell proposed raising the state income tax to increase Pennsylvania's share of public-school funding. Today, his plan to pump an extra $650 million into programs aimed largely at the state's youngest and poorest children has been pared to $224 million. The legislature has yet to approve even that.

"We take folks with the most problems and give them the least amount," said Sugrue, the Penn historian. "In education, to whom little is given, much is expected. . . . It's a perverse way of thinking about public policy."

For two years, the federal law known as No Child Left Behind has stirred both hope and fear.

Hope that it might finally narrow the racial achievement gap.

And fear that, by focusing parents' attention on test scores, it could cause segregation in the nation's schools to deepen.

The law sets an ambitious goal: All children will be proficient in math, reading and science by 2014. Schools that do not improve enough each year must give up some federal funds for tutoring or allow students to transfer to better schools.

U.S. Education Secretary Paige describes No Child Left Behind as "the logical extension" of Brown. Christopher Edley, cofounder of the Harvard Civil Rights Project, calls it "a civil rights statute."

Because of No Child, Edley said, the long legacy of educational inequity is being shoved between the nation's eyes, with Washington's demand that something be done about it.

Critics complain that although the law allows children in failing schools to transfer to better ones, they are largely limited to their own usually troubled districts. And even Edley is among those who say that No Child doesn't provide enough money to help districts with many disadvantaged students meet the challenge - one measured by tests.

"The focus on scores has the potential to resegregate," said Amy Stuart Wells, a professor at Teachers' College in New York.

Wells studied 600 graduates of the Class of 1980 at six desegregated high schools throughout the country. Most told her the diversity had been good for them.

Yet now, when it comes to placing their own children in schools, three-quarters of the whites choose majority-white schools. Many said they would prefer better-integrated schools but cannot find any in which the scores are as high.

"There used to be less pressure to have your kids in high-achieving schools," Wells said, "and if you chose diversity over test scores, you weren't dooming them."

Schools must be accountable, she said, but "when we say we want good schools, we need to think about that in a more complex way. We want kids to do well on . We also want them to get along in a society where people don't look like each other."

Contact staff writer Dale Mezzacappa at 215-854-5112 or dmezzacappa@phillynews.com.

Staff writers Diane Mastrull and Anthony R. Wood contributed to this article.

The Brown Case

Oliver L. Brown et.al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka was an amalgam of five segregation cases from Kansas, Delaware, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington, D.C., combined by the U.S. Supreme Court under the name of one plaintiff.

A Topeka, Kan., parent, Brown had to send his daughter to an all-black elementary school two miles from home. The city had 18 neighborhood schools for whites and four for African Americans, permissible under an 1879 Kansas law.

In 1950, the Topeka NAACP gathered a group of 13 black parents to try to enroll their 20 children in the white schools nearest their homes. All were turned away. A class-action lawsuit was filed on their behalf in U.S. District Court, which ruled against them.

The Brown case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and argued by Thurgood Marshall, of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, in December 1952.