When Public Schools Aren't Color-Blind

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Worse, by stressing racial balancing, critics say, you take the focus off improving educational outcome. Thirty years of seating black students next to white ones has failed to close Jefferson County's achievement gap. Black high school students still trail their white counterparts by 25% in reading-proficiency tests and by 34% in math. The gap is closely linked to factors like parents' education level and income, which no amount of school balancing is likely to fix. "We have the most integrated school system in the country," says Carmen Weathers, a retired Jefferson County schoolteacher. "That sounds good on a business brochure, but it has nothing to do with education."

Weathers, who is black, favors a return to schools that are all or mostly black because he thinks the teachers would be more attuned to the particular needs and learning styles of some black students. But where are those teachers supposed to come from? Raoul Cunningham, who heads the local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., points out that it is harder to recruit experienced teachers to work in largely minority schools. Critics "blame all the ills of the current system on desegregation," he says. "Desegregation did not cause the achievement gap."

One challenge facing the Jefferson County school district is to convince the Supreme Court that racial integration not only does no harm but offers concrete benefits that would be lost without the guidelines. To help make this case, 553 social scientists--including professors at Harvard, the University of Hawaii and myriad institutions in between--have submitted a friend- of-the-court brief detailing how racial integration in schools reduces prejudice and prepares students to enter a diverse workforce. More support will come from a study to be released this week showing that blacks and Latinos perform better academically in integrated schools. Based on an analysis of No Child Left Behind data conducted by Doug Harris, an assistant professor at Florida State University, the study reveals that test scores of minority students in high-minority schools fall about 4 percentile points a year behind those of minority students in lower-minority schools.

Meredith's lawsuit seeks an end to the guidelines (and $25,000 in damages for her son, who was eventually admitted to the school that originally rejected him and is now a fourth-grader there). While dozens of civic organizations, the Louisville Chamber of Commerce and five former Secretaries of Education have sided with the school district, the Bush Administration has taken up Meredith's cause. The Solicitor General submitted a brief arguing that schools should not be in the business of racial balancing and that even Brown v. Board Ed. declared that public schools should ultimately admit students "on a nonracial basis."