Black America and School Choice: Charting a New Course

Abstract

The dominant perspective among those who have examined behavioral, academic, psychological, and cultural consequences of Brown and its progeny. Brown reinforced centralization of education establishment and resulted in forced of certain schools and districts. Dr. Doris Wilkinson, Professor of Sociology at University of Kentucky, has compared education of black America during era of Jim Crow with post-Brown developments described above. She concludes: Public school and associated demolition of black school has had a devastating impact on African American children - their self-esteem, motivation to succeed, conceptions of heroes or role models, respect for adults, and academic performance. Racial animosities have also intensified. Unless rational alternatives are devised that take into account uniqueness of African American heritage, busing and compulsory school will become even more destructive to their health and ultimately to nation as a whole. The teachers, administrators, and school boards of both urban and suburban school districts are overwhelmingly white, and relatively few black children attend suburban schools, representing most of integration that exists in public schools. Minority children ride bus to attend schools with strangers - children belonging to another neighborhood, racial group, and social class. With only a handful of black students in each classroom, they experience prolonged isolation in predominantly white settings, where they are often exposed to denigrating racial imagery from teachers, tracking, low expectations, or race hatred. According to one writer, the basic assumption of those endorsing theory that a school district has overcome its history of racial discrimination is that a school district can be expected to treat minority students fairly without court supervision because there are no longer racial barriers. However, this illogical approach to equal educational opportunities has negatively impacted black students from both middle- and low-income families, former often as much as latter. Black America has devoted its energy and resources to fighting a losing battle. The Court's rejection of most viable school desegregation plans, coupled with reality that policies have produced hoped-for improvement of quality of educational opportunities for African Americans requires a reformulation of meaning of Brown rather than more fruitless school desegregation litigation. Accordingly, I would reinterpret constitutional imperative of Brown as requiring equal access to quality educational programs. Thus, a school district that did not purposefully assign students based on their race would fall within zone of defensibility, if not actual compliance, with mandate of Brown if it made concerted efforts to raise substantially quality of educational opportunities afforded to black children in their own neighborhoods. At very least, good faith efforts to convert litigation resources into education resources for those with most pressing needs would help to promote equal protection. The Detroit School Board's efforts to establish all-male academies were persuasive because officials assumed an affirmative obligation to work with parents and to involve community in bringing about desired changes to troubled system. Much of education literature supports Helaine Greenfeld's theory that what equal protection may require, in this situation, is providing African-American and white students with what they both need, respectively, to derive an equal benefit from their schooling.