Race or Place? Emerging Public Perspectives on Urban Education

Abstract

Americans view the broad goal of racially integrated education positively and a specific means of achieving that goal, busing of students, negatively. But we know relatively little about how residents of urban areas assess their schools, and we know next to nothing about what they think should be done to improve the schools. Nor do we know whether racially integrated education, once seen as a virtual panacea for improving the schools in heavily minority areas, is still seen in the same light, or whether school integration had its day as a rallying point, as Glenn Loury (1997) has recently argued. That is, are residents of urban areas, whites and nonwhites alike, concerned primarily about the quality of the schools and relatively unconcerned about racial balance per se? If so, the tide would have turned sharply since the days of Brown v. Board, the desegregation of Little Rock Central, and the legal, political, and street battles over busing. For the last few years, we have been studying issues of race relations in the specific context of one notably, but not uniquely, troubled metropolitan area, Detroit. Here we use survey data we gathered in a 1992 in-home survey of 1124 Detroit area residents-658 blacks and 466 whites re-