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Thursday, July 26, 2001
To students in all but a handful of schools in Western Pennsylvania, a recent Harvard University study documenting the resegregation of American schools won't come as much of a surprise.
Officially segregated schools may be a thing of the pre-Brown vs. Board of Education past, but virtually all-white and all-black schools persist, thanks to the racial composition of the communities from which pupils are drawn. According to the Harvard report released last week, 70 percent of black children nationwide attend predominantly minority schools.
In a neighborhood school system, the sort cherished by many Western Pennsylvanians, schools can only reflect the racial makeup of the community. And not only do we want our neighborhood schools -- we apparently want neighborhood school districts as well. By deliberation or design, a majority of the state's incredible aggregation of 501 school districts are deeply segregated.
Pennsylvania ranked poorly on one key measure of segregation in the Harvard report: Nearly half the state's black students attended schools in 1998-99 composed completely, or nearly so, of minorities. The figure puts the state sixth in the nation in that category, according to Gary Orfield, co-director of Harvard's Civil Rights Project.
Nationwide, about 70 percent of black children attended predominantly minority schools in 1998-99, the report noted. That marks an increase from 66 percent in 1991-92 and 63 percent in 1980-81.
Besides the social problems that racial isolation brings, why is school resegregation a bad sign? As Mr. Orfield noted, high-minority schools almost without exception also are high-poverty schools. And poverty correlates with other problems -- uninvolved parents, less-qualified teachers, fewer classroom resources and higher absenteeism among teachers and students.
Given segregated housing patterns, what can be done to integrate public education? A consolidation of tiny contiguous school districts could be one remedy. But mergers have been attempted and have failed. Mere suggestions of mergers involving the Moon, Montour, Sto-Rox, Cornell, Clairton, Midland and other school districts have led to community outrage -- with undercurrents of racial and class bias.
Emotions were just as strong when five districts -- four predominantly white, one mostly black -- merged through a federal court order to form Woodland Hills School District in 1981. Today, the result is possibly the most racially diverse suburban district in the state, and its individual schools also are racially diverse.
Even in the city of Pittsburgh, where a comprehensive desegregation plan has helped lead the district to a ratio of 40.3 percent white students and 55.4 percent black students, some schools are nearly all-black or all-white.
A move to countywide school districts would be an immense undertaking in Pennsylvania -- and of course many of the state's 67 counties simply aren't racially diverse. But in other areas, consolidation of school districts would bring not only efficiency, a broader tax base and more educational offerings, but also greater racial integration.
And then -- who knows? -- maybe neighborhood grocery stores, playgrounds and ball parks would begin to reflect the racial diversity of the schools.