New Coleman Report

Much of the thrust toward school desegregation was provided by the 1966 Coleman Report, which demonstrated statistically that black students learn more in integrated classrooms. Now the author of that report, University of Chicago Sociologist James S. Coleman, has completed another study on school integration that is likely to be as controversial--and perhaps as influential--as his first. Coleman's conclusion: "Programs of desegregation have acted to further separate blacks and whites rather than bring them together."

The blame, says Coleman, lies largely in the forced massive busing of students in big cities. When confronted with the possibility that their children will have to go to school with large numbers of blacks, many middle-class white families move to the suburbs or head for private schools. Says Coleman: "Busing has subjected middle-class white parents to things that they don't want --the possibility of lower reading levels and greater discipline problems in their children's classrooms."

Coleman's latest study, sponsored by the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank, analyzed racial data and trends in U.S. public schools from 1968 to 1973. When only small numbers of well-behaved, well-scrubbed black children were involved in busing, Coleman says, white parents did not resist too much. Indeed, busing has continued to work well in some smaller school systems. But when busing began to involve large numbers of low-income blacks from big-city ghettos, whites started to move away. Apparently confirming what opponents of forced busing have maintained all along, Coleman says: "Busing does not work."

No Tools. Critics were quick to call the report premature and unsubstantiated. NAACP Executive Director Roy Wilkens wondered whether Coleman was being used to "draw the Negro away from the courts." But Coleman still firmly believes in school integration. The problem, he says, lies in the way that courts have tried to bring it about. "It is ludicrous to attempt to mandate an integrated society. Integration must come through other means."

Some of those means, Coleman feels, are local school boards and state legislatures--because their actions require a consensus. But he believes that successful integration in the U.S. will also depend on "voluntary factors," including more racial intermarriage.

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