THE END OF INTEGRATION

By JAMES S. KUNEN

In room CCII (make that 202) of Martin Luther King Latin Grammar Middle School in Kansas City, Missouri, Ms. Dickerson's rhetoric students are engaged in a public-speaking contest. Sixth-grader Jo Ann Carter, dressed in the school uniform of white blouse and plaid skirt, has chosen a speech by the school's eponym: "If something isn't done, and in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect," she declaims forcefully, "the whole world is doomed."

Jo Ann's mother Catherine Carter looks on approvingly. Jo Ann has earned all A's except for a B in phys ed, and her mother's got the report cards in her pocketbook to prove it. "I was lucky to get her into this school," says Carter, a medical secretary. King, a one-story brick building in a ramshackle area well east of Troost Avenue--Kansas City's approximate racial dividing line--offers an enriched program of classical language and related subjects such as rhetoric. "Well, not lucky--I lied. She didn't get in the first time, so I applied again and said she was white."

This is what things have come to in the latter days of school desegregation in Kansas City. For the sake of desegregation, blacks are sometimes barred from the most popular schools on account of their race, lest they tilt the enrollment too far from the goal of 35% white students. Like most urban systems, the Kansas City, Missouri, School District (KCMSD) has lost white students to the suburbs in droves, which has made the task of achieving racial balance nearly impossible. After deciding that inner-city students could not be bused out to the suburbs as part of a mandatory desegregation plan, a federal district court ordered the state and KCMSD to spend $1.7 billion to create a top-notch system, in part to lure suburban whites. Then, last June, the Supreme Court decreed that the district court had no authority to order expenditures aimed at attracting suburban whites.

When the history of court-ordered school desegregation is written, Kansas City may go down as its Waterloo. Said to be the nation's most ambitious and expensive magnet plan, Kansas City's effort is unlikely to be matched anywhere. In fact, the high court's action has accelerated the pace at which cities across the country are moving to undo mandatory desegregation (see map). And the federal judiciary, which long staked its authority on the enforcement of desegregation orders, appears eager to depart the field. Chris Hansen of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York City observes, "The courts are saying, 'We still agree with the goal of school desegregation, but it's too hard, and we're tired of it, and we give up.'"

After two decades of progress toward integration, the separation of black children in America's schools is on the rise and is in fact approaching the levels of 1970, before the first school bus rolled at the order of a court. Nationally, fully a third of black public school students attend schools where the enrollment is 90% to 100% minority--that is, black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American. In the Northeast, the country's most segregated region, half of all black students attend such schools. "We have already seen the maximum amount of racial mixing in public schools that will exist in our lifetime," says University of Indiana law professor Kevin Brown, an expert on race and education. The combination of legal revisionism and residential segregation is effectively ending America's bold attempt to integrate the public schools.

This historic reversal has been welcomed by many in the African-American community. In some cities--Denver, for example--the dismantling of mandatory desegregation has been initiated by black leaders, since it is often black children who bear the brunt of such plans--forced to travel long distances to schools where they may not be welcome. In Yonkers, New York, late last year the local leader of the N.A.A.C.P. was suspended by the national organization for declaring that busing had outlived its usefulness. Clinton Adams Jr., a black attorney who is sufficiently abrasive to qualify as a militant in Kansas City--a town so even-tempered that car horns are blown only to warn of impending collisions--takes an even harder line. "The most egregious injustice is the situation where suburban white kids get priority over resident African-American kids, who are the adjudicated victims of segregation," he says. "That's atrocious. Just to try to achieve some kind of mythical benefit that black kids will receive by sitting next to a white kid?"

Homer A. Plessy, described in court papers as "of mixed descent, in the proportion of seven-eighths Caucasian and one-eighth African blood," bought himself a first-class ticket from New Orleans to Covington, Louisiana, and took a seat reserved for whites on the East Louisiana Railway. He was jailed for violating an exquisitely even-handed, race-neutral statute that forbade members of either race to occupy accommodations set aside for the other--with the exception of "nurses attending the children of the other race." Plessy insisted he was white, and when that failed, argued that criminal-court judge John H. Ferguson had violated his constitutional right to the equal protection of the laws.

In its ruling on Plessy v. Ferguson, announced May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court declared laws mandating that "equal but separate" treatment of the races "do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race," and cited the widely accepted propriety of separate schools for white and colored children. In dissent, Justice John Harlan remarked, "The thin disguise of 'equal' accommodations...will not mislead any one, nor atone for the wrong this day done."

But the thin disguise endured for a half-century, until a series of school-segregation cases culminating in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal" and violate the Constitution's equal-protection guarantee, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled on May 17, 1954. A year later, the court ruled that school districts must admit black students on a nondiscriminatory basis "with all deliberate speed" and instructed the federal district courts to retain jurisdiction "during this period of transition."

The nation is still in that period of transition, observes Kenneth Clark, 81, the black sociologist upon whose work the Brown decision in part relied. "I didn't realize how deep racism was in America, and I suppose the court didn't realize it either," he says. Ten years after Brown, when only 2% of black children in the South attended schools with whites, the court announced, "The time for mere 'deliberate speed' has run out." In 1968 the court declared that discrimination must be "eliminated root and branch." In 1971, noting that about 40% of American schoolchildren routinely rode buses to and from school anyway, the court held in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education that the federal courts could order busing to desegregate schools.

Busing broke the back of segregation in the South, where 36.4% of black students attended majority-white schools by 1972. But Chief Justice Warren Burger's opinion in Swann also opened the door for the federal courts to get out of the integration business. Once legally enforced segregation was eliminated, he wrote, single-race schools would not offend the Constitution unless some agency of the government had deliberately resegregated them.

Since the end of World War II, as blacks have streamed into the cities in search of work, whites have streamed out--in search of greener lawns and whiter neighbors. Anytime blacks were able to breach the wall of restrictive covenants, brokers' steering and mortgage redlining to begin to integrate a neighborhood, white flight and resegregation quickly followed. By 1970, with the white birthrate plunging, Northern urban school districts, which seldom extend beyond city limits, lacked enough white children to desegregate.

A dearth of whites led a federal court to order the city of Detroit to integrate its schools with those of 53 surrounding districts. In 1974 the Supreme Court struck down that order, holding in Milliken v. Bradley that suburban districts could not be ordered to help desegregate a city's schools unless those suburbs had been involved in illegally segregating them in the first place. Justice Thurgood Marshall warned in dissent that the court had set a course that would allow "our great metropolitan areas to be divided up each into two cities--one white, the other black..."

That is exactly what happened. School segregation exacerbated residential segregation, as whites chose not to live in neighborhoods served by predominantly minority schools. Detroit's public school system is now 94% minority. By 1990, in the 18 largest Northern metropolitan areas, blacks had become so isolated that 78% of them would have had to move in order to achieve an evenly distributed residential pattern. The Milliken ruling, says Indiana University's Brown, "eliminated all hope of meaningful desegregation in most of the country's major urban areas."

This was the state of affairs when, in 1976, the Federal Government threatened to cut off funds to the KCMSD because it had maintained a dual system of segregated schools. Pro-integration kitchen-table activists who had won control of the KCMSD school board responded by suing suburban school districts and the State of Missouri, arguing that they had worked to confine blacks to the inner city.

Until the Brown decision, schools were segregated by law in Missouri; after it, the state allowed desegregation at the discretion of local school boards. Many of the suburban districts (parts of which extended into the city) had not allowed blacks to attend high school, forcing black families to move into central Kansas City in search of education. As the city's minority population grew, the KCMSD redrew school-attendance zones hundreds of times and bused some black children far from their neighborhoods in order to keep the races apart.

Federal District Judge Russell G. Clark, a conservative Democrat, ruled that the state and KCMSD had violated the Constitution, but he dropped the outer districts from the case, finding insufficient proof that they they had acted illegally--a decision he would have cause to regret. "The very minute I let those suburban school districts out, I created a very severe problem for the court and for myself, really, in trying to come up with a remedial plan to integrate the Kansas City, Missouri, School District," the judge reflected years later. "The more salt you have, the more white you can turn the pepper. And without any salt, or with a limited amount of salt, you're going to end up with a basically black mixture."

KCMSD's only remaining hope for racial balance was a system of magnet schools designed to lure whites back from private schools and the suburban districts. In 1986 Judge Clark ordered such a plan. After the KCMSD's enrollment became majority black in 1970, the district's voters, who remained majority white, had allowed the schools to literally fall apart, rejecting funding initiatives 19 times while pipes burst and ceilings collapsed. In addition to smaller classes and higher teacher salaries, Judge Clark's order required renovation of 55 schools and construction of 17. When the school district failed to come up with its quarter of the cost--Clark had laid three-quarters of the bill on the state--the judge took the unusual step of doubling the local property tax. The money bought, among other things, a planetarium, radio and TV studios, and 1,000 computers for Central High School's 1,069 students. Central, which before Clark's order was awash in broken toilets and overrun by rodents, now occupies a $32 million building that resembles a small city's airline terminal and features an Olympic-size swimming pool.

The KCMSD's annual per-pupil expenditure, excluding capital costs, reached $9,412 last year, an amount exceeded by perhaps 40 of the nation's 14,881 school districts. All together, as of this February, $1.7 billion has been spent under court order in Kansas City.

Sugar Creek Elementary is a French-immersion school. An integrated teaching staff of native French speakers recruited from France, Belgium, Canada, Haiti, Egypt and Cameroon keep the children speaking only French, from the Pledge of Allegiance ("Je declare fidelite au drapeau des Etats-Unis...") through recess to the end of the day. The kids even talk out of turn in French. "They're so eager to learn everything, they pick it up like a sponge," says kindergarten teacher Janet Lawrence.

A third of the students are white, and a third of those come from outside the district--transported by parents such as Virgil Adams. (The state stopped paying for transportation into the district this year.) Adams or his wife makes a 28-mile round-trip drive twice a day from Blue Springs, a suburb of tidy lawns and two-car garages, so that Sarah can go to second grade and William to third at Sugar Creek. They were drawn by the foreign-language instruction, but Adams, an fbi agent based in Kansas City, sees the social mix itself as an important advantage. "Somewhere on the news one night the word nigger was used," he recalls. "My son asked me what it meant. I thought that was great; if he'd been around my dad three or four days in a row, he'd have known. We didn't want to bring up our kids that way."

For all its moral appeal, however, the Kansas City plan's achievements appear modest when weighed against its enormous expense. The number of out-of-district white children enrolled at the magnet schools peaked at 1,476 last year. Standardized test scores have registered slight gains. White flight, while substantially slowed, has not been reversed: in 1985, the year before the magnet plan began, the district was 73.6% minority; this year it is 75.9% minority. If nothing else, horrible school facilities have been replaced with nice new ones, and for some that is justification enough. "I bet a lot of kids in Kansas City are enjoying their childhood more now that they don't have to go to schools that smell," says author Jonathan Kozol, a longtime chronicler of educational injustice. "A good society would consider that money well spent."

His is not the prevailing view in Missouri, where for the past decade candidates for just about any office have been running against what much of the electorate perceives as Judge Clark's liberal-from-hell spending spree. Attorney General Jay Nixon expresses outrage that the state has spent $2.6 billion on court-ordered school desegregation in metropolitan St. Louis and Kansas City. He is seeking "unitary status"--that is, an end to court supervision based on a judicial finding that the system is desegregated--in both cities. "I'm a Democrat, and I want to help kids' educations," he says. "But to see the fencing team in Kansas City sent to Hungary because it showed up good in the focus groups and the whites would think it's cool, is just ridiculous."

The U.S. Supreme Court evidently agrees. In Missouri v. Jenkins, the court held last June that Judge Clark had no authority to order the state and district to pay for a plan aimed at attracting suburban students. Chief Justice William Rehnquist pointedly reminded the district court that its ultimate goal was not to achieve racial balance but "to restore state and local authorities to the control" of the school system. Once the lingering effects of legally enforced segregation were eliminated, it would be perfectly legal for the district to run schools that happened to be all black or all white. As Justice Clarence Thomas explained, "The Constitution does not prevent individuals from choosing to live together, to work together, or to send their children to school together, so long as the State does not interfere with their choices on the basis of race."

For the KCMSD, Missouri v. Jenkins portends a big reduction in the state's extraordinary desegregation payments. For court-ordered desegregation generally, the decision's implications could be dire. Says associate director of the naacp Legal Defense Fund Ted Shaw, who argued the Kansas City case before the high court: "If the courts say unitary status means school districts just have to get to the point where a desegregated snapshot can be taken, and then they can go back to the segregating school assignments they had before--if that's all Brown has done, it's been a big charade."

If resegregation is indeed the wave of the future, then the future can be glimpsed in Norfolk, Virginia. Norfolk won federal court approval of a return to neighborhood schools back in 1986, for the stated purpose of increasing parental involvement and arresting white flight. Black parents had sued to block the new plan because it would immediately render 10 elementary schools, many of them serving housing projects, 100% black. Sociologist David Armor, retained as an expert witness by the school board, predicted that if Norfolk's crosstown busing continued, the whole school system would soon become 75% black, making racial balance impossible. "Civil rights groups have always discounted the importance of whites," he says today, "which has always been a mystery to me. It's as though their goal were some abstract equity thing, as opposed to actual integration." The court accepted Armor's argument.

"It was turning back the clock. It was like being told you have to go to the back of the bus," recalls Lucy Wilson, then an associate dean at Old Dominion University and one of two black school-board members who initially voted against the plan. When the federal court's ruling rendered the return to neighborhood schools inevitable, Wilson and the other dissenter changed their votes in exchange for a commitment that the all-black schools would be targeted for extra resources, though Wilson doubts the promise will be kept forever. (As Harvard School of Education sociologist Gary Orfield has observed, "A less powerful group isn't going to get disproportionate resources for a very long time from a more powerful group. It requires that water flow uphill.") For the 1993-94 school year, the district's average expenditure per pupil in the black "target" elementary schools was $736 higher than at Norfolk's other elementaries, while class size averaged 20 pupils, two or three fewer than at the other schools.

Still, test scores dropped at the 10 target schools after the end of busing. In 1991 black third-graders in the target schools scored 5 percentage points lower than black third-graders in the remaining integrated elementaries on a battery of tests. Last year black third-graders in the target schools tested 10 percentage points lower.

Young Park Elementary occupies a well-kept building set among the barracks-like structures of Norfolk's Young Terrace public housing project. Of its 341 students, 98% are black and 94% are poor enough to qualify for the free-lunch program. This year so far, the parents or guardians of 60 to 70 kids have joined the PTA. "Some of the children arrive at school not knowing their full name; they just know their nickname," says principal Ruby Greer, who has managed to improve test scores and attendance. "They don't know how to hold a pencil or a book. And it seems like you never catch up."

A five-minute drive away from Young Park stands Taylor Elementary. This is the neighborhood school of white children from the large houses on the surrounding tree-lined streets; and of black children from nearby, mostly working-class neighborhoods. Sixty-one percent of Taylor's 433 children are white, and only 30% qualify for the free-lunch program. One hundred percent of the children's parents are in the pta, which runs 22 committees. In 1994, 88% of Taylor's fourth-graders surpassed national norms on standardized tests. At Young Park, 7% did.

"The whole discussion of desegregation is corrupted by the fact that we mix up race and class," says Harvard sociologist Orfield. "You don't gain anything from sitting next to somebody with a different skin color. But you gain a lot from moving from an isolated poverty setting into a middle-class setting." National statistics provide suggestive evidence that desegregation raises blacks' academic achievement (without lowering whites'), despite its apparent failure in such high-profile cases as Yonkers--where middle-class flight left low-income students concentrated in high-poverty schools. A massive 1993 Department of Education study of Chapter One, the compensatory-education program for poor children, found that recipients of Chapter One services in schools where at least three-quarters of the children were poor scored substantially lower in math and reading than recipients attending schools where fewer than half were poor.

And, in fact, since the onset of widespread desegregation in 1971, black 17-year-olds have closed roughly a third of the reading-score gap that separated them from whites. A soon-to-be-released study by Debora Sullivan and Robert L. Crain of Teachers College, Columbia University, reports that among 32 states, the gap between black and white fourth-grade reading scores is narrowest in West Virginia and Iowa, where blacks are least isolated from whites, and largest in Michigan and New York, where blacks are the most racially isolated.

Crain and others have found, however, that academic-achievement tests are only one measure of what schools offer--another important one being what researchers call "life chances." The "great barrier to black social and economic mobility is isolation from the opportunities and networks of the middle class," Crain says. School desegregation puts minority students in touch with people who can open doors to colleges and careers.

In 1966 a randomly selected group of kindergarten-through-fifth-grade low-income students in Hartford, Connecticut, nearly all of them black, were offered the opportunity to attend school in a dozen virtually all-white suburbs. Sixteen years later, researchers tracked down more than a thousand of those who had been tapped for the program and a like number of those who had not. Crain found that males in the test group were significantly more likely to have completed two or more years of college and less likely to have dropped out of high school or got in trouble with the police, and females were less likely to have had a child before age 18.

School desegregation also leads to housing desegregation, not only by promoting tolerance but also, to put it bluntly, by making it impossible to avoid an integrated school by choosing where you live. According to a study by Louisville's Fair Housing Council, Jefferson County's school- desegregation program reduced residential segregation to such an extent that by 1990, though only 17% of the area's residents were black, a mere one-quarter of 1% of the population lived in a census tract without black neighbors.

But in the case of Louisville, a great desegregation success story, the city and suburbs are in a single school district. In most Northern cities, white flight has undermined even the best efforts at racial balance, and the measurable benefits of desegregation programs have been spottier--while the burdens, particularly on black students, have often been enormous. There has always been some preference in the black community, as in the white, for neighborhood schools (though these may be more an ideal than a reality for the children of the poor, who tend to move, or be moved, a great deal). And there is a realistic pessimism about the prospects for integration. Says the Legal Defense Fund's Shaw: "My sense is a lot of people are saying, 'We're tired of chasing white folks. It's not worth the price we have to pay.'"

Edward Newsome, an African-American lawyer in the real estate business who himself attended a segregated school in Texas, is a leader of the anti-magnet plan coalition that has dominated the Kansas City school board since 1994. He feels the underlying assumptions of desegregation are patronizing to blacks--as does Justice Thomas. "It never ceases to amaze me," wrote Thomas in his Missouri v. Jenkins concurrence, "that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior."

Says Newsome: "I welcomed the Supreme Court decision. I saw it as an opportunity for the first time in years to focus on removing the vestiges of segregation. For 10 years we've concentrated on bringing in white kids. There's been no Afrocentric-themed magnet school because it doesn't appeal to white folks."

The J.S. Chick Elementary School represents the kind of school Newsome thinks there should be more of. Chick, whose African-centered program was fashioned by its enterprising principal, Audrey Bullard, occupies a bleak, brown brick building in a rundown east-side neighborhood of Kansas City. Ninety-eight percent of Chick's 327 students are black. "With a Eurocentric curriculum, it appears one race is superior over the others," says Bullard. "The African-centered curriculum makes them feel, 'I'm a part of this. I'm not on the outside looking in.'" Something must be working: Chick's students outscore some of the magnet schools' pupils on standardized tests.

On a recent morning in Lola Franklin's third-grade class, the kids are wearing paper crowns signifying their status as African kings and queens, and they are standing one after another to shout out a dizzying variety of facts. "Welcome to Guinea-Bissau! The official language is Portuguese."

"The main religion is Islam!"

"Sheep, cattle and goats are the principal animals!"

"Who can name an African-American comedian?" inquires Franklin.

"Eddie Murphy!" "Bill Cosby!"

"And some American comedians?"

"Whoopi Goldberg!"

"No, an American comedian," she corrects them.

"Roseanne!" a boy calls out.

"Good," says Franklin.

Clint Bolick, litigation director for the libertarian Institute for Justice in Washington, predicts court-ordered desegregation schemes will be gone in 10 to 15 years. Their fatal error was in making racial balance a goal, which eventually led to admissions preferences for whites, "turning Brown on its head," says Bolick. "What all this shows is that social engineering doesn't work."

But a great deal of social engineering went into creating school segregation in the first place, points out William Taylor, a Washington lawyer who has worked on civil rights cases for 40 years. Taylor laments what he sees as the courts' "peculiar notion that segregation is the natural condition and desegregation goes against the natural order of things. The court's own finding in Brown was that segregation had been imposed by law and practice for many years. Missouri is a good example. You have racially restrictive covenants, racially restrictive ordinances. The notion that somehow segregation came about all because of people's individual preferences is wrong."

Engineered or not, American society is facing "awesome demographic changes," says Harvard's Orfield. "In around 2050 there's going to be about half nonwhites in the total population, in 2020 about half nonwhites in the school population. We have to figure out how to run our institutions in that kind of a society. 'Separate but equal' is the most well-tried experiment in American history. It was policy for 60 years, and we have no evidence that it can work, given the distribution of power and resources in our society."

Four decades after his research helped decide the case that was supposed to change everything, perhaps Kenneth Clark still puts the issue most succinctly: "Talk about 'separate but equal,' " he says. "If they're going to be equal, why are they separate?"