Prometheus 6

As much respect as I have for the Harvard University Civil Rights Project (how much respect? they're permanent residents in the Reality Checks link box), the last line in this extract is wrong. We never tried "separate but equal." We only had "separate."

The fact is, had we done the "equal" part, no one would have ever complained.

The problem is not that integration is being undone. It's that no one can conceive of equal education for all people under any other circumstances.

America's public schools, after decades of struggle to achieve racial and ethnic balance, are tilting back toward separate institutions.

And children of color today are much more likely to be in mostly minority schools than they were a decade ago.

With little fanfare and scant publicity, federal judges and school policy-makers have abandoned hundreds of desegregation plans written in the 1960s and 1970s.

The public largely is unaware of the change, according to a recent national poll conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University. Sixty percent of Americans say it is "very important" that "students of different races attend classes together." Most incorrectly assume that their local schools are integrated.

A study of U.S. Department of Education records conducted by Scripps Howard News Service found that racial isolation - the percentage of children of color enrolled in schools that are 90 percent minority or more - has risen in at least 36 states between 1991 and 2001, the most recent year for which reliable data are available.

In all, 6.6 million of the nation's 18.9 million black, Hispanic, Asian and American Indian children in 2001 were enrolled in public schools that were 90 percent minority or more. That means 35 percent are racially isolated in their classrooms.

"These patterns are not the result of current illegal practices by school districts," said Rod Paige, U.S. secretary of education. "The reasons are complex, and sociologists and demographers can help us figure it out. Some of the causes involve housing patterns and economic factors."

But several prominent experts on race in public schools are quick to blame the nation's political and judicial leaders for making a quiet policy change.

"We're in a major process of re-segregation," said Gary Orfield, co-director of Harvard University's Civil Rights Project, which tracks school segregation patterns by school districts. "There is a cowardice about this issue. People are afraid to talk about it because it is so sensitive. So we are slipping back into separate-but-equal schools, a policy we tried once without success."