I thank Domingo Morel for his accurate summary of the main arguments of The Crucible of Desegregation. Only in his final paragraph do I find anything with which to disagree. There he claims that the policy flaws that I describe reflect a “broader logic to deny equality of opportunity to Black people … while maintaining a rhetorical commitment to equal opportunity.” This unduly pessimistic conclusion not only overlooks the momentous accomplishments of southern desegregation but also ignores a central theme of my book—that “desegregation” came to mean many different things to people in widely varying school districts. To evaluate the success of “desegregation,” we must first distinguish among its many meanings and forms.
The first phase of desegregation was a stunning success. Southern desegregation not only undermined the vicious Jim Crow system but also substantially improved the educational achievement and life chances of millions of minority children. What Gary Orfield has aptly descried as “the reconstruction of southern education” went well beyond mere rhetoric.
Outside the South, however, desegregation orders produced few benefits. It is essential to recognize how much these enterprises differed. In the north and west of the United States, there was no state-mandated racial segregation, no thoroughgoing Jim Crow system. What became known as “racial isolation” was the result of residential segregation, which in turn was the product of a complex combination of government policies, redlining, social norms, economic class divisions, and individual choice. These proved to be much more difficult obstacles to overcome. In the South, inner cities and suburbs were often in the same school district. In the North, they were not, which vastly complicated the politics of integration. Initially, desegregation could be viewed in simple Black/white terms, but as the campaign moved north and west, this binary paradigm became inadequate. For these reasons, and many more, the task of integrating schools outside the South was far more daunting and the results correspondingly meager.
Morel ends his review by writing, “This notion of a collective American belief in equality of opportunity, especially educational opportunity, deserves greater scrutiny.” What the history of school desegregation shows is that although the American commitment to equal education opportunity remains strong, our understanding of how to achieve it remains inadequate. Grandiose plans and dubious testimony from self-proclaimed “experts” led many well-meaning judges to impose disastrous desegregation decrees.
Not only does educational opportunity depend on many factors outside the schoolhouse but also what happens inside the classroom is hard to observe, evaluate, or control from above. The post-2001 “standards” regime that Morel criticizes in his book, Developing Scholars, provides at least a starting point for figuring out which incremental reforms help reduce the racial achievement gap. That is why so many civil rights organizations have supported it.
In the end, the greatest failure of the desegregation effort was the unwillingness of judges, litigants, expert witnesses, and academic commentators to define with precision and appropriate humility what they were trying to achieve and how they expected to reach those goals. Judges spoke in legal abstractions disconnected from the day-to-day realities of the “street-level bureaucrats” we call teachers. Too many others were happy to follow along with those glib generalizations. The central problem was not racism but a stunning lack of knowledge, intellectual honesty, and realism about what could effectively promote racial equality in America’s schools.
