Courts, School Boards Testing Strategies To Integrate Neighborhoods, Schools

By Peter Schmidt

Although social scientists often have found a link between housing segregation and school segregation, few school systems around the country have been willing, as Palm Beach County has, to attack both problems at once, desegregation experts said last week.

Recently, however, several federal courts and school beards have begun, largely on their own, to test strategies to integrate both housing and schools.

With little guidance from the U.S. Supreme Court, the Bush Administration, or each other, the school beards generally have been "trying to feel their way" into the largely uncharted area where the two types of integration overlap, according to Gary Orfield, a professor of education and social policy at Harvard University who has been involved in developing...