Dis-Integrating American Public Schools
Racially integrated public schools have not become embedded in the foundation of American public policy.
Two massive domestic social experiments were undertaken by the American federal government in the 20th century. The first—the establishment of a modern welfare state—succeeded. Although never attaining levels found in most European states, entitlements to health care for the elderly, Social Security, unemployment compensation, a minimum wage, and even some form of monetary support for the needy are now accepted parts of American life. Arguments continue about the appropriate scale and shape of these programs, but not about their existence. Powerful constituent groups now guard these programs against their most vociferous opponents; political suicide awaits any politician who advocates eliminating any of these programs.
By contrast, the second social experiment—the racial integration of public schools—has failed. Racially integrated public schools have not become embedded in the foundation of American public policy. Nor do powerful claimant groups protect integrated schools. Indeed, even the policy's intended beneficiaries—African-Americans—no longer press energetically for it. In fact, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which designed and executed the arduous legal strategy that won school desegregation in the courts, now has difficulty maintaining a public posture favorable to it against an indifferent and sometimes hostile membership.
Consider this brief comparison: Despite the ascendancy of anti-welfare-state conservative Republican presidents like Ronald Reagan, welfare-state expenditures continue to increase incrementally from one government budget to the next. By contrast, according to the Harvard University researcher Gary Orfield, the major scholarly expert on school desegregation, there were more black students in schools whose student populations were more than 50 percent minority in 1991 than in 1971, several years before most busing for integration even began. The proportion of black students in entirely segregated schools increased in the late 1980s and 1990s, despite the Clinton administration's supposed friendly stance toward African-American interests. In the Reagan administration's early legislative blitzkrieg, Congress repealed the Emergency School Aid Act of 1972, the principal federal law used to spend public money on school desegregation. Can one imagine a comparable fate for, say, the Social Security Act of 1935, or even the much less popular Federal Housing Act of 1949?...
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