COURT MAY RIGHT ITSELF ON DESEGREGATION ISSUE

Will last week's U.S. Supreme Court decision on federal court supervision of school desegregation efforts help Missouri break the stranglehold of such ventures in this state? The good news is the high court ruling provides some light at the end of the tunnel. The bad news is the light is dim. Freeing the state and its many troubled school districts from this ruinous obligation still seems a colossal task.

By a unanimous decree, the justices announced Tuesday that targeted school districts don't have to achieve full desegregation before federal courts begin vacating control of those efforts. The court's majority opinion, speaking to a case in DeKalb County in Georgia, noted that school districts can be released from judicial supervision in incremental stages, "before full compliance has been achieved in every area of school operations."

More telling about the whole process of federal oversight of desegregation, this opinion says school districts need not make "heroic" efforts to ensure racial balance: "Racial balance is not to be achieved for its own sake," reads the majority report. "Residential housing choices and their attendant effects on the racial composition of schools present an ever-changing pattern, one difficult to address through judicial remedies."

Contained in those words is an elaborate bit of judicial face-saving, albeit a welcome step. The highest court in this land says with this opinion that some aspects of American life operate independent of judicial management, that racial formulas can not be so tightly controlled by the courts as some judges and social meddlers would like to believe. While it doesn't take in the full scope of federal interference, this opinion slugs it out of the most fundamental question involved here: Why are the courts tinkering with society?

It also points out that societal change sometimes moves at a quicker pace than the judiciary can accommodate. The DeKalb County desegregation oversight began in 1969. St. Louis public schools have been under various court orders since 1975. Think of the changes that have taken place in American social structure and attitudes in the years since those programs were put in place. Was the federal judiciary responsible for those changes, or was it merely a normal evolution of thought and action? We accept the latter proposition.

Unfortunately, it is not likely that Tuesday's ruling will bail out Missouri from its deseg~regation load in the near future. A court-ordered school construction and renovation program isn't scheduled to be completed in St. Louis until 1995. It's unlikely such a timetable could be accele~rated, and the inertia of such federal authority is not easily slowed.

The St. Louis and Kansas City desegregation cases have cost Missouri taxpayers a couple of billion dollars. Were that money applied to education throughout the state instead of these isolated, federally mandated social experiments, it is likely many Missouri schools would not find themselves in financial difficulties today. What seemed at one time to be remote projects in urban areas have turned out to be a drain on school resources statewide; it touches all our lives. We'd like to believe last week's Supreme Court decision will have a positive and immediate impact on that, but that optimism won't be allowed to get the best of us. The ruling, however, does provide some hope that the judiciary is righting itself on this issue.