School colors

From The Wall Street Journal

A recent study by the Civil Rights Project, a liberal outfit housed at Harvard, uses the racial composition of inner-city schools to allege that the U.S. is undergoing resegregation. Our reading is that their findings say much more about the state of inner-city public education.

For starters, the U.S. is less segregated today than ever before. A Brookings Institution paper -- "Racial Segregation in the 2000 Census: Promising News" -- has the details. Segregation levels are "at their lowest point since roughly 1920," say the authors. "The 2000 Census documents that, for the third straight decade, segregation between blacks and nonblacks across American metropolitan areas has declined dramatically." During the past 20 years black incomes have risen (most blacks are not poor) and high school graduation rates have improved. Better education has led to better jobs, which have led in turn to more integrated suburbs, particularly in the fast-growing South and West.

Pockets of segregation persist in some of the nation's largest cities, and this is reflected in their public schools. But when we talk about the causes of segregation these days, we're talking about something very different from the past. There was a time when the racial makeup of neighborhoods and schools was mandated by law, and the minorites relegated to those enclaves had nowhere else to go, regardless of their socioeconomic standing. Today that's no longer the case. Black "flight" from urban areas is common, and the reason many are fleeing is the schools.

The Harvard researchers have ignored or played down the relevant Census data and these developments, instead opting for loaded language. The report, released on the eve of Martin Luther King Day, is titled, "A Multiracial Society with Segregated Schools: Are We Losing the Dream?" and it makes references to "apartheid schools." According to the study, the average black attends schools that are 54.3 percent black, which is hardly cause for alarm. The average white attends schools that are 8.6 percent black and 7.6 percent Latino -- ratios that aren't wildly different from their respective shares in the U.S. population. But the media has focused on numbers coming out of New York, California, Michigan and Illinois -- states that have cities with large concentrations of minorities attending the same schools.

Here's where the report's language gets less specific, and the authors group blacks and Hispanics into a "nonwhite" category that can distort results. "A big part of what's driving their numbers is the Latino population," says Edward Glaeser, a demographer at Brookings. "If you have a massive immigrant influx of one minority -- a minority with particularly large amounts of kids -- it's not surprising that the people going to these schools in these areas find themselves surrounded by members of that minority more." In other words, there's nothing pernicious going on here, notwithstanding the study's shrill reference to South Africa. The racial makeup of our schools results not from the return of Bull Connor but from economics, immigration and birth rates. Middle-class blacks, whose ranks continue to grow, have moved into mixed neighborhoods.

Left behind in the major big cities is a minority underclass, whose numbers are inflated by recent arrivals who traditionally settle first among their own ethnic groups. During the 1990s, 11 million foreigners immigrated to the U.S., and more than half came from Latin America. Poor minorities are also the youngest members of our society. And they're having most of the children, which explains their high enrollment numbers. White enrollment rates have been steadily declining for decades.

The answer to today's increasing self-segregation is to fix the inner-city schools. Their dreadful quality is a major motive behind white -- and now middle-class black -- flight.