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The Burden of Brown: Thirty Years of School Desegregation Paperback – June 30, 1992
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- Print length356 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherUniv Tennessee Press
- Publication dateJune 30, 1992
- Dimensions6 x 1.4 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100870497502
- ISBN-13978-0870497506
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Product details
- Publisher : Univ Tennessee Press; 1st edition (June 30, 1992)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 356 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0870497502
- ISBN-13 : 978-0870497506
- Item Weight : 1.09 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.4 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,480,226 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,898 in Education Reform & Policy
- #5,116 in Administrative Law (Books)
- #119,356 in United States History (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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Prior to the 1954 desegregation ruling, blacks had inferior schools due to their inability to raise as much money for their schools because they had less valuable property to tax than whites and did not create as much wealth. This lead to inequalities in how much funding was provided for black and white schools. Before Brown, some state governments decided to spend more on black schools to equalize them financially with the white schools, so they could avoid integration and uphold the separate but equal ruling. The Brown hearing itself involved a black family who did not want to bus their child to an all black school far away when there was a white one close by.
The original ruling for desegration was interpreted to mean that a school could not use race as a basis for choosing its students; but there would be no forced busing to forcibly integrate a school to achieve a certain racial balance. But during the sixties, environmental explanations for black's inferior performance in schools came into vogue. It was considered that blacks in segregated schools were in inherently inferior schools because the segregated blacks got the impression that they were too inferior to participate in white society. Psychologist Kenneth Clark brought out his black and white dolls and found out that (gasp!) black children were choosing white dolls over black ones in the segregated south, which obviously meant that blacks were being psychologically warped into thinking they were inferior to whites in segregated schools. (It's silly, I know, but bear with me.)
Consequently, the new solution ruled by the courts was to rule that schools had to forcibly integrated to achieve a certain racial balance so that blacks wouldn't feel inferior and that they would learn the values of white middle class society and maybe some of the smarts of one race would rub off on the other. Ability tracking was even done away with in some schools because it was thought that this rubbing-off principle wouldn't work if remedial students weren't sitting around the bright ones. And blacks disproportinately made up remedial classes. Never mind if brighter students were held back by the mediocre pace of a class with integrated intellectual levels.
When the schools became forcibly integrated, there was a massive resistance by whites once they found out that in integrated schools crime and foul language were increasing and the standards of education were more geared towards integration and equality rather separation and quality. Even the many blacks were dissatified with forced busing and integrated classrooms that took no account of differing intellectual abilities. One mother complained that her daughter was frustated in the new integrated class because it was above her abilities.
Whites began to move out of the inner cities to white suburban schools or, as in one case down south, whites closed the public school, which left the blacks without a school for a time, and created a private white segregated one. Integration worked better in places where there wasn't a high minority population such as in Topeka, but proved disastrous in places like Washington, DC and Wilmington, Delaware in which nearly all the whites eventually moved out as the schools became bad inner city schools.
I saw the book as good demonstration of the weaknesses of the environmental theory of why races perform at differing levels. There is a general fear to say that such differences are innate since then the problem of differences can't be rectified by liberal social engineering and many people are loathe to differiate between inferior and superior in a society that believes in egalitarianism so much.
Wolters himself comes to fuzzy conclusions near the end. At one moment, he says he supports getting back to local control over schools as opposed to federal control with its forced integration. In another moment, he seems to deplore the increasing segregation of northern schools and declares that more compulsion is needed. But other than that funny little line, Wolters lays down the cold, hard facts about the dire consequences of having integrated schools.
If Wolters and others would like to go back to the days of seperate and unequal de jure schools and when fear prevented interracial friendships, they are welcome to take a trip on a one-way time machine backward. Meanwhile, many of us enjoy the present and the future just fine.
