Where inner-city students live versus how they learn.

• Author: Newberg, Norman A.
• Position: Response to article by Gary Orfied in this issue, p. 1397 - Symposium - Shaping American Communities: Segregation, Housing & the Urban Poor

Dr. Orfield is a proponent of an influential, but flawed approach to the problems of the poorest minority children. In a recent article, he uses a medical analogy to explain the inadequacy of the current treatment plans for school segregation. He asserts:

To understand and to produce lasting change in metropolitan school segregation it is essential to deal with housing issues. A school desegregation plan is like a major operation on a long-established cancer. The benefits of the surgery greatly diminish and the risks soar if it is undertaken without understanding the body's structure [or] if the operation ends before the cancer is completely removed.(1)

Orfield sees segregation as the "cancer" and the spread of the disease as linked to the interaction between housing and schools. He asserts that integrated housing can produce integrated schools and, by extension, quality education for poor minorities. Thus, excising the cancer of segregated housing eliminates the spread of the disease in schools.

Although the rhetorical impact of the cancer analogy endures, it is, for purposes of effective school reform, no more instructive today than it was twenty-five years ago.(2) In 1970, I coauthored an article commissioned by the U.S. Office of Education entitled That's Not a Cancer; That's a School System.(3) In the opening paragraph, we state:

There is a great deal of talk these days about the futility of putting band-aides [sic] on the cancers infecting the school system. Such talk is misleading; the implication is that a doctor can come in, and if not dole out band-aides [sic], then do some drastic surgery, and all will be well.... We find it more helpful and more accurate to avoid thinking about cancers and surgery in education.... We believe our job is to work directly with the assumptions and applications of that system--changing them so that they allow students, teachers, and administrators to find greater freedom, joy, and usefulness in the learning experience.(4)

Because neither ineffective school systems nor segregated housing are like cancers and will not respond to the surgeon's knife, we are still left with a basic question: What is the best allocation of ameliorative resources in treating a systemic problem? Orfield assures his readers that the problem is solved by implementing various strategies to desegregate housing. Such strategies may have merit as vehicles for expanding the housing options of urban minority families and for promoting the development of racially and/or ethnically diverse neighborhoods. Housing has, moreover, among its attractions as a focus for reform, its amenability to quantitative measurements of "concrete" inputs and outputs. But whatever the merits of housing desegregation, it requires an Olympian leap of faith to expect that such programs will address the pervasive dysfunction of the largest inner-city public school systems. The schools themselves must change, and change dramatically, and equally important, meaningful economic opportunities must be developed. Poor minority students are best served when a set of interventions addresses the ecology of their situation.(5) Housing, then, is but one element, along with restructuring of schools and economic opportunity, that together promise a better life for inner-city minority students and for the communities in which they live.

1. DESEGREGATION AND ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT

   As a matter of principle, I agree with the advocates of housing desegregation that citizens must have a right to live where they wish. But the policy choices that follow from the principle are, by no means, self-evident. Orfield, who is among the most distinguished voices for housing desegregation's transformative potential, talks about moving toward "natural integration."(6) In my experience, I have found few instances of natural integration. In Philadelphia, for example, there are two neighborhoods where blacks and whites live side by side. These communities, West Mt. Airy and University City, have been integrated for over twenty-five years. While it could be credibly argued that integration does feel natural in these two areas, the rest of the city is largely organized in racially isolated and homogeneous communities.

   Orfield implies in his paper's title that there is a "relationship between school desegregation and housing patterns."(7) He states that we can reduce the pain of arbitrary methods of integration like busing by implementing incentives and subsidies that make it possible for blacks to live in white communities and, thereby, integrate schools naturally.(8) But he and others are hard-pressed to link the improved achievement of black students to the schooling they receive in an integrated school. In Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority,(9)

   the courts ordered a set of remedies ... that permitted several thousand female-headed poor families to move out from city projects ... to suburban private units with rent subsidy certificates. The program moved the school children to vastly more competitive schools--going from the bottom quartile to the top quartile--and the city children had surprising successful and positive experiences in the schools where their presence increased integration from a very low level.(10)

   In the scholarship of an authority on the relationship between housing and schools, one would expect more than one example of the positive effects of integration on the achievement levels of blacks. Even the example presented lacks the specificity that would allow the reader to understand exactly how integration affected academic achievement. What were the indices of success? What percentage functioned on grade level?

   Nor does Dr. Orfield offer any examples illustrating the success of integration in the five most populated cities where large concentrations of minorities live. In fact, forty years after the Brown decision,(11) the evidence indicates that desegregation has little or no effect on the achievement of blacks. Herbert Walberg, in a metanalysis of involuntary school desegregation programs, concludes:

   Despite much hope and considerable research, despite authoritative commissions and lengthy deliberation, no consistent evidence of the positive effects of school racial composition or desegregation on Black learning has been forthcoming. Where small effects have been shown, some were positive and some were negative. The positive effects were convincingly accounted for by other explanations with clear-cut empirical support; notably, desegregated children were superior to their counterpart control groups at the outset, or were given superior instruction. Quality educational programmes, without desegregation, moreover, showed far larger effects on both Black and White learning than quality education programmes with desegregation.(12)

   Walberg described the lack of apparent success of involuntary desegregation efforts. Is the record appreciably better in other contexts? My experience suggests that Orfield's premise fares no better in neighborhoods that appear to be naturally integrated. I have lived in Philadelphia side by side with black neighbors for many years. We do work shifts at the local co-op together; we patrol the streets together as part of Town Watch; we organize protests to get the city to remove abandoned cars; and we promote both black and white political candidates who will better serve our community's interests.

   When it comes to public schools, we make independent, although often similar, decisions. From kindergarten through third or fourth grade, 30% to 40% of the student population is white. Beyond these grades, the number of whites reduces significantly. In general, neither middle-class whites nor middle-class blacks will send their children to the local middle school. These parents, however, will either struggle to gain their children's admission to one of the magnet schools or, more likely, will find the resources to send their children to a private school. Why do residents who decide to live in integrated neighborhoods refuse to send their children to the local public school? These neighbors would answer that the quality of education is inferior. They argue that the class size is too large, the school is dangerous, and the education is not challenging.

   The pattern of results in urban schools is disturbingly regular. In West Philadelphia...