Discusses the reversal of desegration in public schools

After over half a century of court-directed efforts to redress the historical educational chasm between blacks and whites in the United States, both the past achievements and the future direction of school desegregation are uncertain. Too often, the early gains made in racially desegregating America's schools seem to have been halted, and in many cases reversed. Urban school decay is once again on the rise, with predictable consequences. For the very poorest minority students, who have limited educational options apart from dangerous, deteriorating neighbourhood schools, drop-out rates are high, standardised test scores are abysmally low, and violence is an everyday fact of life. The gulf between the unskilled, marginalised students being warehoused in these predominantly poor, minority schools on the one hand, and the increasingly high tech society they cannot compete in on the other, is growing. This ground-breaking book presents the viewpoints and research of some of the most prominent scholars in the field of school desegregation. It covers virtually the entire spectrum of thinking and scholarship on school desegregation and its promise, success, necessity, pitfalls and failures.

Confronting a reality that many policy makers would prefer to ignore, contributors to this volume offer the latest information on the trend toward the racial and socioeconomic resegregation of southern schools. In the region that has achieved more widespread public school integration than any other since 1970, resegregation, combined with resource inequities and the current "accountability movement," is now bringing public education in the South to a critical crossroads. In thirteen essays, leading thinkers in the field of race and public education present not only the latest data and statistics on the trend toward resegregation but also legal and policy analysis of why these trends are accelerating, how they are harmful, and what can be done to counter them. What's at stake is the quality of education available to both white and nonwhite students, they argue. This volume will help educators, policy makers, and concerned citizens begin a much-needed dialogue about how America can best educate its increasingly multiethnic student population in the twenty-first century. Contributors: Karen E. Banks, Wake County Public School System, Raleigh, N.C. John Charles Boger, University of North Carolina School of Law Erwin Chemerinsky, Duke Law School Charles T. Clotfelter, Duke University Susan Leigh Flinspach, University of California, Santa Cruz Erica Frankenberg, Harvard Graduate School of Education Catherine E. Freeman, U.S. Department of Education Jay P. Heubert, Teachers College, Columbia University Jennifer Jellison Holme, University of California, Los Angeles Michal Kurlaender, Harvard Graduate School of Education Helen F. Ladd, Duke University Luis M. Laosa, Kingston, N.J. Jacinta S. Ma, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, University of North Carolina at Charlotte Gary Orfield, Harvard Graduate School of Education Gregory J. Palardy, University of Georgia john a. powell, Ohio State University Sean F. Reardon, Stanford University Russell W. Rumberger, University of California, Santa Barbara Benjamin Scafidi, Georgia State University David L. Sjoquist, Georgia State University Jacob L. Vigdor, Duke University Amy Stuart Wells, Teachers College, Columbia University John T. Yun, University of California, Santa Barbara

As a result of Pretoria's 1976 imposition of independence on the "black homeland" of Transkei, its capital city, Umtata, became one of the first communities in South Africa to experience fundamental changes in the apartheid. This timely book discusses those relationships that remained unchanged, as well as the important race and class realignments that accompanied apartheid's dismantling. Walton R. Johnson shows that although the universal franchise radically altered municipal government and desegregation changed access to some public and private amenities, transformation of the basic patterns of dominance and subordinance occurred slowly. He describes how the established dominant group perpetuated key parts of the old order by guiding and manipulating a pliable new African middle class. For the mass of Africans the facade was new, he makes clear, but the underlying structures were the same: effective social and political control stayed for a long while in the hands of the white elite and few new economic opportunities opened for Africans. His chapter on personal ideologies shows how deeply cultural much of this behavior was. Providing an informed account of change and continuity in one town, Dismantling Apartheid is a compelling preview of future social relations in South Africa.

Tells the story of a group of African-American lawyers and plaintiffs and their white allies who were determined to break down racial barriers at the University of Georgia in the 1950s. Reprint.