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The last half-century has witnessed great strides toward racial equality, but we have not yet realized the promise of Brown v. Board of Education. To invalidate the plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown. The plurality’s decision, I fear, would break that promise. This is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret.
– Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing in dissent to the June 28, 2007, decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools Inc. v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson County (Ky.) Board of Education
A year ago this month, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that sent shivers through the ranks of urban school officials across the country: The court voted 5-4 to strike down voluntary integration programs used in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle.
The ruling did not go unnoticed at Fort Wayne Community Schools, where the racially balanced magnet school program is the result of a 1989 court settlement and looks much like the Louisville school-assignment program rejected by the divided court. The FWCS school board, in intense discussions over the district’s goals late last summer and fall, strongly reaffirmed its commitment to the spirit of the agreement with a vision statement defining the district as “the school system of choice and a source of community pride.” Its stated core values include “equity in educational opportunities” and “diversity and uniqueness of our district and community.”
With an assurance from William Sweet, the district’s general counsel, that FWCS’ court-monitored desegregation agreement is sufficiently different from the one that dictated Louisville’s voluntary plan, Superintendent Wendy Robinson said she made the decision to focus on more pressing needs, including major changes to the district’s high schools and a management program to measure district progress.
“At some point you have to decide what issues you attack first,” she said in an interview last week. “We didn’t see the need to move ahead with discussions on (the ruling).”
But Evert Mol, a consistent critic of FWCS’ achievement record and leader of the successful effort to kill the district’s long-term building plan, is now raising questions about the school’s unique Racial Balance Fund, the foundation of its magnet program and one of the underpinnings of its integration plan. In the Code Blue Schools blog that he has continued since the remonstrance battle ended last July, Mol questioned recently why money diverted from the district’s capital projects fund to the Racial Balance Fund shouldn’t be restored and used on building improvements.
“I question what it has accomplished,” he said in an interview. “I haven’t seen any data, any quantifiable results. I would expect to see some narrowing of the gap. What’s happened to minority test scores? I don’t know exactly.”
Mol said he believes the district should consider reverting the money – almost $9 million this year – from racial balance programs to the Capital Projects Fund to pay for building improvements and maintenance.
And he sees no contradiction in that position and the Code Blue rallying cry of “academics not buildings.”
“We had to put a phrase on the buildings,” he said of the campaign’s slogan. “For five years I’ve been harping about the academics and I’ve seen nothing change. What has Wendy been working on for the last five years? The first thing she comes out with is the $500 million building plan.
“I’m not against spending money on the buildings,” Mol said, “at least to keep them in good repair. In a way, I’m sorry it had to be done that way. I could fault them for not maintaining the buildings along the way. They should have requested a modest tax increase to keep the buildings up. But they wait until all of the buildings are in need of repair and it’s, ‘Oh my God, we’ve got this lack of funding.’ ”
Robinson said the Racial Balance Fund was the compromise reached between FWCS and Parents for Quality Education with Integration, the community group that sued the school district and the state in 1986, charging that the district’s elementary schools were segregated. To make the plan revenue neutral, the capital projects tax levy was reduced by an amount equivalent to the racial balance levy, which was to pay for desegregation efforts and programs aimed at helping disadvantaged children. In addition, the state agreed to pay $12.9 million over six years.
The Educational Improvement Committee, a group that included some of the community members involved in the suit, exercised rigorous oversight over the racial balance spending, Robinson said, and the strict oversight continues today, even though the state’s share of funding is gone. None of the money goes to busing costs but primarily to extra teaching positions in the magnet schools and for programs like Reading Recovery, designed to bring struggling readers – often minority and at-risk students – up to grade level.
“The money is very closely aligned to the kids who need it,” Sweet said.
Robinson said the decision to reduce the Capital Projects Fund was made in a different era and under different circumstances. The district’s ability to pay for repairs wasn’t hindered by pension bond costs that further reduced the capital projects budget and by utility costs, which also were moved to the fund. The schools were 20 years younger, and building improvement costs were much less.
And schools weren’t under the pressure of meeting federal No Child Left Behind standards.
Amy Stuart Wells, professor of sociology and education at Teachers College at Columbia University, said those federal demands alone justify the district’s racial balance programs. One of the nation’s foremost experts on school segregation, she said that the programs the district is paying for with racial balance dollars represent a mix of those designed to address inequities in segregated schools.
“There’s tons of research that segregation is bad,” she said in an interview. “People tend to focus on the benefits of integration, but in this period of growing inequality, separating kids compounds the inequity.”
Stuart Wells said the mixed findings on integration are primarily on short-term reading and math scores – the very data that Mol demands. The long-term evidence of not addressing segregation far outweighs it. In a friend of the court brief filed in the Seattle and Louisville cases, Stuart Wells cited “decades of social science research – both quantitative, survey-based research and qualitative, in-depth interview-based studies – on the long-term individual and societal benefits of integrated education.” Students of all colors benefit, she wrote, but the benefits also carry over to improving the health of our economy and democracy.
Mol said last week that he will be a candidate for the school board if no one else challenges incumbent Steve Corona, a 27-year board member who supported the 1989 settlement.
“I’m not dying to get on the school board,” said Mol, who unsuccessfully sought the District 5 seat four years ago. “Corona is not going to go unopposed. If that means I have to run to give him an opponent, I will run.”
And if he runs, the Exxon Mobil retiree said, he believes the Racial Balance Fund issue should be on the table.
That assertion should draw the attention of anyone interested in the future of Fort Wayne Community Schools and the community at large. Mol’s charge that the district ignored the condition of its schools by supporting a Racial Balance Fund runs directly counter to his complaint that the district has ignored academics at the expense of buildings. Programs and teachers supported by the fund are at the very heart of the district’s academic foundation – building reading skills among children whose homes lack books and magazines, giving at-risk students an early start on learning, strengthening the district through choice and innovation. In a community that is home to residents from dozens of nations, racially balanced schools have fostered tolerance and understanding.
Stuart Wells notes that students in a diverse school district will have the advantage in the years ahead. The global community demands a workforce comfortable with people of all races and creeds, she said. And while she believes it is a moral imperative to provide equal opportunity, Stuart Wells also points out that there is a financial reason, as well.
“There’s this huge cost to society with an inadequate education,” she said. “You pay for it in the long run in terms of lost earnings when kids don’t get the education they need.”
A critic who argues both sides, a political climate that casts suspicion on all public spending and a Supreme Court ruling that shakes the foundation of desegregation law set the stage for a critical school board election this year.
Stay tuned.
