Criteria for Evaluating School Desegregation in Milwaukee

Since 1976, the Milwaukee School District has been under a court order to desegregate its schools. The original ruling,1 handed down on January 19, 1976, by U. S. District Judge John Reynolds, required the school district to desegregate one-third of its schools for each of the school years 1977-78, 1978-79, 1979-80. The Milwaukee Public School Board appealed this court order all the way to the United States Supreme Court. A final out-of-court settlement to this appeal was reached on May 4, 1979. The settlement required that by September 1979 all teaching staffs in the city's schools be desegregated and that 75 percent of the pupils be enrolled in desegregated schools. (The court stipulated that a school is desegregated with a student population 25 percent to 60 percent black, and a faculty that is 16.6 percent minority plus-or-minus 10 percent.) For the school years 1979-80 and 1980-81, 80 percent of Milwaukee's school children were attending schools that met the desegregation guidelines. all obvious indications, the Milwaukee plan has been considered a success. A 1981 Newsweek article reported, By presenting students with a choice, not just a court order, Milwaukee has managed to achieve what bigger cities no longer even dream of. It has desegregated most of its schools through largely voluntary means, and avoided the white flight that usually follows on the heels of forced busing.2 School officials in Milwaukee have claimed that the city is one of the few large northern industrial cities that has desegregated its schools without the type of violence that characterized desegregation in cities of similar size where desegregation efforts created turmoil that made national headlines. While

Desegregation · Mathematics education · Political science · Psychology · Public Administration · School Choice and Performance

• The Rise and Fall of a Voluntary Public School Integration Transportation Program

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