School Desegregation

After twenty-three years of debate, litigation, plans, preparation of communities, and implementation, the nation is still left basically with nonimaginative and even racially abhorrent strategies intended to accomplish school desegregation but which often fall short of a standard of quality guaranteed against damage to Black children. One of the goals of sociologists during the late 1960s was that of convincing white parents that desegregation would not damage white children. The subject of damage to Black children, given the constraints of present desegregation strategies, has occupied little attention by scholar-educators. The presumption, of course, being that race mixing is always good for Blacks under any conditions. Yet there still exists a scarcity of research examining the full impact of desegregativn upon the Black child. Working basically within an orientation which posits a cultural deficit model for Black Americans, i.e., class or racial deficits presumed to be based in biological origins,1 sociologists have generally supported school desegregation on moral and educational grounds, despite mixed research results on the value of desegregation to the youngsters involved. For the liberal sociologists, separate had indeed meant unequal. However, one wonders about the results of this equation had the South put as much emphasis on the equal as they did on the separate

Criminology · Desegregation · Perspective (graphical) · Political science · Social science · Sociological imagination · Sociological theory · Sociology · Critical Race Theory in Education · Mathematics · Public Administration · School Choice and Performance