What caused the decline in American public education over the past 50 years? Countless books have been written on this subject. Most are politically correct drivel, some written by the same academics whose advocacy of social engineering for egalitarian and multicultural objectives helped cause the decline in the first place. A few - especially the authoritative histories of public education by Diane Ravitch - have shed a damming light on utopian pedagogical fads such as "the child centered classroom," "outcome based education," and the general hostility of the educational establishment towards a curriculum based on the transmission of knowledge, with the establishment favoring instead a curriculum based on "learning how to learn" and indoctrination in politically correct platitudes. These are indeed important causes of American educational decline. But perhaps THE most important cause, the forced racial integration of primary and secondary schools, especially programs like busing to achieve "racial balance," is seldom addressed in the literature about educational problems. Even Ravitch - unblinkingly honest on other reasons - largely (though not entirely) skirts the race issue. There are good reasons for the general silence, of course. Racial integration and its modern embodiment, the cult of diversity, have become sacrosanct, part of the American civic religion, whose moral goodness and entirely positive effects cannot be questioned by decent people. Anyone who does is, ipso facto, not decent, a racist who should be driven out of polite society and, if possible, professionally ruined.
Nevertheless, from time to time (albeit rarely), a brave soul DOES question the orthodoxy that racial integration has been an unalloyed good for American education. Raymond Wolters is one of these. An education scholar and university professor, he first described the negative effects of forced integration in his seminal work, THE BURDEN OF BROWN, which carefully described the experiences of several widely different school districts with racial integration in the years immediately following the Supreme Court's BROWN decision in 1954 which abolished legal segregation by race in public schools.
It wasn't a pretty picture then, and it gets worse in RACE & EDUCATION, which updates Wolters' study of school integration to 2007. The collapse in academic standards, the increase in violence, and the general decay which took place in many schools after they were racially integrated is described in detail. But the book is much more than a description of chaos. Wolters seeks to understand the reasoning of the integrationists as well as the court decisions which implemented their ideas. Much of RACE & EDUCATION is devoted to a study of the theories that psychologists and sociologists like Kenneth Clark and James S. Coleman used to justify forced integration and mass busing, their general idea being that lower class black children required the presence of a critical mass of middle class white students in their classrooms in order to reach their learning potential. In several places, Wolters (who strongly supports the Supreme Court's original BROWN decision) points out that these theories and court decisions violated BROWN (which had outlawed race discrimination in school enrollment) by REQUIRING race discrimination to "racially balance" schools.
Wolters also shows how academic theories about why (in his words) "the travail of integration" was necessary, changed over time as busing and racial integration failed to improve black academic achievement, especially in relation to whites. Since the achievement gap in standardized tests between black and white students was not significantly narrowed, the rationale for integration had to be shifted from academic benefits to the benefits of diversity. In the new multicultural America of the 21st century, black children and white children must "mingle" in school to learn how to work together as adults. Some integrationists, according to Wolters, celebrated the increase in interracial dating in some schools as sufficient reason to consider integration a success, apparently disregarding their previous concern with academic goals.
Finally, Wolters describes how federal courts have stepped back in recent years from racial balancing towards the original interpretation of the BROWN decision, as requiring a race blind attitude in all areas of education. This has caused an end to busing in some districts and a decline in "racially balanced" schools, over the protests of academics like Gary Orfield who remain strong advocates of even more integration. Wolters takes a cautiously hopeful view of the future, predicting that perhaps schools - no longer forced to spend so much time and resources on racial issues - will be able to focus on improving education in other ways.
I'm more pessimistic. The damage that racial integration has done to American schools is, in my view, even greater than described by Professor Wolters. Indeed, I believe he understates what is in fact a disaster, a kind of self-administered educational lobotomy that America has done to itself. For example, though Wolters, unlike most scholars, pays some attention to the negative effects integration had on white children, he could easily have devoted an entire chapter to this subject, while still maintaining a general focus on the effect integration had on black children.
Overall, though, this is a fine book, an honest book. Unfortunately, it (save for THE BURDEN OF BROWN) will probably remain a unique one.
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