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WHAT RACIAL INTEGRATION & DIVERSITY DID TO DALLAS SCHOOLS
Greetings. Dubeaux here, back to shine more light on the situation. I posted a prequel to this essay on March 1st, "Diversity is nothing to be proud of." Lively discussion ensued. Folks who haven't seen that thread might want to take a look, especially those unconvinced that, "Diversity makes us stronger!" Today's post is a non-P.C. look at how racial integration and its offspring, Diversity, shaped the DISD we know (and don't especially love) today. I also have a word to say about Highland Park, and how it avoided (or rather, escaped from) integration and Diversity. It is not the kind of rosy report you typically read in the Dallas Morning News, or in the more ill-informed threads in this forum. Enjoy.
Introduction
We are constantly bombarded with earnest, even plaintive assertions about how wonderful Diversity is transforming America into a better place. The sainted Civil Rights Movement got us started on this road, the road to equality and diversity in all things (EDIAT for short), and the next few years will see the 50th anniversary of many Civil Rights milestones. People who believe the Civil Rights Movement is not an unalloyed blessing, and may even have damaged the United States, are attacked and largely marginalized as "racists," "bigots," "nativists," and "xenophobes." They can lose their jobs, friends and social standing for speaking out, and many have. So most people shut their mouths and smile and nod their heads when they are told to "embrace diversity." But before we completely shut off our brains, and go stepping off into our "inevitable" multicultural future, let's take a look at the most important institution so far to be thoroughly diversified and see how that's working out. Fasten your seatbelts - for some of you it's going to be a bumpy ride.
A little history, national & local...
Once upon a time, long before Diversity became an American holy-word, we had "racial integration" and "equality" as the terms which made liberals dewy-eyed and weak at the knees. Integrating previously all white schools with black students would raise academic achievement levels among blacks and broaden the horizons of whites without damaging their achievement levels. In this way, equality in education would at last be achieved. This idea, btw, came after the landmark, Brown vs Board Supreme Court decision of 1954, which merely ruled that school assignments could not be made by race, and that admissions should be "color-blind." No, the idea behind aggressively integrating rather than merely de-segregating was based on more advanced thinking than merely allowing a black child who lived closest to a white school to attend that school. This particular example of advanced thinking came from the mind of one James Coleman, a Johns Hopkins University sociologist. His pet theory - that black students failed to achieve academically because they were not exposed to the intellectually stimulating presence of white students in the classroom - was published in 1966 and provided much of the intellectual justification and impetus behind many of the later federal court decisions which led to forced busing and "racial balancing" in public schools. In his 1966 report, Coleman acknowledged that the funding of all black schools was now roughly the same as for white schools, but that didn't matter - only putting black children and white children together in the classroom would lead to equality. Coleman's ideas affected court decisions all over the country, including Dallas. According to Coleman and his academic allies, it was necessary to forcibly mix the schools racially according to a master recipe. Ideally, all black students would be placed in majority white schools and classrooms. The theory ignored class differences between the mostly lower class blacks and middle class whites it envisaged blending harmoniously together in an enriched learning environment for all. (And of course, the well documented IQ gap between whites and blacks - a 15 point difference in favor of whites - was ignored by the professors and the courts.) It has almost been forgotten that forced busing, racial-balancing, and quotas were the product of completely different thinking than the philosophy behind the Brown decision. (This is brought out very clearly in Race and Education, 1954 - 2007, by Raymond Wolters, a historian at the University of Delaware.)
After resisting for over ten years, the Dallas schools finally began large-scale integration in the early 1970s. In 2002, federal judge Barefoot Sanders - the decisive player in the "de-segregation era," declared the Dallas schools integrated. (Note: as part of their deception plan, to make the public think the outrageous things they ordered were connected to the "simple justice" of the original Brown decision, the courts claimed they were merely desegregating - combating an unequal racist school system - and not necessarily forcing integration. This was a lie.) But the legal battles and the semantic obfuscations used to fight them are over. The integrationists won. So, what does their victory look like today? In other words: was integration a success?
But before we answer the last question, let's consider the physical results of integration in Dallas - let's look at (to paraphrase the title of a book about integration) "the world we created in DISD." That is, the world created by the federal courts and the integration activists.
What integration did to north Dallas schools
Creating something new often means destroying something old, and this is true of DISD. The school district in 1970 wasn't great (this is Texas, remember, not the Midwest), but was - all in all - pretty decent. Especially in north Dallas there were some reasonably good schools, including high schools like Hillcrest, Thomas Jefferson (henceforth, TJ), and T.H. White. In 1970 the typical median S.A.T. score for these schools was around 1100. (To avoid confusion, I have converted all S.A.T. scores to the scale used today, after the "recentering" of 1995, which - in effect - inflated scores after that year by roughly 100 points.) TJ, White, and Hillcrest typically boasted from six to ten National Merit Semifinalists each year. Generally speaking, these schools, though somewhat behind Highland Park (then the best public high school in Texas) in academic achievement, were not far behind. Their test scores, graduation rates, and college placement were roughly similar to HPHS. In 1970, all these schools were overwhelmingly white.
Of course, everyone knows thhis. The know the first year of busing - of "real integration" - was 1971. They know there was a "white flight" from integration and that blacks - supposedly its beneficiaries - also became disgusted with busing, and that the gradual influx of Latino immigrants (legal & illegal) transformed DISD into what it is today. Beyond those basic facts, the public has largely forgotten what happened, perhaps the way a drinker forgets a bad drunk. But the details should be remembered. They are a cautionary tale.
First, a bit of today's DISD. The district is 64% Hispanic, 30% black, 5% white. White and Hillcrest are "majority-minority" and TJ is virtually all Mexican. Both average and median S.A.T. scores for these schools are 100 to 300 points lower than they were in 1970, and other academic indices have fallen as well. Two years ago none of these schools produced so much as a single National Merit Semifinalist. Hillcrest managed to produce one of the four NMSFs in DISD in 2010. (Highland Park had 16, the three Plano high schools, 86.) The north Dallas schools reflect what happened in the rest of the district. Except for its two showpiece magnet high schools, each with a small, carefully selected enrollment of less than 400 in one and 300 in the other (chosen from 38,000 Dallas high school students), each of which includes a large contingent of whites, DISD is an academic wasteland. To be sure, you would never know this from the Dallas Morning News or the other propaganda organs for Diversity. They trumpet the high S.A.T. scores and T.E.A. ratings and graduation rates of the small magnet schools and try to persuade the taxpayers that things are gettin' better in the Dallas schools.
Ain't so. Most people, including blacks, know DISD is a terrible school system, that it consists mainly of expensive warehouses that keep their children off the streets for several hours each day. These days it is blacks who are leaving DISD, heading for better schools in the suburbs. (This may be problematic for the suburbs, but that is beyond the scope of this post. I do address that topic in my previous post, "Diversity is nothing to be proud of."
I have heard people say that the reason DISD is in bad shape today is because of white flight. But they never say what caused white flight. Traditional liberals who still believe in integration, like the veteran Dallas journalist, Jim Schutze, say white flight was caused by white racism, by the refusal of white parents to let their children sit next to black children in classrooms, and that if integration failed, it was largely because of white flight. But the parents of white students, and the vast majority of those students themselves, say that white flight was caused by the failure of integration.
The facts are on their side.
Theory vs reality: theory wins the battle - reality wins the war - Dallas loses both
Consider this: most Dallas whites were reconciled to the principle of integration by the late 1960s, and by that time there were a small number of black students in most of Dallas's "white" schools. These were mostly children of the black middle class (the true, merit-based black middle class, not the affirmative action created black middle class of today). These students blended in with their white classmates with minimal friction. Some were academic stars: one black girl at TJ was a National Merit Semifinalist. However, this integration was denounced as "token" and insufficient to establish true equality in Dallas schools.
The integration which began in the 1970s was different from the successful kind described above, in size, quality and outcome. It was mostly by large numbers (roughly 10,000) of lower class blacks into middle class white schools. The much smaller number of whites ordered to integrate black schools refused to attend them. They and their families became the first major wave of white flight out of Dallas into the suburbs (and in some cases, the Park Cities). Where integration took place, troubles soon began: inter-racial fights, including riots of up to 200 students; complaints by white students that blacks were held to lower standards in behavior and grades; complaints by black students that white students were unfriendly, white teachers were unfair, and white administrators punished blacks more often and more harshly than whites.
By the mid-1970s, white parents had had enough. Besides the troubles mentioned above, their children told them of white girls being groped by black boys in hallways and having their blouses ripped by black girls in the bathrooms, of stairwells controlled by blacks who required whites to pay a toll to use them, of black students who never went to class, but roamed the hallways instead. They looked to the principals and superintendent Nolan Estes for help, but federal judge Sarah Hughes had already pronounced DISD "institutionally racist" and demanded DISD stop suspending black students for truancy, smoking, disrespect, and loitering in the hall. What discipline was left in the integrated schools quickly deteriorated even more. The parents then turned to the leadership of Dallas for help, but the city's "shadow government," the Dallas Council - made up of 250 of the wealthiest and most high powered businessmen and lawyers in the city - told them to get lost, that the courts must be obeyed. (Most of these civic leaders actually lived in the Park Cities or sent their children to private all-white schools.) The courts themselves kept changing their definitions of what constituted integration - five different de-segregation plans were implemented by the courts between 1971 and 1984. Schools were closed, reopened, and closed again. Attendance zones were redrawn over and over, forcing students to attend different schools, sometimes every year. In response to this chaos, whites voted with their feet. They left for Richardson and Plano, for Garland and Mesquite, and eventually Rockwall and Coppell..If they had enough money they got into the Park Cities. Thousands of white newcomers to Texas, refugees from the declining economy of the "rustbelt" Midwest, saw what was happening inside Dallas and opted for the suburbs over the city. 1973 was the last year in which whites made up a majority of students in DISD.
Blacks were upset as well. They bore the burden of busing, of sending their kids into unfamiliar and (they believed) hostile territory every school day. They were also offended by the underlying premise of race-mixing in the classroom: that black children could not succeed academically without the magic influence of white children sitting next to them.
And then there were the test scores. In most integrated schools (nationwide as well as Dallas), the test scores of blacks did not improve, and in some schools they declined. White scores also remained stagnant, or in some cases declined as well. In the few schools where black scores did improve, the school was as likely to be non-integrated (i.e., 100% black) as it was to be racially mixed. James Coleman belatedly realized that the data on which he based his 1966 report favoring race-mixing in the classroom as a way to improve black academic performance was flawed: it was based on samples which were too small or represented the experiences of small numbers of black middle class students who entered previously white schools within a few blocks of their own house. But ever the true believer, Coleman now emphasized (in his 1975 report) non-academic reasons for continuing to press forward in integrating the schools. Citing statistics showing an increase in interracial dating in some integrated schools and a national increase in marriages between blacks and whites, Coleman claimed this was "an encouraging trend," asserting that, "No society is going to be completely integrated until there is widespread interracial marriage."
In other words, raising black test scores to white levels, or achieving equality in education between whites and blacks, was no longer the primary goal of integration. Integration for itsown sake was now the goal.
In Dallas, federal judges like Barefoot Sanders and Sarah Hughes agreed with Coleman's outlook. NAACP activists - now ignoring the desires of the majority of black parents - also demanded continued busing and efforts for more integration. There was too much emotional and psychic investment in integration to turn back. But there was a problem: they were running out of whites to integrate with, because whites were running away from integration. The district made much heralded efforts to keep whites from leaving by creating magnet schools, places where top teachers, using state-of-the-art equipment and classrooms, would educate a relatively limited number of motivated, well-behaved students who had been selected for their intelligence, work ethic, and positive attitude. Here, white students (and their parents) would not be afraid to mingle and learn with the best of the black and other minority students. After many false starts, the district finally got some decent magnet schools operating. They have attracted lots of attention and praise, winning lots of prizes, but they were too little and too late to restore the confidence of most white parents in DISD - the exodus continued and the white population of the district has dwindled to about 7,500 students out of 150,000. Many of the parents of this white remnant are the idealistic type: they love Diversity. But the integration dreamed of by James Coleman, Barefoot Sanders, and the idealists of the 70s does not exist today in DISD.
Highland Park dodges the bullet
During the 70s, as DISD descended into turmoil, the town fathers of the Park Cities, the so-called "Highland Park mafia," could pat themselves on the back. After Dallas ended the gentlemen's agreement whereby the Park Cities sent their black children to "colored" schools in the segregated DISD - a result of the Brown decision - they had gotten rid of their black residents (mostly maids, cooks, and gardeners who lived in servants quarters behind Park Cities houses) by requiring all residents to live on their own property or be renters by legal contract. Since restrictive covenants, private discrimination, and segregated apartments had not yet been outlawed, it was a small matter to "ethnically cleanse," in a peaceful and perfectly legal way, the Park Cities of blacks.
As a result, the Highland Park ISD had no black students until the late 70s, after the Open Housing Act had outlawed segregation in housing, when a few children of SMU faculty living in rental properties began enrolling. By then, property values in the Park Cities had risen so high - to a large degree fueled by white flight from Dallas - that almost no blacks except for multi-millionaires, such as professional sports stars, could afford to buy a house there. The reputation of Highland Park schools soared during this time: as academic standards declined and school violence increased all around it in Dallas, HPISD was an island of academic excellence and safety. Even today, there are few blacks in Highland Park schools, usually less than one percent.
The final verdict
So we return to the question: was integration a success or not?
If the goal of integration was to provide blacks with a better edcuation, one equal to whites, the experiment must be ruled a failure. Why? Look at the metrics. The achievement gap between blacks and whites in all kinds of educational tests persists. Ditto graduation rates. It's the biggest single issue in education. Some say that school integration made the expanded black middle class possible, that it gave blacks the access to education they needed to climb the rungs of America's class structure. But that position is not supported by the data. Whatever gains in education - as reflected in test scores - blacks have made have been modest at best. On the other hand, the credentials that completing an education provide - whether or not anything was actually learned during the process - are essential to entrance into the middle class. And it's true that more blacks are getting more credentials than ever before. That the credentials themselves are debased is a subject I might address in a later post. But the black middle class, as it exists today, is more a product of affirmative action and other forms of anti-white discrimination that it is of improved education and achievement.
Even if the goal of school integration was simply integration itself, to force blacks and whites together and hope they would date each other and marry each other and eventually blend into one cafe au lait Starbucks supreme shade of people, like James Coleman and a number of other academics apparently hoped...well, despite Barack Obama and some other famous and not so famous "bi-racials," as they are currently known, we ain't there yet, not by a long shot. And there are plenty of whites, and blacks as well, who aren't going to cooperate in that project.
But enough (don't want to rant...might offend somebody).....let me cast my eye on the Dallas schools one last time and tell you what I see....
Today, the DISD is like a dry land version of the Titanic. The big ship hit an iceberg. The big institution collided with integration. Both were destroyed. But DISD was reborn - kind of like Titanic would be if it could be raised from the bottom of the ocean in one piece, and then all spray painted in gold. It might fool people who didn't look too close, but it would still be a wreck. This pretty much describes the condition of DISD in 2011.
And that, my friends, is what racial integration and Diversity did to Dallas schools.
Postcripts
Coming soon to a forum near you....
When I started this post I had the idea that I would also talk about the effects of integration on the suburban schools of Dallas, and about the "Diversity game" whichis played by elite private schools like St. Mark's and Hockaday. But this thing is already too long, and I believe it provides an adequate number of topics to.....umm....discuss. (Take your best shot.) So....I will be posting about the suburbs and private schools later, in days or weeks.
A note on some sources
There really isn't much in the way of secondary sources about de-segregating Dallas schools. Perhaps a bright young thing at SMU will remedy that someday, though I shudder to think how politically correct it will be. The only scholarly study extant is Desegregating Schools in Dallas, by Glenn Linden, which focuses mainly on the interplay between the federal courts, the DISD administratiion, and the integration activists. Although Linden mentions some of the turmoil integration caused, he stints any account of what was really happening at ground level, in the classrooms, hallways, stairwells and bathrooms of the integrated Dallas schools. Linden is also pro-integration, as much a true believer - in the face of daunting evidence to the contrary - as Jim Schutze or James Coleman.
Jim Schutze, though a die-hard liberal if ever there was one, has written a great deal of useful stuff about the Dallas power structure over many years, especially in his book, TheAccomodation: the Politics of Race in an American City, and also in the long defunct DallasTimes Herald (the former afternoon paper), and more recently in the Dallas Observer.
There are other books on integration in general but not many on wht actually happened on a day to day basis in the integrating schools. And almost all these books suffer (with the exception of Wolters, who supported the original Brown decision, btw) from what might be described as fanatical pro-integration bias. The best known case study on a specific school undergoing integration is The World We Created at Hamilton High, by Gerald Grant.
Useful primary sources I consulted included TEA reports, such as the old Snapshots, and today's AEIS reports, many of which are online, though older ones must be ordered (or, if you are lucky, found in the dusty recesses of the Dallas Public Library). High school yearbooks can tell the curious researcher many things.
And then there is my personal knowledge. I did not attend any of the schools mentioned in this post, but have many friends who did. I also know (or rather, knew) teachers from a number of DISD schools. They all made excellent informants. Finally, I have personal knowledge based on professional experience.
I don't think forced "diversity" and "integration of DISD" did this to Dallas. I think people self-segregate by nature and this would have happened anyway. White europeans are on the decline as a majority and have chosen to sequester themselves from others. Whites are not the only race to do this, of course.
The truth is, is that you need a solid middle class to have acceptable public schools. The middle class has been dwindling since the 1970s and the little that is left has flocked to their middle class enclaves or scraped together tuition for private school. I fear good public schools in twenty years will only be found in HISD, Carroll ISD and other suburbs with high incomes.
So, I don't see this as a race issue, I see this as a class issue and a byproduct of such a small percentage of the American population controlling so much of the wealth.
This thread was locked for awhile but is now open. If anyone posts insulting pictures - such as the type which caused my previous thread to be closed - I will simply ask the moderator to remove them and press on with whatever civil (a relative term) discussion is occuring. There are those of you who think the ideas I've expressed in the first post should be suppressed, or thrown down the memory hole.
Maybe they will, but I'm not going to make it easy for you.
I'm not really sure about all this but I do find it thought provoking.
If you have time you might find some of the books I mentioned at the bottom of the first post illuminating, especially the ones by Raymond Wolters, Race and Education, 1954 - 2007 or The Burden of Brown. The American Renaissance website has some interesting stuff about integration. American Renaissance
I don't think forced "diversity" and "integration of DISD" did this to Dallas. I think people self-segregate by nature and this would have happened anyway. White europeans are on the decline as a majority and have chosen to sequester themselves from others. Whites are not the only race to do this, of course.
Your first sentence contradicts the second. A major contention of my initial post is that forced integration drove out the white students. If not for that, DISD would have a much larger number of white students today, probably over 50%. Whites are declining as a majority because of specific anti-white government policies: mass, non-white immigration and the forced integration in schools which caused whites to flee into neighborhoods where the property values literally exploded because of their influx, making it economically much more difficult for a white family to have children. There are other reasons for this - the increasing materialism & the "it's all about me" culture - but immigration and integration are important causes.
"The truth is, is that you need a solid middle class to have acceptable public schools. The middle class has been dwindling since the 1970s and the little that is left has flocked to their middle class enclaves or scraped together tuition for private school. I fear good public schools in twenty years will only be found in HISD, Carroll ISD and other suburbs with high incomes."
Disagree. The white immigrants in New York City at the beginning and early to middle 20th century - Italians, Jews, Slavs, Irish, Germans - were dirt poor, lived in tough neighborhoods, but the public schools served them well. The kids who graduated from these schools for the poor went on into the middle class, professional class and upper class in one generation. There were also other areas of the USA where people of humble, non-middle class background could find good schooling. However, if you substitute the words, "stable family background" (i.e., mother, father) for middle class, I would agree.
"So, I don't see this as a race issue, I see this as a class issue and a byproduct of such a small percentage of the American population controlling so much of the wealth."
You haven't provided enough supporting evidence for this statement to be plausible.
It's hard for liberals to hear the truth - all they can do is insult you and your article because they can’t respond with facts. Just ignore them.
It's kind of like how they will ignore the fact that it's NOT OK to have a oversized national debt, and will ignore the rampant abuse of our social security disability system by attorneys and so called fake disabled patrons (I see this all the time in the real estate business)...but oh well...a liberal is a liberal, whom is uneducated and uninformed in many ways.
Now to take this one step further, I agree with what someone else said...this has everything to do with class, a little to do with culture but actually nothing to do with skin color.
MANY black people have broken their culture that was forced upon them by the liberals of the 1960s/70s. The liberals gave them a "give it to me free" welfare style, cultural mindset. And I don't blame the black community for that - it's really the fault of the liberals for giving it to them in the first place to makeup for the transgressions of our Caucasian ancestors. What appeared to be gift…welfare, free school lunches, Title I school funding, food stamps, section 8, free daycare, free healthcare, whatever…was actually a hindrance…because it becomes an addiction or a habit, and therefore discourages people from pursuing bigger & better things in life.
However MANY blacks have become educated and moved out of the ghettos of Dallas to the suburbs. Those proud, black Americans now have great paying jobs, left the cycle of poverty and have became successful. Some people call it black flight.
If you noticed the Mexicans never had that cultural mindset, coming from a country where there is little to no opportunity to even rub two nickels (err, pesos) together, and therefore they will open businesses and will work 7-days a week to feed their families - if needed. Neighborhoods like West Oak Cliff are now booming, thanks to them, the companies they open and opportunities they've created for others.
No socio-economic group is perfect...there are freeloaders (people who get free government benefits - some in an abusive or rampant manner) among all skin colors nowadays. However skin color is no longer a major issue now like it was viewed years ago. However in reality it was not skin color at all - just cultural differences.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dubeaux
WHAT RACIAL INTEGRATION & DIVERSITY DID TO DALLAS SCHOOLS
Greetings. Dubeaux here, back to shine more light on the situation. I posted a prequel to this essay on March 1st, "Diversity is nothing to be proud of." Lively discussion ensued. Folks who haven't seen that thread might want to take a look, especially those unconvinced that, "Diversity makes us stronger!" Today's post is a non-P.C. look at how racial integration and its offspring, Diversity, shaped the DISD we know (and don't especially love) today. I also have a word to say about Highland Park, and how it avoided (or rather, escaped from) integration and Diversity. It is not the kind of rosy report you typically read in the Dallas Morning News, or in the more ill-informed threads in this forum. Enjoy.
Introduction
We are constantly bombarded with earnest, even plaintive assertions about how wonderful Diversity is transforming America into a better place. The sainted Civil Rights Movement got us started on this road, the road to equality and diversity in all things (EDIAT for short), and the next few years will see the 50th anniversary of many Civil Rights milestones. People who believe the Civil Rights Movement is not an unalloyed blessing, and may even have damaged the United States, are attacked and largely marginalized as "racists," "bigots," "nativists," and "xenophobes." They can lose their jobs, friends and social standing for speaking out, and many have. So most people shut their mouths and smile and nod their heads when they are told to "embrace diversity." But before we completely shut off our brains, and go stepping off into our "inevitable" multicultural future, let's take a look at the most important institution so far to be thoroughly diversified and see how that's working out. Fasten your seatbelts - for some of you it's going to be a bumpy ride.
A little history, national & local...
Once upon a time, long before Diversity became an American holy-word, we had "racial integration" and "equality" as the terms which made liberals dewy-eyed and weak at the knees. Integrating previously all white schools with black students would raise academic achievement levels among blacks and broaden the horizons of whites without damaging their achievement levels. In this way, equality in education would at last be achieved. This idea, btw, came after the landmark, Brown vs Board Supreme Court decision of 1954, which merely ruled that school assignments could not be made by race, and that admissions should be "color-blind." No, the idea behind aggressively integrating rather than merely de-segregating was based on more advanced thinking than merely allowing a black child who lived closest to a white school to attend that school. This particular example of advanced thinking came from the mind of one James Coleman, a Johns Hopkins University sociologist. His pet theory - that black students failed to achieve academically because they were not exposed to the intellectually stimulating presence of white students in the classroom - was published in 1966 and provided much of the intellectual justification and impetus behind many of the later federal court decisions which led to forced busing and "racial balancing" in public schools. In his 1966 report, Coleman acknowledged that the funding of all black schools was now roughly the same as for white schools, but that didn't matter - only putting black children and white children together in the classroom would lead to equality. Coleman's ideas affected court decisions all over the country, including Dallas. According to Coleman and his academic allies, it was necessary to forcibly mix the schools racially according to a master recipe. Ideally, all black students would be placed in majority white schools and classrooms. The theory ignored class differences between the mostly lower class blacks and middle class whites it envisaged blending harmoniously together in an enriched learning environment for all. (And of course, the well documented IQ gap between whites and blacks - a 15 point difference in favor of whites - was ignored by the professors and the courts.) It has almost been forgotten that forced busing, racial-balancing, and quotas were the product of completely different thinking than the philosophy behind the Brown decision. (This is brought out very clearly in Race and Education, 1954 - 2007, by Raymond Wolters, a historian at the University of Delaware.)
After resisting for over ten years, the Dallas schools finally began large-scale integration in the early 1970s. In 2002, federal judge Barefoot Sanders - the decisive player in the "de-segregation era," declared the Dallas schools integrated. (Note: as part of their deception plan, to make the public think the outrageous things they ordered were connected to the "simple justice" of the original Brown decision, the courts claimed they were merely desegregating - combating an unequal racist school system - and not necessarily forcing integration. This was a lie.) But the legal battles and the semantic obfuscations used to fight them are over. The integrationists won. So, what does their victory look like today? In other words: was integration a success?
But before we answer the last question, let's consider the physical results of integration in Dallas - let's look at (to paraphrase the title of a book about integration) "the world we created in DISD." That is, the world created by the federal courts and the integration activists.
What integration did to north Dallas schools
Creating something new often means destroying something old, and this is true of DISD. The school district in 1970 wasn't great (this is Texas, remember, not the Midwest), but was - all in all - pretty decent. Especially in north Dallas there were some reasonably good schools, including high schools like Hillcrest, Thomas Jefferson (henceforth, TJ), and T.H. White. In 1970 the typical median S.A.T. score for these schools was around 1100. (To avoid confusion, I have converted all S.A.T. scores to the scale used today, after the "recentering" of 1995, which - in effect - inflated scores after that year by roughly 100 points.) TJ, White, and Hillcrest typically boasted from six to ten National Merit Semifinalists each year. Generally speaking, these schools, though somewhat behind Highland Park (then the best public high school in Texas) in academic achievement, were not far behind. Their test scores, graduation rates, and college placement were roughly similar to HPHS. In 1970, all these schools were overwhelmingly white.
Of course, everyone knows thhis. The know the first year of busing - of "real integration" - was 1971. They know there was a "white flight" from integration and that blacks - supposedly its beneficiaries - also became disgusted with busing, and that the gradual influx of Latino immigrants (legal & illegal) transformed DISD into what it is today. Beyond those basic facts, the public has largely forgotten what happened, perhaps the way a drinker forgets a bad drunk. But the details should be remembered. They are a cautionary tale.
First, a bit of today's DISD. The district is 64% Hispanic, 30% black, 5% white. White and Hillcrest are "majority-minority" and TJ is virtually all Mexican. Both average and median S.A.T. scores for these schools are 100 to 300 points lower than they were in 1970, and other academic indices have fallen as well. Two years ago none of these schools produced so much as a single National Merit Semifinalist. Hillcrest managed to produce one of the four NMSFs in DISD in 2010. (Highland Park had 16, the three Plano high schools, 86.) The north Dallas schools reflect what happened in the rest of the district. Except for its two showpiece magnet high schools, each with a small, carefully selected enrollment of less than 400 in one and 300 in the other (chosen from 38,000 Dallas high school students), each of which includes a large contingent of whites, DISD is an academic wasteland. To be sure, you would never know this from the Dallas Morning News or the other propaganda organs for Diversity. They trumpet the high S.A.T. scores and T.E.A. ratings and graduation rates of the small magnet schools and try to persuade the taxpayers that things are gettin' better in the Dallas schools.
Ain't so. Most people, including blacks, know DISD is a terrible school system, that it consists mainly of expensive warehouses that keep their children off the streets for several hours each day. These days it is blacks who are leaving DISD, heading for better schools in the suburbs. (This may be problematic for the suburbs, but that is beyond the scope of this post. I do address that topic in my previous post, "Diversity is nothing to be proud of."
I have heard people say that the reason DISD is in bad shape today is because of white flight. But they never say what caused white flight. Traditional liberals who still believe in integration, like the veteran Dallas journalist, Jim Schutze, say white flight was caused by white racism, by the refusal of white parents to let their children sit next to black children in classrooms, and that if integration failed, it was largely because of white flight. But the parents of white students, and the vast majority of those students themselves, say that white flight was caused by the failure of integration.
The facts are on their side.
Theory vs reality: theory wins the battle - reality wins the war - Dallas loses both
Consider this: most Dallas whites were reconciled to the principle of integration by the late 1960s, and by that time there were a small number of black students in most of Dallas's "white" schools. These were mostly children of the black middle class (the true, merit-based black middle class, not the affirmative action created black middle class of today). These students blended in with their white classmates with minimal friction. Some were academic stars: one black girl at TJ was a National Merit Semifinalist. However, this integration was denounced as "token" and insufficient to establish true equality in Dallas schools.
The integration which began in the 1970s was different from the successful kind described above, in size, quality and outcome. It was mostly by large numbers (roughly 10,000) of lower class blacks into middle class white schools. The much smaller number of whites ordered to integrate black schools refused to attend them. They and their families became the first major wave of white flight out of Dallas into the suburbs (and in some cases, the Park Cities). Where integration took place, troubles soon began: inter-racial fights, including riots of up to 200 students; complaints by white students that blacks were held to lower standards in behavior and grades; complaints by black students that white students were unfriendly, white teachers were unfair, and white administrators punished blacks more often and more harshly than whites.
By the mid-1970s, white parents had had enough. Besides the troubles mentioned above, their children told them of white girls being groped by black boys in hallways and having their blouses ripped by black girls in the bathrooms, of stairwells controlled by blacks who required whites to pay a toll to use them, of black students who never went to class, but roamed the hallways instead. They looked to the principals and superintendent Nolan Estes for help, but federal judge Sarah Hughes had already pronounced DISD "institutionally racist" and demanded DISD stop suspending black students for truancy, smoking, disrespect, and loitering in the hall. What discipline was left in the integrated schools quickly deteriorated even more. The parents then turned to the leadership of Dallas for help, but the city's "shadow government," the Dallas Council - made up of 250 of the wealthiest and most high powered businessmen and lawyers in the city - told them to get lost, that the courts must be obeyed. (Most of these civic leaders actually lived in the Park Cities or sent their children to private all-white schools.) The courts themselves kept changing their definitions of what constituted integration - five different de-segregation plans were implemented by the courts between 1971 and 1984. Schools were closed, reopened, and closed again. Attendance zones were redrawn over and over, forcing students to attend different schools, sometimes every year. In response to this chaos, whites voted with their feet. They left for Richardson and Plano, for Garland and Mesquite, and eventually Rockwall and Coppell..If they had enough money they got into the Park Cities. Thousands of white newcomers to Texas, refugees from the declining economy of the "rustbelt" Midwest, saw what was happening inside Dallas and opted for the suburbs over the city. 1973 was the last year in which whites made up a majority of students in DISD.
Blacks were upset as well. They bore the burden of busing, of sending their kids into unfamiliar and (they believed) hostile territory every school day. They were also offended by the underlying premise of race-mixing in the classroom: that black children could not succeed academically without the magic influence of white children sitting next to them.
And then there were the test scores. In most integrated schools (nationwide as well as Dallas), the test scores of blacks did not improve, and in some schools they declined. White scores also remained stagnant, or in some cases declined as well. In the few schools where black scores did improve, the school was as likely to be non-integrated (i.e., 100% black) as it was to be racially mixed. James Coleman belatedly realized that the data on which he based his 1966 report favoring race-mixing in the classroom as a way to improve black academic performance was flawed: it was based on samples which were too small or represented the experiences of small numbers of black middle class students who entered previously white schools within a few blocks of their own house. But ever the true believer, Coleman now emphasized (in his 1975 report) non-academic reasons for continuing to press forward in integrating the schools. Citing statistics showing an increase in interracial dating in some integrated schools and a national increase in marriages between blacks and whites, Coleman claimed this was "an encouraging trend," asserting that, "No society is going to be completely integrated until there is widespread interracial marriage."
In other words, raising black test scores to white levels, or achieving equality in education between whites and blacks, was no longer the primary goal of integration. Integration for itsown sake was now the goal.
In Dallas, federal judges like Barefoot Sanders and Sarah Hughes agreed with Coleman's outlook. NAACP activists - now ignoring the desires of the majority of black parents - also demanded continued busing and efforts for more integration. There was too much emotional and psychic investment in integration to turn back. But there was a problem: they were running out of whites to integrate with, because whites were running away from integration. The district made much heralded efforts to keep whites from leaving by creating magnet schools, places where top teachers, using state-of-the-art equipment and classrooms, would educate a relatively limited number of motivated, well-behaved students who had been selected for their intelligence, work ethic, and positive attitude. Here, white students (and their parents) would not be afraid to mingle and learn with the best of the black and other minority students. After many false starts, the district finally got some decent magnet schools operating. They have attracted lots of attention and praise, winning lots of prizes, but they were too little and too late to restore the confidence of most white parents in DISD - the exodus continued and the white population of the district has dwindled to about 7,500 students out of 150,000. Many of the parents of this white remnant are the idealistic type: they love Diversity. But the integration dreamed of by James Coleman, Barefoot Sanders, and the idealists of the 70s does not exist today in DISD.
Highland Park dodges the bullet
During the 70s, as DISD descended into turmoil, the town fathers of the Park Cities, the so-called "Highland Park mafia," could pat themselves on the back. After Dallas ended the gentlemen's agreement whereby the Park Cities sent their black children to "colored" schools in the segregated DISD - a result of the Brown decision - they had gotten rid of their black residents (mostly maids, cooks, and gardeners who lived in servants quarters behind Park Cities houses) by requiring all residents to live on their own property or be renters by legal contract. Since restrictive covenants, private discrimination, and segregated apartments had not yet been outlawed, it was a small matter to "ethnically cleanse," in a peaceful and perfectly legal way, the Park Cities of blacks.
As a result, the Highland Park ISD had no black students until the late 70s, after the Open Housing Act had outlawed segregation in housing, when a few children of SMU faculty living in rental properties began enrolling. By then, property values in the Park Cities had risen so high - to a large degree fueled by white flight from Dallas - that almost no blacks except for multi-millionaires, such as professional sports stars, could afford to buy a house there. The reputation of Highland Park schools soared during this time: as academic standards declined and school violence increased all around it in Dallas, HPISD was an island of academic excellence and safety. Even today, there are few blacks in Highland Park schools, usually less than one percent.
The final verdict
So we return to the question: was integration a success or not?
If the goal of integration was to provide blacks with a better edcuation, one equal to whites, the experiment must be ruled a failure. Why? Look at the metrics. The achievement gap between blacks and whites in all kinds of educational tests persists. Ditto graduation rates. It's the biggest single issue in education. Some say that school integration made the expanded black middle class possible, that it gave blacks the access to education they needed to climb the rungs of America's class structure. But that position is not supported by the data. Whatever gains in education - as reflected in test scores - blacks have made have been modest at best. On the other hand, the credentials that completing an education provide - whether or not anything was actually learned during the process - are essential to entrance into the middle class. And it's true that more blacks are getting more credentials than ever before. That the credentials themselves are debased is a subject I might address in a later post. But the black middle class, as it exists today, is more a product of affirmative action and other forms of anti-white discrimination that it is of improved education and achievement.
Even if the goal of school integration was simply integration itself, to force blacks and whites together and hope they would date each other and marry each other and eventually blend into one cafe au lait Starbucks supreme shade of people, like James Coleman and a number of other academics apparently hoped...well, despite Barack Obama and some other famous and not so famous "bi-racials," as they are currently known, we ain't there yet, not by a long shot. And there are plenty of whites, and blacks as well, who aren't going to cooperate in that project.
But enough (don't want to rant...might offend somebody).....let me cast my eye on the Dallas schools one last time and tell you what I see....
Today, the DISD is like a dry land version of the Titanic. The big ship hit an iceberg. The big institution collided with integration. Both were destroyed. But DISD was reborn - kind of like Titanic would be if it could be raised from the bottom of the ocean in one piece, and then all spray painted in gold. It might fool people who didn't look too close, but it would still be a wreck. This pretty much describes the condition of DISD in 2011.
And that, my friends, is what racial integration and Diversity did to Dallas schools.
Postcripts
Coming soon to a forum near you....
When I started this post I had the idea that I would also talk about the effects of integration on the suburban schools of Dallas, and about the "Diversity game" whichis played by elite private schools like St. Mark's and Hockaday. But this thing is already too long, and I believe it provides an adequate number of topics to.....umm....discuss. (Take your best shot.) So....I will be posting about the suburbs and private schools later, in days or weeks.
A note on some sources
There really isn't much in the way of secondary sources about de-segregating Dallas schools. Perhaps a bright young thing at SMU will remedy that someday, though I shudder to think how politically correct it will be. The only scholarly study extant is Desegregating Schools in Dallas, by Glenn Linden, which focuses mainly on the interplay between the federal courts, the DISD administratiion, and the integration activists. Although Linden mentions some of the turmoil integration caused, he stints any account of what was really happening at ground level, in the classrooms, hallways, stairwells and bathrooms of the integrated Dallas schools. Linden is also pro-integration, as much a true believer - in the face of daunting evidence to the contrary - as Jim Schutze or James Coleman.
Jim Schutze, though a die-hard liberal if ever there was one, has written a great deal of useful stuff about the Dallas power structure over many years, especially in his book, TheAccomodation: the Politics of Race in an American City, and also in the long defunct DallasTimes Herald (the former afternoon paper), and more recently in the Dallas Observer.
There are other books on integration in general but not many on wht actually happened on a day to day basis in the integrating schools. And almost all these books suffer (with the exception of Wolters, who supported the original Brown decision, btw) from what might be described as fanatical pro-integration bias. The best known case study on a specific school undergoing integration is The World We Created at Hamilton High, by Gerald Grant.
Useful primary sources I consulted included TEA reports, such as the old Snapshots, and today's AEIS reports, many of which are online, though older ones must be ordered (or, if you are lucky, found in the dusty recesses of the Dallas Public Library). High school yearbooks can tell the curious researcher many things.
And then there is my personal knowledge. I did not attend any of the schools mentioned in this post, but have many friends who did. I also know (or rather, knew) teachers from a number of DISD schools. They all made excellent informants. Finally, I have personal knowledge based on professional experience.
Now to take this one step further, I agree with what someone else said...this has everything to do with class, a little to do with culture but actually nothing to do with skin color.
MANY black people have broken their culture that was forced upon them by the liberals of the 1960s/70s. The liberals gave them a "give it to me free" welfare style, cultural mindset. And I don't blame the black community for that - it's really the fault of the liberals for giving it to them in the first place to makeup for the transgressions of our Caucasian ancestors. What appeared to be gift…welfare, free school lunches, Title I school funding, food stamps, section 8, free daycare, free healthcare, whatever…was actually a hindrance…because it becomes an addiction or a habit, and therefore discourages people from pursuing bigger & better things in life.
However MANY blacks have become educated and moved out of the ghettos of Dallas to the suburbs. Those proud, black Americans now have great paying jobs, left the cycle of poverty and have became successful. Some people call it black flight.
If you noticed the Mexicans never had that cultural mindset, coming from a country where there is little to no opportunity to even rub two nickels (err, pesos) together, and therefore they will open businesses and will work 7-days a week to feed their families - if needed. Neighborhoods like West Oak Cliff are now booming, thanks to them, the companies they open and opportunities they've created for others.
No socio-economic group is perfect...there are freeloaders (people who get free government benefits - some in an abusive or rampant manner) among all skin colors nowadays. However skin color is no longer a major issue now like it was viewed years ago. However in reality it was not skin color at all - just cultural differences.
I dont agree with everything, but I can respect this as opposed to the orginal post. Its not the color of someones skin that broke things down for the Dallas schools. It was a combination of errosion of middle class, corruption, greed, and budget cuts.
Corruption and greed are the real enemies of DISD, not race mixing. The black white thing is moot now anyway since DISD is now over 60% Hispanic.
I dont agree with everything, but I can respect this as opposed to the orginal post. Its not the color of someones skin that broke things down for the Dallas schools. It was a combination of errosion of middle class, corruption, greed, and budget cuts.
Corruption and greed are the real enemies of DISD, not race mixing. The black white thing is moot now anyway since DISD is now over 60% Hispanic.
I don't think race mixing ever had anything to do with it, race mixing was just the social agenda at the time that resulting in cultural and class mixing on a large scale which caused so many to withdraw from DISD. School systems have a very strong snowball effect, once a school is known as "good" it attracts more "good" students and families, thus making the school even better. Which is why you don't see very many "average" schools, you see either fantastic schools that people are proud to go to, or you see schools everyone is trying to escape.
The race mixing is just a fire-starter that causes everyone to get up in arms due to racism real and perceived, and makes the school system discussion worthless. I agree with much of what dallas90210 said in his post, even if I don't know about a lot of that guys other posts.
Replace the words 'racial integration and diversity' with 'politics' and you will get a lot closer.
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Thread reopened
