School Resegregation: Must the South Turn Back?

School Resegregation: Must the South Turn Back? Edited by John Charles Boger and Gary Orfield. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2005. Pp. xiv, 380. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8078-5613-4; cloth, 59.95, ISBN 0-8078-2953-6.)

In August 2002 more than five hundred students and scholars gathered in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to explore the causes and consequences of school resegregation. John Charles Boger and Gary Orfield bring together thirteen of the papers that were presented at the conference. While this collection would have benefited from a more generous historical perspective, School Resegregation: Must the South Turn Back? provides a clear picture of what the editors call "the fateful changes now under way" and makes a compelling case that resegregation "will prove disastrous for our schools" (pp. 3, 322).

These essays examine four themes Erwin Chemerinsky, Jacinta S. Ma, and Michal Kurlaender contend that the principal cause of resegregatton is a fading judicial commitment to desegregation. Chemerinsky argues that the "courts could have done much more to bring about desegregation" (p. 30). He suggests that the Supreme Court's rulings during the early 1990s flowed inexorably from the appointment of conservative justices who gave "a clear signal to lower courts: the time has come to end desegregation orders" (p. 40). As federal courts declared more and more school districts unitary, Ma and Kurlaender note, judges in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina struck down race-conscious student assignment policies that school officials used to maintain diversity. As a consequence, the percentage of black students attending majority-white schools in the South fell from 43 percent in 1988 to 31 percent in 2000. Capturing a theme that runs through the book, Charles T. Clotfelter, Helen F. Ladd, and Jacob L. Vigdor write that the courts "bear substantial responsibility for the recent rise in segregation" (p. 71).

Several chapters explore the relationship between residential and school segregation and challenge Justice Anthony Kennedy's contention in Freeman v. Pitts (1992) that resegregation is the result of "private choices" (p. 167). Sean F. Reardon and John T. Yun show that while residential segregation in the South "declined rather substantially" during the 1990s, public school segregation increased (p. 67). Erica Frankenberg's comparative study of school and housing segregation in Mobile, Alabama, and Charlotte, North Carolina, suggests that where school desegregation plans are fully and completely implemented, as they were in Charlotte in the 1970s and 1980s, housing becomes more integrated. The problem is that in Mobile, as elsewhere, such plans were not fully implemented, and these and other chapters leave the reader wondering if this was simply the result of lackluster judicial oversight. Still, careful attention to the relationship between education and housing makes the consequences of resegregation clear: as the courts and local educational and political officials dismantle school desegregation and as schools resegregate, residential segregation will become more pronounced, a process that will almost certainly accelerate further resegregation.

School desegregation has clear academic benefits. Chapters on testing and tracking examine a third theme and suggest that state mandated high-stakes tests and No Child Left Behind policies threaten these benefits as they contribute to the resegregation of schools. Roslyn Arlin Mickelson's regression analysis of standardized test scores in Charlotte during the 1996-1997 school year, before the district resegregated, demonstrates that "the more time both black and white students spend in desegregated elementary schools, the higher their standardized test scores in middle and high school" (p. 93). Like Texas and Florida, North Carolina has been a leader in what is now a federal effort to use tests to determine if students are promoted and granted high school diplomas. Jay P. Heubert argues that these tests have a legally disparate impact on minority students. Amy Stuart Wells and Jennifer Jellison Holme contend that "comparisons of test scores across schools played a role in [the] resegregation process" as advantaged white parents fled desegregated high schools "solely on the basis of average test scores" (pp. 194, 207).

Other chapters explore a fourth theme, the costs of resegregation for African American and Latino students. In Georgia, Catherine E. Freeman, Benjamin Scafidi, and David L. Sjoquist find that predominately black schools have fewer teachers with advanced degrees and higher rates of teacher turnover. Luis M. Laosa's analysis of the Texas public schools shows that dense concentrations of impoverished Latino and African American students depress scores on achievement tests.

These essays present new evidence on the causes and consequences of resegregation in the South, but the editors might have brought more historical perspective to this important issue and situated these carefully crafted chapters in the literature on the history of southern school desegregation. In the conclusion Boger provides short reviews on the "Lessons from Southern History," but the past seems divorced from most of the volume's essays (p. 311). What the authors identify as the causes of resegregation--deference to local educational authorities and testing--have been an important part of the history of school desegregation in the South. A fuller consideration of this history would have strengthened this timely and significant book.

R. SCOTT BAKER

Wake Forest University