Brown: a great decision--except for schools.(1954 Brown vs. Board of Education)(Advertisement)

Oliver Brown--the plaintiff in the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision--sued a school board, not a public park commission, even though such facilities were also segregated. Within the private sector, discrimination was pervasive.

Yet, today, we see marked progress toward racial equality in parks, recreation programs, politics, communications, commerce, and industry--but not in schools.

The irony is all the greater, inasmuch as the Supreme Court, in Brown, outlawed only school segregation--on the shaky grounds that such segregation harmed the "hearts and minds" of African American children.

But at a time when the workplace is more often racially mixed than not, Brown's educational consequences remain ambivalent. On the plus side, most school districts have become as integrated as city demographics allow. But the price paid for this integration has been high--involuntary busing that separated schools from families and communities; large, difficult-to-manage school campuses; white flight; and lowered expectations for students of all social backgrounds.

Worse, the performance of African American students has continued to trail that of whites. Although the gap narrowed in the 1980s, it opened again in the 1990s, a time when the principles of Brown should have been firmly entrenched.

Conventional liberals blame "politicians" for inadequate funding or "society" for its abiding, if now hidden, racism. But money has seldom bought educational progress, and one is hard put to explain the survival of racism in schools when it is on the wane elsewhere.

Conventional conservatives are more apt to "blame the victim," suggesting that the ...