A legendary failure of liberalism

5/22/2014

When the Brown v. Board of Education ruling came down 60 years ago, desegregating America's public schools, this writer was a sophomore at Gonzaga in Washington, D.C.

Gonzaga was deep inside the city. And hitchhiking to school every day, one could see “for sale” signs marching block by block out to Montgomery County, Md.

Democrat and liberal Washington was not resisting integration, just exercising its right to flee its blessings by getting out of town. White flight to the Washington suburbs was on.

Across the South, there was resistance to Brown, marked by the “Dixie Manifesto” of 1956, Gov. Orval Faubus' effort to keep black students out of Little Rock Central High in 1957, and the defiance of U.S. court orders to desegregate the universities of Mississippi and Alabama by Govs. Ross Barnett and George Wallace.

While he has received little credit, it was Richard Nixon who desegregated Southern schools. When he took office, not one in 10 black children was going to school with whites in the Old Confederacy. When Nixon left, the figure was close to 70 percent.

For nearly half a century, no black child has been denied entry to his neighborhood school because of race. Ought we not then, with Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom in The Wall Street Journal, celebrate Brown “as a truly heartening American success story”?

Certainly Brown advanced the cause of freedom. But as for realizing the hopes of black parents, that their children's educational progress would proceed alongside that of their white classmates, it is not so easy to celebrate.

For three in four black and Hispanic children are in schools that are largely black and Hispanic. And the racial gap in test scores has never been closed.

A May story in The Washington Post reports that not only has there been no gain in U.S. high school test scores in reading and math, the disparity between black and white students has deepened.

And there are other realities that folks need to stop denying.

First, as the Thernstroms write, where white children were 80 percent of pubic school students in 1970, today they are 50 percent and falling.

Second, there is no conclusive research that black kids learn more when sitting beside white kids.

Third, after trillions dumped into education since the Great Society, it is apparent the education industry has not only failed the nation. It has no idea how to close that gap.

Fourth, wealthy white liberals who dominate the D.C. metropolitan area appear to prefer living in predominantly white neighborhoods and sending their children to predominantly white schools.

The 60 years since Brown in D.C. have demonstrated another truth. There is no correlation between dollars invested in education and student achievement in schools where the money is spent.

Per capita expenditures for students in D.C.'s schools rank among the nation's highest while test scores rank among the nation's lowest. Whom should be held accountable?

Since D.C. got the right to vote, no GOP candidate has ever carried its electoral votes. Barack Obama won the city with 93 percent in 2008. And since home rule half a century ago, we have had only black Democrat mayors and liberal Democrat city councils.

This social debacle belongs to liberalism alone.

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