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Strategies for Effective Desegregation: Lessons

A joint effort by nine coauthors representing several disciplines, this book blends advocacy and analysis in a generally systematic and often compelling fashion. Each chapter employs a format of topical discussion followed by evidence from the literature and, when available, examples from desegregation experience. Hawley and associates offer readers (1) reviews of the school desegregation literature; (2) proposals to reduce racial isolation in public schools and to avoid resegregation in schools already desegregated; (3) recommendations for building student, parental, and community support for desegregation; (4) suggestions to change curriculum, student evaluation, instructional methods, and teacher training for the sake of "more effective" desegregation; and (5) an attack on the "new mythology" about school desegregation, said by the authors to combine pessimism and misinformation. Academics will find the book most useful for discussion of the impact of different types of desegregation plans on white pupil loss, and a brief but very good treatment of reciprocal relationships between segregated schools and segregated housing. A more general audience, including parents, school administrators, and others directly involved in school desegregation, will profit from chapter 7's discussion of how smaller schools can promote more teacher attention to individual pupils, perhaps improve educational quality, and otherwise help ease racial tensions during the first year or so of implementation. Other chapters offer useful suggestions for parental involvement in school activities, maintaining contact with families whose children have left the public schools, and publicizing positive aspects of desegregation. To their credit, Hawley et al. declare that their proposals should not be regarded as "foolproof recipes" or suitable for all locales. Readers are invited to draw their own conclusions about the feasibility of each recommendation. I suspect readers will heed this good advice when they come upon some of chapter 7's ideas to transform public schooling in the cause of interracial harmony and minority student self-esteem. Here desegregation is taken as a license to "innovate," and the "multi-ethnic" approach advocated appears bent on avoiding almost any scholastic situation in which pupils figure as individuals rather than members of categorical groups. Whether educational quality will be enhanced as a result is open to serious question, and widespread doubts on this score surely contribute to the pessimism lamented by the authors. The book would have benefited from more systematic discussion of the role of middle-class white pupils in school desegregation. Chapter 3 advocates reassignment of as many such students as possible to serve as achievement role models for minority and lower-income white classmates, but chapter 7's approach appears to minimize the white achievement thesis by accentuating racial differences and favoring "pluralistic" standards. Still another topic needing more development is minority diversity. Occasional references to limited-English proficiency and foreign-born students do little to disaggregate so variegated a grouping. Too often "minority" seems to mean "lower-income black."