ERIC Number: ED117795
Record Type: RIE
Publication Date: 1975-Dec-5
Reference Count: 0
Compulsory Racial Balance in the Schools.
Coleman, James S.
In this paper, the author analyzes what has happened since 1954 in the area of school integration and suggests what he feels are appropriate policies for the future. He identifies two major changes that have affected school integration since 1954--a change in residential patterns that has increased segregation in recent years, and a change in the idea of what constitutes desegregation. The courts have changed the "rules of the game," he argues, by confusing the essentially different goals of eradicating legally sanctioned segregation and overcoming the educational handicaps of blacks that have resulted from official and unofficial discrimination. The author asserts that, because of white flight to the suburbs, efforts to achieve compulsory racial balance in the schools will succeed only where there is sufficient community support for the idea. A more realistic alternative, he suggests, is to attack the effects of residential discrimination by adopting a voluntary "integrating transfer" plan that permits children to attend any school in their metropolitan area, so long as they transfer to a school with a smaller proportion of persons from their race. (JG)
Publication Type: Speeches/Meeting Papers
Education Level: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Note: Speech given at the National Conference on Alternatives to Busing (1st, Louisville, Kentucky, December 5-6, 1975)