The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

Spring 1991: Volume 5, Number 4

Civil Rights Monitor
Spring 1991

• Introduction
• Senate Judiciary Committee Rejects Judge Kenneth Ryskamp
• Supreme Court Rules in Fetal Protection Case
• Supreme Court Accepts Georgia School Desegregation Case
• Supreme Court Accepts Higher Education Desegregation Case
• Supreme Court Hears Oral Arguments in Voting Rights Cases
• My Mind on Freedom: 40 Years of LCCR

Supreme Court Accepts Georgia School Desegregation Case

In January 1991, the Supreme Court addressed for the first time the question of when a formerly segregated school system can be released from court supervision, Board of Education of Oklahoma City Public Schools v. Robert L. Dowell. The decision left many questions unanswered including to what extent residential segrega tion is a vestige of a segregated school system that must be addressed before a school system can be freed from court supervision. The Court remanded the Oklahoma school desegregation case to the district court to determine whether the school board "had complied in good faith with the desegregation decree ... and whether the vestiges of discrimination had been eliminated to the extent practicable". The Court said the district court should reconsider the issue of whether residential segregation was "too attenuated to be a vestige of former school segregation", but did not give any guidance in the area.

Now the Court has accepted for review a second case, from Georgia that raises similar questions. The case, Freeman v. Pitts, No. 89-1290, involves an appeal by school officials from the decision of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals that the DeKalb County, Georgia school system (DCSS) had not sufficiently erased the legacy of segregation, and that school officials should consider broader measures including busing.

The issues before the Court are whether compliance can be attained on a piecemeal basis, i.e. student assign ments, faculty assignments, and to what extent a school district can be held responsible for countering the ef fects of demographic changes that occurred after it initially desegregated its schools.

The DeKalb County, Georgia School District

As of 1986 the DCSS enrolled 79,991 students in approximately 90 schools, with African American students 47 percent of the population. Fifty percent of the African Americans students attended schools that were more than 90 percent African American, and 27 percent of the white students attended schools that were more than 90 percent white. Sixty-two percent of the African American students attended schools at least 67 percent African American, and fifty-nine percent of white students attend schools at least 73 percent while.

African American administrators were 30 percent of the system's elementary school administrators, but 60 percent of the administrators at schools with African American student populations of more than 81 percent, and less than 10 percent of such persons in elementary schools with majority white student enrollments. Thirteen of the eighteen African American elementary principals were assigned to schools more than 90 percent African American in student enrollments. Similarly, 4 of the 5 African American high school principals were assigned to schools with African American populations of more than 95 percent.

The average number of years teaching experience for teachers in majority white schools was 9.79 compared to 5.19 in majority African American schools. In addition the per pupil expenditure in majority white schools was $2,833, and in the majority African American schools it was $2,492.