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Desegregation Issue

Desegregation remains a controversial issue in education. Once believed to be the only remedy for a separate but unequal school system, desegregation is now labelled by critics a misallocation of scarce financial resources. On the other hand, forced school integration has resulted in the elimination of racial imbalances in certain situations. At stake in the debate on desegregation is the fate of African-American children in the nation's deteriorating urban school system.

Desegregation in education has several advantages, both tangible and intangible. One of the tangible benefits is that it increases interracial exposure between blacks and whites. For example, after a decade of the implementation of a desegregation plan in Milwaukee, the white enrollment in minority schools increased from 21 percent to 31 percent. In a society where African-Americans and whites appear to have grown increasingly racially polarized, racial mixing of this magnitude is an outstanding achievement.

Another tangible benefit of desegregation is the impact on academic achievement for African-American students who attend racially integrated schools. A recent study in St. Louis found that black children who were transferred to predominantly white high schools outperformed black students who remained in inner city districts, even schools that had adequate levels of funding. Higher rates of college attendance have also been associated with school integration.

To illustrate the shortcomings of the non-desegregated school system it is instructive to examine the intangible benefits of desegregation. According to noted educator John Dewey, the ideal school functions as a form of community life in which students are not merely prepared for some remote future but introduced to social institutions: "school, as an institution, should simplify existing social life; should reduce it, as it were, to an embryonic form." As such, the inferior, mostly s...

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Desegregation Issue. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 15:15, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681245.html