souri, but more on the authority of the federal district court to order a property tax increase to fund a court-ordered desegregation plan. In Board of Education of Oklahoma City Public Schools v. Dowell (1991), the Court ruled that school systems that once practiced segregation could be freed from court-ordered busing plans if the schools had made good faith efforts to end discrimination. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice Rehnquist noted that school desegregation plans were "temporary measure(s) to remedy past discrimination" and were not meant to "operate in perpetuity" (Abernathy and Perry, 1993, p. 359). In Freeman v. Pitts, a 1992 Supreme Court decision on federal school desegregation, one justice wrote that the country was fast approaching the time when it should abandon school desegregation law as a failed experiment (Pillets, 1995, p. A-2). Justice Clarence Thomas, who is African-American, has subsequently written, "It never ceases to amaze me that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior" (Ahearn, 1995, p. NJ-5).
In New Jersey, the school desegregation controversy began in 1963 when the state ordered Englewood to desegregate its schools. The issue intensified in 1985 when the predominantly white school district of Englewood Cliffs petitioned the state for the right to send its high school students to Tenafly instead of Englewood's Dwight Morrow High School. Englewood subsequently sued and white parents pulled their children out of the school district in droves. Consequently, the student population of Dwight Morrow is now 97 percent black and Hispanic, and New Jersey's public schools are the fourth most racially imbalanced in the nation (Pillets, Young, and Markowitz, 1995, p. R-1).
The state appeals court ruled in 1992 that Englewood Cliffs students must continue to attend Dwight Morrow. In 1993, the state Supreme Court upheld the authority of the Englewo...