The Courts Social Science And School Desegregation

This book surveys the legal issues confronting courts as they decide school desegregation cases, and the extent to which social science research has been brought to bear on those issues. It examines the relationship between school segregation and residential segregation.

The 1954 landmark school desegregation decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Education, was part of one of the most extensive and tumultuous social/legal movements in the nation's history. The authors of this study employ the school desegregation movement to examine the role of social scientists, and social science, in the litigation process. Covering seventeen desegregation cases in litigation after 1970, they bring together the perspectives of judges, lawyers, and social scientists in a work sure to be of interest to all concerned with the court process, public policy, applied social science, conflict resolution, and the continuing process of school integration. The authors focus not only on the legal issues but also on the broader issues of conflict resolution, managed social change, and the public role of social science. They first provide a chronicle of the events leading up to the Brown case, and then a thorough and detailed analysis of the social science expert witnesses called upon to testify in the desegregation cases that followed. In the course of their research, they interviewed 90 scientists who appeared as witnesses, 70 lawyers who tried these cases for both plaintiff and defense groups, and 10 trial judges who presided in the cases. No other study has been so broadly encompassing, both in the number of cases and in the span of time involved.

In Forced Justice, David Armor explores the entire range of controversial issues in school desegregation policy, including evolving Supreme Court doctrines, the educational and social impacts of desegregation, and the effectiveness of mandatory versus voluntary desegregation methods, including magnet schools. He challenges the "harm and benefit" thesis of Brown v. Board of Education, finding few significant educational and psychological benefits from desegregation, and he counters conventional wisdom by arguing that voluntary plans using magnet schools are just as effective in attaining long-term desegregation as mandatory busing. Armor concludes by proposing a new policy of "equity choice" which draws on the best features of both the desegregation and choice movements.

"The United States Commission on Civil Rights sponsored a consultation in 1975 to review the relationship between desegregation, court orders, and suburbanization, as well as to assess what further role the Commission might play in discharging its responsibility to advance the constitutional rights of all children to a desegregated education. This book contains four papers which were presented and discussed at the consultation."--Abstract from ERIC website.

The desegregation situation is the keynote theme of the following chapters. I Each of them touches on a different dimension of the situation: the historical, the temporal, the spatial. But the reader, perusing the essays with the situation in mind, should remember that the desegregation situation should not be inter preted literally. Authorities and adults certainly, school-age children probably, are influenced by their awareness of a sequence of past and future situations. Some may even operate with William James's (1890, p. 608) notion of "the specious present" that "has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming," thus reducing the potency of the present situation. Others may be dancing to a slower tempo of change, thus becoming more responsive to the present situation. Whatever the perceived tempo, many must share the view that the future may reverse the direction of the past. Some may see that new future direction as unswerving, unending, or long-lasting; others may see it as short-lived. And it is through attention to the phenomenological description of desegregation that these issues can be explored; a theme that is considered in several of the following chapters.

In one of the twentieth century's landmark Supreme Court cases, Brown v. Board of Education, social scientists such as Kenneth Clark helped to convince the Supreme Court Justices of the debilitating psychological effects of racism and segregation. John P. Jackson, Jr., examines the well-known studies used in support of Brown, such as Clark’s famous “doll tests,” as well as decades of research on race which lead up to the case. Jackson reveals the struggles of social scientists in their effort to impact American law and policy on race and poverty and demonstrates that without these scientists, who brought their talents to bear on the most pressing issues of the day, we wouldn’t enjoy the legal protections against discrimination we may now take for granted. For anyone interested in the history and legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, this is an essential book.