Brown v. Board of education changed American public school education forever.
Or did it?

In New York City, if you are an African-American child, you most probably attend a school that is segregated. All the beautiful, glossy, multi-colored brochures will not change this sad fact, nor will these documents sway the heartache minority parents have over the inequality in public school education they see with their own eyes every single day. Parents who have not read any studies on this are very aware of the racial divide, and the very obvious consequences of this gap. Anyone who talks to African American parents or guardians (often the grandparents) will be told about the run-down school facility; the lack of supplies, books, good teachers, even homework assignments. In these schools, 50 years after the momentous Brown v Board of Education decision, very little has changed, and not one official from the Bloomberg/Klein/DOE administration have stepped forward to explain why this is so, or what they will do to change this. Instead, officials in the Mayor's office and at the New York City Department of Education are deceiving - or trying to- the public by denying the discrimination and the violations of city, state, and federal laws governing public school education and NY state legislation implementation.

In fact, The E-Accountability Foundation has tried, for the past four years, to obtain the attention of anyone at any level of the Bloomberg administration - including Deputy Mayor and African-American Dennis Walcott - as well as Chancellor Joel Klein, NY City Council Speaker Gifford Miller, City Council Education Chair Eva Moskowitz, New York State Assembly Education Committee Chair Steve Sanders, Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, and Commissioner of Special Investigations Mr. Richard Condon. We have personally spent countless hours going over specific examples of racism and non-compliance with laws of due process, civil rights, and special education in NYC public schools, all to no avail. Not one politician or educator wants to do anything about this problem. We have also gone to the major newspapers such as The New York Post - through reporters Carl Campanile and now David Andreatta - as well as reporters at The Daily News, Mr. Joe Williams. We have heard that our material is interesting, but not interesting to the readers. One reporter at The Daily News told us that there would never be a story on anything we brought to the newspaper because the publisher is good friends with the Chancellor. The closed door to the information on the systemic, clandestine support for segregation, racism, and non-compliance with federal laws is less obvious at The New York Post, but still there nonetheless. The major networks are not "allowed" to do this story, either. Michael Cardozo, chief counsel for the NYC DOE, is also a legal consultant for NBC News' "Today" Show.

The problem of rampant racism throughout America will not go away simply because our educators and politicians say that it will:

Shaky first results
for Mike's school reforms
By DIANE RAVITCH
Sunday, November 14th, 2004

It is time for a midcourse correction in Mayor Bloomberg's school reforms. Why? Because we now have the first fourth-grade math and reading scores to come out since the introduction of his new curriculum a year ago, and a careful analysis shows children in some of the city's poorest districts are falling further behind, rather than making progress.
When Schools Chancellor Joel Klein selected the new reading and math programs, specialists warned that they wouldn't succeed with low-performing students. The reading program lacks adequate attention to phonics, and the math program scants basic skills like adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing.

Nevertheless, the reading program was imposed in hundreds of elementary schools in September 2003 - although 235 schools were exempted because of their relatively good scores. Schools were allowed to phase in the math program over two years.

The latest test results to arrive from the state Education Department were the math scores released last month. At first glance, the news seemed good: Scores for fourth-graders across the city were up by 1.4%, and scores for eighth-graders up by 8%. But first impressions can be misleading.

Because the new math curriculum wasn't fully implemented and more than 200 schools were exempt, it's hard to know to what extent the new math program influenced the scores.

And when one looks under the surface, there are worrisome trends. More than half the city's school districts saw declines in the proportion of fourth-graders scoring at level 4, the highest level. And many fourth-grade students in poor districts actually lost ground despite the citywide gain of 1.4%.

In central Harlem's District 5, for example, two schools posted gains, six schools showed no change, and six recorded losses. In Brooklyn, Bedford-Stuyvesant's District 16 saw the proportion of fourth-graders meeting standards decline by 7%. District 17 in Crown Heights experienced a 6% drop in the proportion meeting standards.

The results were even more disturbing for the reading scores released by the state in June. The number of fourth-graders who met state standards fell to 49.5% from 52.5%, and the number of students who scored at level 4 dropped to 10% from 16%.

Again, in some poorer districts the declines exceeded the citywide average. In Harlem's District 5, the percentage meeting standards fell 10 points. In Bedford-Stuyvesant's District 16, the percentage dropped to 36% from 52%. In Crown Heights' District 17, the drop was 12 points.

Klein and the mayor need to pay attention to what these numbers are telling them: Many children have fallen behind since the introduction of the new reading and math programs.

That's consistent with those warnings that the programs would be least successful with kids from less-advantaged circumstances because they need more structure and better instruction than the programs offer.

The result is a growth in the achievement gap between the haves and the have-nots - hardly what the mayor intended when he took control of the schools.

No innovation can be fairly judged on the basis of a single year's results, but the sharp test-score declines in some of the city's poorest neighborhoods should ring alarm bells. A year lost in the life of a child is terrible. Two years lost may be irreversible.

Ravitch is research professor of education at New York University and a former U.S. assistant secretary of education.

A new study prepared by The Education Trust says that the white-black gap is narrowing, but too slowly:
Measured Progress: Achievement Rises and Gaps Narrow, But Too Slowly (PDF)

ACORN studied this problem:

Secret Apartheid I
A Report on Racial Discrimination Against Black and Latino Parents and Children in the New York City Public Schools

Executive Summary
One of the most pressing issues confronting New Yorkers is the quality of the public education which a million children and youths experience. New York ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is a grass roots community organization representing 20,000 mostly low income New Yorkers. For over ten years, ACORN members have fought for better schools for their children and neighborhoods. Despite many hard won ACORN victories at the local level, hundreds of thousands of young people continue to attend substandard schools that fail to address their educational needs. In many cases, these schools shut their parents and the community out of any meaningful involvement in efforts to provide more effective educational opportunities for them.

This report, Secret Apartheid, details evidence of institutional racism in New York City Public Schools which prevents parents of color from making informed decisions about their children's education. In nearly 100 test visits to schools in 16 community school districts, the ACORN Schools Office discovered that:

Black and latin parents were permitted to speak with an educator less than half as often as white parents.
White parents were given tours of schools two and a half times more often than black or latin parents.
White parents often received "A" list treatment while people of color were relegated to the "B" list.
Access to information about gifted programs appeared to vary by the race of the parent making the inquiry.

Examples of discrimination range from the blatant to the less obvious. Many times this discrimination becomes apparent only when the treatment of black and white testers is compared:

Ten days after an assistant principal told a black parent there would be no room in the school's kindergarten for her child because the classes were already filled to capacity, the a.p. told a white parent that she should register soon because classes would be filling up.
A latina tester was quizzed by school secretaries about whether she was on public assistance and whether her child spoke English.
A white parent was encouraged to apply for a gifted program even though she had missed the deadline; she was given the number of someone in the district office to ask "what she could do." A black tester at the same school was told to come back in a month for kindergarten registration and was offered no information about the gifted program.

We are not concerned with whether this institutional racism reflects conscious decisions by policy makers; malign neglect by elected officials; or the dysfunction that results when a vital public responsibility is managed by people whose racial, class, and cultural reality is totally different from that of the people whom they are supposed to serve. We are concerned with the ways in which, by denying parents access to essential information about the schools and their programs, it closes off options for students and de facto sets them on the track to academic mediocrity if not outright failure.

The most blatant illustration of the long term results of narrowing our children's options can be found in the composition of the student body at New York City's premier academic high schools: Stuyvesant and Bronx Science.

System-wide, about 39 percent of high school students are black, 34 percent latino. At Stuyvesant, less than five percent of students are black and just over four percent are hispanic. At Bronx Science, less than 11 percent are black; about 9 percent are latino.

The public school programs which effectively prepare students to enter one of these elite schools are limited. What our study will demonstrate is that in a variety of ways parents of color, who are the vast majority of parents in the public schools, do not have equal access to information about regular schools, let alone about the gifted programs, option schools, and other "fast track" alternatives used to market the public schools to white middle class parents. Without information, choice is a myth for parents and options non-existent for their children. Without information, reform of the New York City Public Schools is an impossibility.

This study recommends that the Chancellor and the Board of Education take a number of specific steps to reverse the racist treatment of parents in the schools. We further call for an immediate systematic examination of the currently uncharted array of gifted programs: What is their purpose? Whom do they serve? How are they evaluated? Are they appropriate for children in the early grades? And, perhaps most important, why are the innovative approaches used in gifted programs not used in all of our schools?

Table of Contents | Context

In New York City 2004, New York public school guidance counselors are still telling black and hispanic parents that the Specialized Science High School Achievement Test (for Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech and three new specialized high schools) is "not for your child".

Secret Apartheid II: Race, Regents, and Resources:

Executive Summary
When asked if the test for admission to the specialized high schools were an IQ test, staff of the Office of High School Placement responded, "No, it's based on course work." 1 The daughter of an ACORN member earned good grades as a student in District 19's so-called magnet gifted program at I.S. 166, but was not one of the 26 of 377 eighth graders who took Regents math. Despite repeated inquiries, her mother was never able to ascertain what math she was taking. After taking the admission examination for the specialized science high schools, her honor student daughter was rejected by all eight of her high school choices and directed to enroll in Thomas Jefferson, her failing zoned high school.

This report picks up the fate of our children a few years down the low achievement track which Secret Apartheid: A Report on Racial Discrimination Against Black and Latino Parents and Children in the New York City Public Schools suggested was inevitable when parents, particularly parents of color, are consistently denied the information they need to make decisions about their children's education.

This report summarizes our recent investigation of what happens when students are consistently denied the quality and content of course work and instruction they need to compete successfully for a spot in one of the very few high schools that might prepare them for a quality university education. Our investigation forces us to conclude that the racial imbalance occurring at the Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and similar schools is the direct result of programmatic and geographic tracking that condemns them to failing, zoned high schools.

We will demonstrate that a student's success on the competitive examination for admission to the elite high schools is dependent on his or her mastery of specific subject-related content and skills. 2 We then document that only a fraction of the middle school students have access to the opportunity to learn this material. Finally, we present strong evidence that a major factor in being denied access to the types of instruction necessary to do well on the examination for the specialized schools is race. There is, in other words, not a level playing field for winning the prize of a desk at Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, or similar schools.

If this evidence were presented about any other business serving the public, let alone a government facility, that business or facility would be shut down and its management sacked or jailed.

This evidence is drawn primarily from 86 middle schools in 14 community school districts and includes findings such as the following:

Developing the skills and academic competence to compete successfully for admission to Stuyvesant or Bronx Science requires course work which is not available to most black and latino students in the public schools.

Eighteen schools had no eighth graders studying Sequential I Math, a key course for scoring well on the entrance exam for Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. They are all located in nine low sending districts which collectively provide less than two percent of the students at Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. 3

A few districts dominate the enrollments of Stuyvesant High School and Bronx High School of Science.

Private and parochial schools plus just three community school districts provide over half of the students to the two "science schools;" not surprisingly, these districts have relatively high percentages of students taking Regents level math classes.

The districts which send the most students differ in racial composition from the districts which send the fewest.

In the five top districts sending students to Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, the combined student enrollment (1995-96) for their middle schools is under 45 percent black and latino. The combined student enrollment (1995-96) for the middle schools in the five districts that contribute the fewest students is over 97 percent black and latino.

Personnel in many schools who are unhelpful, uninformed, rude -- or all three -- continue to hinder parents' attempts to obtain information they need to plan their children's education.

A year after Secret Apartheid was published and the Chancellor has issued memos about making schools more welcoming, barriers and misinformation are still quite apparent. All in all, staff from at least 17 schools refused some portion of the information we requested. In other cases, we were given incorrect information. In at least one case, the parent calling was criticized for worrying about whether her middle school student would get into a good high school and that she was "thinking too far ahead."

Our recommendations for reversing a maldistribution of key educational resources include:

Establish linkages between Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and the handful of other top performing high schools with middle schools and their feeder elementary schools in nearby districts which currently have few or no successful applicants for admission.

As an interim measure, each high school would set aside a number of ninth grade slots for students from those schools who will be evaluated using alternative appropriate assessment techniques.

Suspend the competitive testing for the specialized high schools.

Until the Board of Education can show that the students of each middle school in the system have had access to curricula and instruction that would prepare them for this test regardless of their color or economic status, the current test for the specialized high schools must remain permanently suspect as the product of an institutional racism inappropriate to an educational system in a democracy. As a first step toward aggressively attacking this problem, the Board of Education should immediately establish programs for this year's seventh graders to expand the pool of students taking next fall's test, if it can be offered.
Adopt common minimum standards for all subjects beginning with math to ensure that at each grade level all students in the system have an opportunity to learn challenging material that prepares them for the next grade.

Standards such as those of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, provide accountability for teachers and administrators and a way for parents to know whether or not their children are being educated for the real world.

Establish an independently operated "Choice Clearinghouse" where information about all New York City schools and programs will be centralized and available in a user-friendly format to interested parents.

This recommendation echoes last year's report and is, unfortunately, still highly relevant. It is intolerable that such information is not available at the school level from well informed, courteous public employees, but in too many cases it is not. Until it is, a Choice Clearinghouse is an important tool for redressing at least one dimension of the inequitable distribution of educational resources.

Table of Contents | Introduction

Notes
1. Phone research conducted on November 18, 1996.

2. In this report we have focused on Regents level math course work because the documentation was readily available and easily comparable. However, math curricula are intended primarily as a proxy for the many academic subjects which students will never master unless they are exposed to them.

3. Student enrollment at these schools is 97 percent black and hispanic and 83 percent free lunch eligible.

Secret Apartheid III: Followup to Failure:

Executive Summary
Secret Apartheid III: Follow Up to Failure presents evidence that both accountability and standards -- of pedagogy and decency -- have been abandoned in the treatment of students of color in the New York City Public Schools.

Three strands of investigation come together in this report:

An examination of the Survey For Programs Serving Gifted Students, Spring 1996 ordered by the Chancellor in response to grass roots pressure from ACORN and an appraisal of the relationship between gifted programs and federal and state magnet funding.
An investigation of the Board of Education's compliance with the consent agreement between the Board of Education and the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, another result of ACORN's advocacy for better schools.
Research on the 1996-97 distribution of rigorous course work at the middle school level in a cross section of New York City community school districts.

Key findings from this study include:

Children of color are dramatically underrepresented in gifted programs throughout the system.

Latino children are underrepresented in more than two thirds of the programs described by the surveys and occasionally over represented in a mere handful. White students are twice as likely to be over represented in a program as African American students and are over represented eight times more frequently than Latino students.

In at least 14 gifted programs, between 50 and 100 percent of the school's white enrollment is concentrated in the gifted program.
Among these schools are some of the City's top recipients of magnet school funding.

Five of the ten schools receiving federal magnet funding have at least half of their white enrollment concentrated in their magnet programs. A sixth has almost half (49 percent). These schools share over $600,000 in federal magnet money. Two other schools which place 97 and 89 percent of their white students in gifted programs receive more than a third of a million dollars in state magnet funding.

In 32 visits to schools, African American and Latina testers succeeded in speaking with an educator (principal, teacher, etc.) only four times (12.5 percent). Only one of the four was a principal.
In five visits, black or Hispanic testers were prevented from getting information from various school offices by security guards who refused them entry to the school; a white tester also encountered this problem.

The overarching finding of this section of our study is that the Board of Education has not made even a good faith effort to live up to the commitments made to the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights. Compared to ACORN's 1996 investigation of schools which prompted the OCR agreement, 1998 visits by testers who were people of color resulted in a slightly lower rate of classroom tours, a higher rate of security guard interference with parent inquiries, and a substantially lower success rate in actually speaking with educators about the schools. White testers fared about the same both years.

In the 1996-1997 school year, 20 percent (17 of 86) of the middle schools in the selected districts failed to offer Sequential I Math and 52 percent (45 of 86) fail to offer Regents Earth Science.
In schools that do offer Sequential I Math to eighth graders, in 52 percent of those schools (36 of 69) the course is only available to one class of students on the grade level.

With the exception of one district -- Community School District 17 -- in the districts selected as the most and least successful at sending students to the science high schools there was no significant change in the distribution of rigorous curriculum in the city's middle schools between our first look at this issue last year and this spring.

This segregation is all the more disastrous for New York City, because we have a Mayor who has staked his political career on education reform in New York City and has done nothing to end this problem. Does this mean that he does not really care about the segregation, or that he does not really believe this is a political situation that needs to worry him? Or both? African-American Benjamin Tucker, appointed by Chancellor Klein to oversee the school violence and security, quit without comment in April, 2004.

For a Historic Anniversary, Few Hurrahs for New York
By SETH KUGEL, NY TIMES, May 9, 2004

P.S. 68 in Wakefield, the Bronx, is 87 percent black and 1 percent white. P.S. 21 in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn, is 93 percent black and 0.35 percent white. P.S. 56 in Staten Island is 1 percent black and 90 percent white.

A week from tomorrow, educators and others around the country will observe the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark court decision outlawing school segregation. But according to a nationwide study of elementary schools conducted by the Lewis Mumford Center at SUNY Albany, New York doesn't have much to celebrate.

In fact, New York's is the only one of the nation's 30 biggest school systems in which black-white segregation increased from 1968 to 2000, according to the "dissimilarity index," a measure used in the study. The index calculates the percentage of black or white children who would have to switch schools to achieve an even distribution. In New York, that percentage rose from 72.2 in 1968 to 81.7 in 2000, while everywhere else, it fell. "New York City has been stuck since the 1960's, and surprisingly so," said John R. Logan, the sociologist who did the study.

Choosing how to gauge segregation, however, is tricky. Mr. Logan favors the dissimilarity index, but Gary Orfield, a professor of education at Harvard and an expert on segregation, called it "a terrible measure" in cases where the school system has few white students. In 2000, New York's elementary schools were 15 percent white and 34 percent black, with Hispanics and Asians making up the bulk of the rest.

But Mr. Orfield agrees that New York is badly segregated, and a second measure used in the Mumford Center study, the exposure index, leads to the same conclusion. This index calculates how many whites are in the school attended by the typical black student. In 1970, this hypothetical school was 21 percent white, but, by 2000, it was just 5 percent white. Although New York's was not the only big school system to regress, it fell the most.

Why has the city fared so badly? First, most segregation lawsuits were filed in the South. "Nobody ever had the money to sue New York," Mr. Orfield said.

Also, integrating areas like the South Bronx, where whites are rare, is difficult. "Reducing barriers in the housing market is, in the long run, the best and perhaps the only viable solution," Mr. Logan said.

Jerry Russo, a spokesman for the city's Department of Education, would not address the racial breakdown of schools directly, but said the department was seeking to furnish an equal education to all children.

New York has a few bright spots. White-Hispanic segregation has dropped since the late 60's, although less so than in many cities. And the average New York student is attending a school that is, on the whole, more diverse (though less white) once Hispanics and Asians are counted.

Still, the city is hardly a model for the nation. When Mr. Orfield comes to New York, he said, he likes to announce: "I'm glad to be here in the heartland of segregation."

New York Schools: Fifty Years After Brown
by Gail Robinson, Gotham Gazette, May 05, 2004

Even parents who can afford private schools send their children to P.S. 6 on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The school offers instruction in political cartooning and foreign language and a joint program with the Museum of Natural History. And all the innovation apparently pays off. More than 92 percent of the students at the school meet the state standards in reading and math for their grade level.

But there is another P.S. 6 in New York City, this one in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Despite a well-regarded principal, only 40 percent of its students meet the state standards in reading and less than a third in math.

The Manhattan P.S. 6 is overwhelmingly white and includes only a smattering of poor students. Its East Flatbush counterpart is more than 92 percent black, with almost 90 percent of its students from families with low enough incomes to qualify the children for a free school lunch.

The differences between these schools reflect the state of education in New York City public schools today, 50 years after the Supreme Court outlawed legally enforced school segregation in the United States. Despite a far greater ethnic diversity, with an increasing number of Asian and Hispanic students, New York City public schools are among the most segregated in the country. But, if integration has not been achieved, few New Yorkers seem to see it anymore as the most important goal in education.

THE BROWN DECISION
On May 17, 1954, when the Supreme Court issued its unanimous ruling in the case of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, legalized segregation in the country had just started to crumble in the wake of World War II. But separate and decidedly unequal still held sway across much of the country, particularly the South, with black Americans forced to sit in the back of the bus, drink at different fountains, and sit in separate train cars. They were barred from Woolworth lunch counters and could not try on clothes in department stores. Poll taxes, tests with arcane questions and intimidation prevented them from voting.

Linda Brown, a black third grader in Topeka, Kansas, had to attend a school a mile from her home, even though a white elementary school was only seven blocks away. The principal of the white school refused to admit Linda, setting in motion the events that would lead to the historic court ruling.

In defense of its dual school systems, the Topeka school board argued that segregated schools prepared youngsters for the segregated society in which they would live and were not harmful to black youngsters.

After years of argument and deliberation, the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, rejected those claims. In the decision, Warren wrote, "Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn."

Brown and a related ruling "reflected and encouraged developments that would soon spark the burst of humane, bold and heroic action that we now know as the civil rights movement," Eric Foner and Randall Kennedy wrote in a special issue of The Nation magazine commemorating the Brown decision.

Some predicted all schools would be integrated within five years. But change came slowly. In 1955, the Supreme Court ruled that desegregation could proceed "with all deliberate speed," a phrase that many school districts took to mean "as slowly as possible." And so a decade after Brown, less than two percent of black youngsters in the South attended integrated schools.

But the civil rights movement helped change that. And by 1974, 20 years after Brown, almost half of all black children throughout the nation went to white-majority schools. Despite what many call the 'resegregation' of the last few decades, some of that change remains, including in Topeka, the city that gave birth to Brown.

ut this is not the story in New York City, where the racial composition of schools today almost resembles those in the South of the 1950s.

Indeed, the city's schools were not much more integrated than Southern schools when the Brown decision was issued -- even though Governor Theodore Roosevelt had directed the New York State Legislature to abolish the last two officially black schools in New York City way back in 1900. But as recounted by Diane Ravitch in her book The Great School Wars, Kenneth Clark, a psychologist whose research bolstered the NAACP arguments in the Brown case, issued another report in 1954 concluding that New York City had a segregated school system and that black children received an inferior education. The head of the New York City Board of Education then, Arthur Levitt, said the segregation had not "been deliberately imposed by legislation" but was nonetheless "not good educational policy."

At the same time, the population of the school system was undergoing a huge change, as many whites left the city for the suburbs, and more and more Hispanics moved to New York. There were many subsequent efforts to address the segregation in the city -- some sincere, some cosmetic, few successful.

NEW YORK'S SEGREGATED SYSTEM
Today, of the approximately 1.1 million students in New York City public schools, about 13 percent are Asian, 15 percent white, 32 percent black and 40 percent Hispanic. Given the makeup of the student body, one reason for segregation of New York City schools, said Pedro Noguera, a professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Education, is that "there are no kids to integrate with."

But the population of many schools is even more skewed than the student population as a whole. Some 60 percent of all black students in New York State, including those in New York City, attend schools that are at least 90 percent black, according to a recent study by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University; more Latinos in New York State than in any other state go to schools that are 90 percent or more Latino.

Another study, this one by the Lewis Mumford Center at the State University of New York at Albany, found that Asians and Hispanics are more segregated from whites in New York schools than in any other school system in the country. For black-white segregation, New York ranks third.

The Mumford study also found that, in 2000, the typical black student attended a school where only five percent of the other students were white, a sharp drop from 1970.

This segregation has a different cause than that in the South of the 1950s. In New York, "the segregation in the schools reflects segregation in the housing market," said John Logan, who conducted the Mumford center study. While New Yorkers think of this as a progressive city, it is, Logan said, "one of the most segregated cities in the country in terms of blacks and whites."

But the city has had little success implementing policies that might reduce the effects that housing segregation has on schools.

Particularly at the high school level, the Department of Education established schools with special programs around the city, in an effort to encourage students to leave their neighborhoods. But the effort has not done much to improve integration. Although some of the individual school programs are good, "I don't believe school choice has made New York a less segregated city," said Jill Chaifetz, executive director of Advocates for Children, which works on school issues.

In another attempt to encourage diversity, the city requires that some high schools with special programs admit the same number of students who do poorly on standardized tests as those who score substantially above average. But this gives the lowest scoring students a better chance at admission because far fewer of that group applies. And some parents, many of them white, complain that their children are being unfairly denied a place in these schools.

Partly in response, white parents in several communities have lobbied to bring back the neighborhood high school, at least in their communities. "Despite paying the highest tax rates in New York City, we don't have a school that will prepare our children to go to the superior colleges they are qualified to attend," a proposal by East Side parents said.

The parents won creation of the new Eleanor Roosevelt High School on East 76th Street, but the school admits children from a broad swath of Manhattan, not just the immediate neighborhood, as the parents had wanted. Eleanor Roosevelt, now in its first year of existence, is 10 percent black, 15 percent Hispanic, 35 percent Asian, and 40 percent white.

Parents in the white, affluent Park Slope section of Brooklyn fought to revamp John Jay, a high school attended largely by black and Hispanic students from outside the community. They believed that three new small schools, with grades 6 through 12, would enable more Park Slope kids to attend high school in their neighborhood. They won their fight but may have achieved a Pyrrhic victory. Top students from Park Slope have been slow to embrace the three new schools and at least one is plagued by discipline problems and a poor reputation in the area.

THE EFFECTS OF SEGREGATION
If the schools are still segregated, does segregation still matter? Some would argue that it does.

Claude Steele, a professor at Stanford University, listed some effects segregation has on black students. "They are more likely to go to poorly funded schools in run-down buildings and more likely to be taught by uncertified and poorly trained teachers," he wrote. "They are likely to be counseled with lower expectations. They are more likely to go to schools with few or no Advanced Placement courses, and they are likely to have less access to test-prep courses and related tutorials."

Although there are exceptions, schools in New York City with higher test scores tend to have greater numbers of white and Asian students, while struggling schools are more likely to be composed primarily of black and Hispanic students.

In the 1990s, the community group ACORN charged that many junior high schools in predominantly black and Hispanic areas did not teach students what they needed to know in order to do well on the test for the selective specialized high schools, such as Stuyvesant. In response, rather than improve the program for all youngsters, the city began offering special instruction for selected students. Despite the classes, less than 10 percent of students at Stuyvesant are black or Hispanic.

Black and Hispanic students score significantly lower than whites and Asians on virtually all standardized tests and are less likely to finish high school. About 94 percent of white youngsters in New York State who started high school in 1999 were seniors in June 2003, but only 61 percent of Hispanic children and 65 percent of black students were.

As New York increasingly relies on standardized tests, some critics worry that black and Hispanic students will be most affected. For example, most students at Taft High School and Bushwick High School, both of which are 98 percent black and Hispanic, did not pass even one of the five Regents tests required for graduation. "On the 50th anniversary of Brown, we've come full circle," said Jane Hirschmann of Timeout From Testing. Relying so much on Regents and other tests, she said, "is very unequal and very unfair."

Test proponents argue, however, that the lack of firm standards in education has been discriminatory, awarding black and Hispanic students diplomas but without giving them the skills they need to earn a living or function in society.

Black and Hispanic students also bear the brunt of discipline in the city schools. More than 90 percent of students at Second Opportunity Schools for students serving lengthy suspensions were black or Hispanic, according to Advocates for Children.

Academics, educators and politicians endlessly debate the reasons for these disparities. But one factor could be that, along with the achievement gap, there is a resource gap. Predominantly black and Hispanic New York City spends $10,500 per pupil, about half the $21,000 that the rich -- and largely white -- Long Island suburb of Manhasset spends, Jonathan Kozol has noted. At the same time, many senior teachers avoid poor, minority schools in the city in favor of richer schools.

The gap to some extent reflects the fact that much of the money for schools comes from local tax revenues, and more affluent -- usually white -- communities have more money to spend than the black and Hispanic communities that tend to be less affluent.

But critics charge that New York State does nothing to erase the gap, and some things that make it worse. According to David Jones, president of the Community Service Society, in New York State "school districts with the highest percentage of minority students receive over $2,000 annually less than school districts with the lowest percentage of minority students." He blames the state's method of allocating funds to districts.

THE BENEFITS OF INTEGRATION
The demand for integration is not purely academic. Students who attended the more integrated schools of the 1970s, and those who attend the segregated schools of today, apparently see the value of diversity.

A recent study by Columbia University Teachers College looked at people who had attended school in the peak integration years of the 1970s before courts began rolling back orders requiring busing and other integration measures. While the integration may not have completely reformed society, it did change individual members of the class of 1980.

The study concluded that the integrated schools did more than any other institution, except perhaps the military, to "bring people of different racial/ethnic backgrounds together and foster equal opportunity." And, the people interviewed said they found attending mixed schools "to be one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives, the best -- and sometimes the only -- opportunity to meet and interact regularly with people of different backgrounds."

Today's school children seem to want a similar chance. Advocates for Children conducted an essay contest to mark the Brown anniversary, asking students to write about such topics as whether integration is important.

In the essays, some of which will be on the group's web site later his month, students wrote about the value of diversity, said Deborah Apsel of the group. "There were kids who said we really wish our school had more Caucasian students or kids from outside our neighborhood," she said. "A lot of kids talked about "tolerance" or "about how integration in the classroom builds on the learning and can add a different dimension to discussions."

LESS AGAINST "SEPARATE", MORE FOR "EQUAL"
But experts debate the value of integration.

Derek Bell, a former civil rights lawyer who teaches at NYU law school, said that in some respects Brown was "a disaster." Those who cheered the decision at the time failed to recognize how entrenched segregation and white racism was in America, he said. Rather than trying to do away with separate schools, Bell has argued, the Supreme Court "might have been better off" if it had set out steps, such as monitoring and enforcement, to ensure that black youngsters attended schools truly equal to those for white students.

Others who support integration, such as Gary Orfield, author of the Harvard Civil Rights Project study, question whether meaningful integregation can take place without crossing boundaries between city and suburb. But in 1974 -- 20 years after Brown -- the Supreme Court in Milliken v. Bradley ruled that school integration efforts did not have to cross government boundaries -- in that case between predominantly black Detroit and its white suburbs.

Faced with that and other court decisions that have chipped away at efforts to integrate schools, activists in New York have shifted their efforts to trying to get more funding to improve the schools that black and Hispanic youngsters attend.

In one, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity challenged the formula New York State uses to determine how much money the state gives each local school district. Activists in other states have also argued that poorer school districts need more money to help their students meet new state standards.

In the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case, the state's highest court ruled that Albany's funding formula denied students in New York City and other cities in the state their right to a "sound, basic education," and ordered that the situation be corrected. But the issue remains entangled in politics and disputes about the amount of money required. Neither Governor George Pataki nor the legislature -- nor localities -- have come up with a means to fund the court's mandate. The governor suggested using funds from electronic gambling machines.

Elise Boddie of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund said she hates to choose between fighting for integration and struggling for more money. But she admitted that in light of legal rulings and hostile courts, "Funding equity cases may be our only hope."

That funding, said Pedro Noguera, can lead to better schools and maybe even more integrated ones: "If you can get really outstanding teachers into high-need areas and really outstanding programs . . . then you're going to attract middle-class kids of all races," he said. "Quality is what is ultimately going to bring people in, -- whites and Asians as well as middle-class blacks and Hispanics."

But it will be a long hard road. And many experts, while recognizing the promise of Brown, see few reasons for optimism on its much-observed anniversary.