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Act, 153 which channels funds for compensatory and remedial programs to schools with concentrations of poor children. President Nixon's 1972 legislative proposals offered aid to improve inner city schools as an explicit alternative to desegregation.154 Legislative proposals to provide substantial funds to these schools, however, have fared very badly on the floor of Congress. 155

The emphasis on the compensatory program alternative occurred in spite of research showing generally negative evaluations of their educational impact. 156 When HEW Secretary Richardson testified in behalf of the Administration's bill in 1972, he indicated that there was evidence that desegregation had a positive effect on achievement greater than or equal to that of compensatory programs, which the Nixon Administration proposed to substitute for desegregation.157 The negative evidence on compensatory programs was only brought into the policy debate when President Nixon used such evidence to justify his vetoes of education appropriations and when the Supreme Court sought to justify its decision in Rodriguez refusing to overturn inequitable state school finance systems. 158 Policymakers insisted that compensatory programs worked when desegregation was threatened, but contended that these programs were useless when redistribution was proposed.

Compensatory education as an alternative to desegregation is implicit in the Supreme Court's second Milliken decision.159 Three years earlier, the Court had rejected a metropolitan area desegregation plan as a remedy for the de jure segregated school system of Detroit. 160 When the case was remanded to the federal district court, a very limited desegregation plan was approved-one confined to the Detroit school district and involving the reas

153. 20 U.S.C. § 241a (Supp. V 1975).

154. Special Message to the Congress on Equal Educational Opportunities and School Busing, PUB. PAPERS 425-43 (March 17, 1972).

155. Congressional Research Service shows substantial declines, in constant-value dollars, in the amounts appropriated for the major federal compensatory and desegregation programs between the early and mid-seventies. See SENATE Comm. on Human Resources, 95th Cong., 1ST Sess., Desegregation and thE CITIES-THE Trends and PoLICY CHOICES 39 (Comm. Print 1977) (prepared by G. Orfield).

156. See T. Thomas & S. Pelavin, Patterns in ESEA Title I Reading Achievement (1976), for summaries of much of the earlier research literature on this compensatory program. The first major evidence that additional resources have little impact on achievement was in the 1966 Coleman Report.

157. Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1972: Hearings before Senate Comm. on Labor and Public Welfare, Subcomm. on Education, 92d Cong., 2d Sess. 289 (1972) (testimony of HEW Sec. Elliot Richardson).

158. San Antonio Independent School Dist. v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1, 23-27 (1973). 159. Milliken v. Bradley, 433 U.S. 267 (1977).

160. Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974). The district court had noted that “relief of segregation in the public schools of the City of Detroit [could] not be accomplished within the corporate geographical limits of the city," since the school population at that time was already three-fourths black. Unreported findings of fact and conclusions of law (E.D. Mich. Mar. 28, 1972), quoted in Bradley v. Milliken, 484 F.2d 215, 244 (6th Cir. 1973).

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161 The district judge,

signment of only about a tenth of the district's pupils.1 however, required the state government to finance various programs in remedial reading, counseling and career guidance, multi-ethnic topics, and staff training.162 The Supreme Court unanimously sustained this unusual order, 163 providing the first definitive judicial recognition of what has become increasingly apparent in research on desegregation-that desegregation is a long process requiring curricular and other educational changes to make it effective.164 Nevertheless, the practical effect of the Supreme Court's decisions in the Milliken cases, first preventing any significant desegregation by prohibiting a metropolitan area plan, and then providing money for compensatory education programs, may be to push frustrated litigants toward the latter as an alternative to desegregation rather than as a necessary component of desegregation.

In the late sixties, the community control movement, which originated in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York, attracted many who thought that the problems of segregated schools could be solved by turning over the schools to the black or Hispanic community, which would then run the schools with minority administrators and teachers. In Atlanta, a “compromise” was reached in which further efforts toward integration were abandoned in exchange for the allocation of more administrative positions, including that of superintendent, to blacks.165 A similar compromise was included in the Dallas plan166 and the issue has been raised in other cities.

The community control movement was widely studied. After an initial burst of writing hailing the idea as a way out of the impasse of big city school bureaucracies, studies indicated that the actual effect of community control in New York was serious community conflict with no demonstrable educational gains.167 Nor is there much evidence that minority teachers would be more

161, 402 F. Supp. 1096 (E.D. Mich. 1975).

162. Discussed in Milliken II, 433 U.S. at 275, 276 & 294 n.2 (Powell, J., concurring).

163. See discussion of this decision in Yudof, supra note 55, at notes 214-226 and accompanying text.

164. See, e.g., Orfield, How to Make Desegregation Work: The Adaptation of Schools to Their NewlyIntegrated Student Bodies, 39 LAW & CONTEMP. PROB., Spring 1975, at 315.

165. Calhoun v. Cook, 362 F. Supp. 1249 (N.D. Ga.), 487 F.2d 680 (5th Cir. 1973). See D. Bell, Waiting on the Promise of Brown, 39 Law & CONTEMP. PROB., Spring 1975, at 341, 358-59. This plan was negotiated by Griffin Bell, Now Attorney General. It was strongly supported by Andrew Young, and by Jimmy Carter (both as governor of Georgia and during his 1976 presidential campaign). Mashek, What Carter Believes, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPT., May 24, 1976 at 18-19, 23.

166. The district court's 1976 plan called for ratios of 44% Anglo, 44% black, and 12% Mexican American in future top administrative appointments. Tasby v. Estes, 412 F. Supp. 1192, 1219 (N.D. Tex. 1976).

167. See, e.g., Levine, Ocean HILL-Brownsville: Schools in Crisis (1969).

Recent elections to select members to the governing boards under the New York legislature's watered down version of a community controlled school system produced very little turnout. Only 8% of the eligible voters went to the polls in 1977, and the candidates endorsed by the United

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fair to minority children than Anglo teachers. A study of teacher-student interaction in classrooms in the Southwest, for example, found that Mexican American teachers were even more inclined than Anglo teachers to reward Anglo children disproportionately.168 Preliminary research has failed to find that programs emphasizing the child's language and culture have any significant impact on children's attitudes toward school or even on their attendance 169 It is apparent that minority school administrators confront many of the same problems of politics, union relations, urban social and economic collapse, and class conflict between teachers and low income students that afflicted their white predecessors. 170 Nonetheless, the idea of transferring bureaucratic power to minorities as an alternative to desegregating the students remains very much alive.

rates.

V

POLITICS, LITigation and White Flight Research

Despite the fact that research on alternatives to desegregation indicates that they have little educational impact, such research has been ignored, and the alternatives continue to be promoted. At the same time, research that indicates busing increases white flight has been given close attention. Indeed, some school districts have commissioned this kind of research for use in opposing court-ordered busing.

During the Los Angeles school desegregation litigation, the school district commissioned a survey asking parents whether they would remove their children171 from city schools if the court were to require a desegregation plan that went beyond the school district's proposed part-time voluntary plan. Since many parents indicated that they would remove their children under such circumstances, the school district tried to introduce this survey as evidence that a mandatory plan would be counterproductive. The St. Louis school district followed the same approach. Governor Jerry Brown illustrated the political value of the issue. He commented that white flight was an inescapable "reality" and used this as reason for attacking the judge in the Los Angeles case:

Federation of Teachers won most of the positions. New York Times, May 18, 1977, § B, at 5, col. 5. Nonpartisan special elections for school board members, however, usually produce a low voter turnout, particularly in poorer neighborhoods. L. Zeigler & M. Jennings, Governing American SCHOOLS: POLitical InteracCTION IN LOCAL SCHOOL DISTRICTS (1974).

168. U.S. COMM'N ON CIVIL RIGHTS, REPORT V: MEXICAN AMERICAN EDUCATION STUDY, TEACHERS AND Students (1973).

169. AMERICAN Institutes for Research, supra note 151, § VI, at 27.

170.

One dramatic indication of conflict between black administrators and black elected officials was the firing of Barbara Sizemore, the first black woman superintendent, in Washington, D.C., by the majority black school board.

171. Marylander Marketing Research, Results of the L.A.U.S.D. Survey (1977).

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The philosophers and judges can issue their edicts, but we are a free country, and if people don't like what they see in the schools, they just get in the car and go to a private school, move to Ventura, go to Riverside, go to Orange County and that's exactly what's happening.172

One major conclusion of the white flight research-that the most stable desegregation plans are not the limited plans but those that are metropolitanwide 173 is almost always ignored by policymakers. Although a study of the St. Louis school district came to this conclusion,174 the issue of white flight was raised instead as an argument for a more limited plan within the city.

Missouri's Senator Thomas Eagleton defended his 1977 break with civil rights groups on the basis of the negative conclusions of some white flight research, ignoring the metropolitan issue. He justified his bill stripping HEW of authority to require busing in urban areas175 because he was convinced that stable desegregation was impossible in cities with less than 50 percent white students.176 In Kansas City, he charged, HEW was planning on "sprinkling an ever-dwindling ration of white students among all-black schools."177 Local civil rights leaders on the Missouri Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights replied that if Eagleton's concern was for stable, majority-white desegregation, he should have supported the Kansas City school board's suit for a metropolitan plan rather than attacking HEW's more limited authority to require busing only within school district boundaries.178 Once again, a policy position was justified on the basis of a selective perception of social science evidence, and a politically-inspired interpretation of its policy implications.

VI

WHAT SHOULD BE DONE?

At a time when consensus on the legal requirements for desegregation and on the desirability of urban school desegregation as a policy have broken down, both better reporting of information on existing research and new research are needed. The best source of information about the effect of school desegregation policies is social science research. Yet a judge or a school official with the best of intentions could not readily untangle the controversies over results of research that now spread across several disciplines, sometimes in

172.

L.A. Times, July 24, 1977, § 1, at 1, col. 6.

173. Coleman, Liberty and Equality in School Desegregation, 6 Soc. POL'Y 9, 13 (1976). See Rossell, supra note 94, at 133.

174. H. Schmandt, G. Wendel, & J. Manns, Government, Politics, and the Public Schools: A Preliminary Study of Three Cities (Sept. 2, 1977) (St. Louis University Center for Urban Programs).

175. Eagleton-Biden Amendment of 1977, Pub. L. No. 95-205, 91 Stat. 1460 (1977).

176. 123 CONG. REC. S10902 (daily ed., June 28, 1977).

177. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 24, 1977, § B, at 2, col. 4. 178. Kansas City Star, Aug. 11, 1977.

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volving highly technical methodological disputes and at other times, simply ad hominum attacks on the motivations of scholars.

The adversary process tends to exacerbate the problem for two important reasons. First, both parties tend to seek not the best but the most predictable witnesses. The primary motivation of the parties is victory, not the discovery of "truth." This means that judges often see a narrow range of witnesses strongly identified with particular policy positions. Such evidence is as likely to deepen confusion as it is to illuminate the choices.

The second problem is financial. Increasingly, school boards are investing substantial sums of money in research designed to support arguments for minimal desegregation. Moreover, they have sufficient funds to make effective use of social science consultants. Civil rights organizations, on the other hand, have never been able to finance such research. And when they can afford consultants, it is usually only to draw up a sketchy "nuts-and-bolts” plan estimating the number of children that would have to be reassigned in order to desegregate the school district.

A more useful approach for a court or other agency dealing with a large city school district would be to create an independent group of experts to respond to questions formulated by the judge or agency. This group could assess the existing research on various issues, initiate short-term research where needed, and report its conclusions. The contending parties should also have access to the data, and the right to question the experts when they submit their report.

This procedure, of course, would not solve all the problems. Where the existing research is inadequate, or where existing findings are unclear or contradictory, all the experts could do is report that there are unresolved questions or that the existing research has nothing of value to say. The independent panel would be useful in pointing out clearly spurious claims or misleading use of data by one or both parties. It could also inform the policymakers of trends and elements of consensus that have emerged from research across the country. The process would not produce a desegregation plan but would give policymakers an opportunity to use social science information more realistically as one element in their decisionmaking.179

The contribution that social scientists can make to desegregation policy has been limited in part because of the lack of a national commitment to doing sophisticated research on desegregation during the seventies. Major urban school busing plans have been implemented in the past seven years, yet there

179. Courts could enlist social science experts in improving the process of monitoring compliance with court orders. Well designed survey research of students and teachers, for example, would provide a valuable supplement to school district reports and the observations of monitoring committees.