Ayers: Conservatives (some of them, at least) were right on desegregation

Considering the topic, Brandt Ayers's Sunday column in the Anniston (Red) Star, entitled "How liberals failed schools," was a little on the short side. He failed to mention how liberals have been the primary stumbling blocks to serious, positive education reforms like charter schools and vouchers. He also left out the fact that liberals have managed to eviscerate the public school curriculum by dumbing down the study of history, geography, and civics; abolishing the study of the "Great Books" and the Western canon; succumbing to various fads that place equality of outcome over equality of opportunity; and viewing every path of intellectual inquiry through the lens of radical ideology. Liberals have failed the schools, all right, but the magnitude of their failure is much more extensive than any of them - including Mr. Ayers - will ever care to admit.

That said, I had to do a double take when I read this:

Two years ago, we celebrated the unanimous Supreme Court decision Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, which began a process that resulted in true racial integration in some school systems, and re-segregation in most urban systems.

Where is the South 50-plus years after Brown? Taken as a whole, the half century represents a strong assertion of democratic principles. We won a fight that frightened and froze the founding fathers, that even Civil War couldn’t achieve — the defeat of legal segregation.

However, the outcome of the issue that Brown sought to resolve is muddied by a persistent trait of human nature: If there is a hard thing to do, let someone else do it. Governors, senators, legislators and educators refused to put their hands to the difficult task of designing a unitary school system in which poor and middle-class children of all races could achieve.

They let the courts do it. Courts, operating as they do through the distant and rigid arm of the law, are numb to elegant choices affecting race, ease of access, different opinions and levels of preparation.

With applause from liberals like me, one of our heroes, Justice William Brennan, delivered an opinion that was the death knell of many urban schoolsystems in the South. In a 1968 Virginia decision, Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, the Supreme Court, in effect, struck down gradual integration under "freedom of choice" plans. ...

Lower courts took their cue from the language in Green that gradual isn’t good enough, and from Brown that segregated schools are "inherently unequal." So, instant and total integration would make them inherently equal? The logic didn’t work.

By the time the Green decision had been fully applied by the lower courts, the Anniston system lost 2,000 students, was 55 percent black and mostly poor. In 2000, the system was more than 95 percent black, 84 percent poor enough to need meal subsidies. A majority of poor, socially and educationally unprepared children flooded systems from Birmingham to Boston, and middle-income parents of both races fled to avoid the deluge. ...

Integration became an end in itself, a value greater than education, or so it seemed to the president of the Mississippi NAACP at a 1972 regional education meeting in Jackson. I asked [Anniston civil rights leader Rev. Nimrod Q. Reynolds], "What is more important: education or integration?" He replied without hesitation: integration.

But more and more integration didn’t translate into better and better education for either race. The result was more and more re-segregation. ...

It takes rare courage to upset local conventions, loyalties and prejudices on behalf of even the highest ideals. Conservatives in the 1960s who counseled a more cautious, thoughtful approach to integration were on sounder ground then.

Note that Ayers is not talking about those "conservatives," like former Governor George Wallace, who chose to do everything in their power to prevent integration. He is talking about those who believed that integration should (and must) come, but only as the result of society's natural progression - a gradual process which would be preceded by, or at least concurrent with, the social and economic integration of blacks into American life.

That's an interesting perspective - one that provokes thoughts of "what might have been." I'm not sure how useful it is today, 50+ years after Brown, but still, it's refreshing to hear a prominent Alabama liberal speak out so reasonably on a topic that has so often been obscured in the shadows of political correctness.

Unfortunately, Ayers chose to wrap up an otherwise thoughtful and deliberate piece with an unfair swipe at modern-day conservatives:

But the conservative approach — doing nothing — isn’t the answer now. In the absence of state action, exceptional local leadership or legal mandates, poor children here and throughout the urban South will be doomed to perpetuate failure — generation after generation.

I'm sorry, but the "conservative approach" to education is absolutely not to sit back and do nothing. It is to recognize where public education has gone wrong and to do our best to correct it. Not by placidly accepting resegregation, as Ayers seems to imply, but by raising standards and revamping the curriculum so that students of all races and backgrounds are actually challenged to achieve and excel. I'm not a fan of President Bush's "No Child Left Behind Act," due to its emphasis on centralized, one-size-fits-all solutions, but there's one thing the President says with respect to education that I completely agree with: the "soft bigotry of low expectations" is a terrible thing, and it is a mindset that has done irreparable harm to generations of American students. It's also a mindset which conservatives are doing their damned-level-best to defeat.