Apartheid. USA 1988

August 6, 1987:

Professor Harriet Rabb from the Columbia University Law School prepared at the request of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund as well as for Advocates for Children a report about New York Policy towards the white student population, The report said that the 10-year-old policy to discourage white students from leaving New York City's public schools had resulted in minority group students receiving inferior educational opportunities. The policy relegated minority group students to overcrowded schools,

[p. 103]

while whites often attend schools with vacant rooms. Schools with a majority of white students offered superior instruction, the report said. Under the Educational Board's so-called integration policy, it has tried to maintain white majorities in certain schools by forbidding minority group students from enrolling in those schools outside their school zones unless a white student is enrolled at the same time. ‘According to the report the policy artificially keeps 20 schools with white majorities,’ reported the Times. (And, it could be added, in an unusual display of persisting ‘apartheid policies’ in the US educational system.)

There is a dwindling number of white students in the city, where minority group members make up 80 percent of the students who are prevented from transferring out of overcrowded, poor performing schools into the under-used, mostly white schools, the report further stated. Professor Robb concluded that the policy would be found unconstitutional if challenged in court, because the quotas at the schools with white majorities and ‘the direction of disproportionately low resources to schools where minority children predominate’ made the program vulnerable to attack as a conscious policy to create and maintain a dual school system.’ The report also said the question of ‘white flight’ was practically irrelevant in the face of the ‘real disgraces’ in the system. ‘Only when the worst of the schools have been turned around and the quality of the entire system improves,’ it said, ‘will the public schools be able to retain and attract back those children for whom the quality of their schools, and not the race of their class-mates, will determine where they will want to go.’^135.

135. The New York Times, from a report by Jane Perlez