Apartheid. USA 1988

October 19, 1987:

Each year, more than 1 400 students from a heavily populated black section of Queens ask city officials to let them go to High School in more affluent white neighborhoods as few miles to the north. These students - nearly half of them were turned down - are trying to avoid attending Andrew Jackson High School, a struggling all-black school that many believe has become a dumping ground for the borough's most unwanted minority students.

Although there are hundreds of empty class-room seats in such nearby white communities as Bayside, Bellerose, and Flushing, the New York City Board of Education has placed a strict admissions quota on blacks, part of a policy of keeping those High Schools at least 50 percent white. The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division which strongly opposes racial quotas, has begun a preliminary

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investigation. These quotas have sparked a fierce argument in Washington over what constitutes the ‘tipping point’, the level at which an influx of minorities will cause whites to flee the system. In a city that has seen many of its white middle-class neighborhoods transformed into poor, predominantly black neighborhoods in the last two decades, it is more than an academic debate.

In the mid-1970's, for example, the school board tried to integrate Andrew Jackson by redrawing attendance lines to include hundreds of white families in neighboring Hollis. Instead the whites changed neighborhood. People sold their houses and moved out. That failed attempt at integration led to the 50-50 quotas, now being denounced in some quarters. ‘While I know people have said that we have got to hold on to the whites that we have, the Constitution doesn't allow that,’ said Norman J Chachkin, an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, which assailed the policy in a recent report. ‘You can't say to a kid that because of your race, you can't go to that school over there that has empty seats.’

In a pattern seen in urban areas across the country, whites have fled New York's public schools since the 1960's, leaving behind a deteriorating system in which three out of four seats are filled by blacks and Hispanics. Of the 273 000 students at 96 public High Schools in New York City, many of the remaining whites are concentrated in about 20 integrated schools, which also happen to be the best schools in the city.^160.

160. The Washington Post, from a report by Howard Kurtz