The notion that separate is inherently unequal may be a great slogan, but, like so many other Warren Court overreaches, it led to a host of terrible laws.

“Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
— from the unanimous Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education.

Separate is unequal.

The phrase is treated as such a truism by the educational establishment today that it is rarely even questioned.   And there is no denying that the general ruling in the famous Brown vs. Board of Education was the correct one.

But while the immediate effects of Brown were admirable, many of the subsequent laws and judgments ultimately derived from Brown’s overly broad reasoning (forced busing, diversity mandates, and other infringements of parental choice), have proven profoundly harmful in the long-term.  Much of this reasoning relied heavily on the allegedly damaging psychological affects of segregation.

The flawed logic at the heart of the notion that separate must mean unequal, came into sharp focus recently when California released the results of its most recent statewide testing scores.  The results revealed that Faria Elementary, a highly-segregated school in the Silicon Valley community of Cupertino, is — if academic records are to be believed — the best single elementary school in California, scoring a perfect 1,000 on the state’s Academic Performance Index (API). 

Faria is not a typical segregated school, however. The students in Faria are 95% Asian-American. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, for a top-rated academic school, 83% of Faria parents attended graduate school.  Are these highly-educated parents with academically accomplished children too stupid to decide on what is best for their kids?

It strains credulity to imagine that the numerous parents who purchase expensive Cuptertino real estate and apply to get their children accepted at Faria (acceptance is open to any student in Cupertino but there is a lottery held for entrance due to high demand) believe that they are giving their children an inferior education to that offered in the generally decaying California schools, which have some of the nation’s worst test score performance. In fact, Faria parents have self-segregated their children in an effort to have them attend a school that, in contrast to so many today, cares about academic achievement. And by any academic measure, the experience of Faria students is among the best in the nation. Of course for some parents, exposure to a more ethnically diverse student body is more important than sending their children to a school with top academic performance. But such choices should be left to families, not government bureaucrats.

While it might seem that the Faria success is safe from judicial meddling and forced “integration” in the name of improving “diversity,” the experience of nearby Palo Alto, California, just a 15-minute drive north of Cupertino, suggests that is not the case.  Palo Alto, which is home to Stanford University, has one of the country’s best school districts. And it is far from segregated — almost half of Palo Alto’s students are ethnic minorities. Yet, for more than 20 years Palo Alto has been subject to a judicial consent decree in which the Palo Alto district is forced to take minority (and only minority) children from the nearby Ravenswood City School District, which serves the overwhelmingly African-American and Hispanic communities of East Menlo Park and East Palo Alto (neither of which are even in the same county as Palo Alto), to satisfy a court’s arbitrary and racially discriminatory view of social justice.

Almost 20% of students who live in Ravenswood district are bused to Palo Alto, despite the fact that Ravenswood district keeps 30% of the funding for those students. Palo Alto taxpayers are forced to subsidize the education of students who do not even live in their same county because activist judges saw the fact that Ravenswood students had to attend school in their city and county as “segregation.”  Using the same logic that was used to “desegregate” Palo Alto’s schools (which would still be highly ethnically diverse even without Ravenswood students), activist judges today could easily find Cupertino guilty of segregation and Faria could to be forced to take in students from outside their district, against their wishes, and at Cupertino taxpayers’ expense.

The legally-mandated transfer of Ravenswood students to already-diverse Palo Alto — and the threat of judicial meddling to Cupertino and other similarly successful districts – illustrates educrats’ refusal to address the central issue at hand: the generally dolorous performance of majority black and Hispanic schools in California and around the nation.  While the reasons for this are much disputed, what is not disputed is that simply throwing money at the problem has proven to be an ineffective solution.  Recently, even the mainstream media have begun asking difficult questions about African-American and Hispanic academic achievement and academic cultures — the San Jose Mercury News recently ran an extensive front-page feature exploring how cultural expectations (and harassment of high-performing students by their peers) led to low student performance in African-American and Hispanic communities (confirming the findings of African-American Harvard economist Roland Fryer).  It is these cultural expectations and behaviors, rather than racial mandates and forced busing, that need to be the focus of our future educational efforts.

What Faria shows conclusively is that, contrary to the words of Brown, separate is not always unequal.  And Palo Alto’s outstanding and highly integrated schools show that ethnically diverse schools can be outstanding ones. But whether parents choose the Faria or Palo Alto model should be a decision made by parents, not judges.  And neither should have to take students from outside their own cities to satisfy the utopian fantasies of judges and left-wing activists.

The notion that “Separate . . . is inherently unequal” may be a great slogan, but, like so many other Warren Court overreaches, it led to a host of terrible laws. Because the court did not confine their ruling explicitly to legally mandated ethnic or racial segregation (making exclusion from a school for the reason of race illegal but leaving the decision narrowly tailored), it ultimately opened the door to decades of disastrous social experimentation from liberal bureaucrats and judges.  This experimentation destroyed the concept of community schooling in favor of mandated “racial balancing” that broke up neighborhood and community schools in Seattle and Louisville (under policies now narrowly overturned by the Supreme Court’s new conservative majority) and countless other districts in the nation.

It is time for conservatives to be clear — voluntary separation, even if it upsets diversity bean counters, is nothing more than a choice made by parents — a free choice that should be given the highest level of legal protection. I’ve chosen the Palo Alto model for my own children, but I support the choices made by Faria parents as well.  Given the successes of both systems, it is clear that neither should suffer from meddling by judges or bureaucrats, whose modish but false educational theories have left much of America’s public school system at the brink of collapse.