Knowledge And Decisions

There was never a serious question whether black schools in general had lower average performances than white schools in general. What was an issue was the cause of this. A long history of highly unequal financial support for black and white schools led some to attribute the educational difference to this — but the Coleman Report¹⁵⁷ data showed (1) how little difference there was between black and white schools in this regard by the mid-twentieth century, and (2) how little difference financial resources or other characteristics of schools made in educational performances. Obvious genetic differences between blacks and whites led others to attribute educational differences to this,¹⁵⁸ but data on various European ethnic groups at a comparable stage of their social evolution in American schools showed I.Q.’s similar to — and in some cases, lower than — those of blacks, even though those European ethnic groups’ I.Q.’s have now reached or surpassed the national average.¹⁵⁹ One of the problems in comparing any given group with the “national average” is that the national average is itself simply an amalgamation of highly varying individual and group averages. Therefore a group may vary greatly from the national average without being in any way unique.

Again, as in the case of “affirmative action,” systemic explanations (residential concentration, cultural orientation, etc.) of such social phenomena were discounted in favor of intentional explanations (“segregation,” “discrimination,” etc.), even though black academic performance was not historically unique either in kind or degree. Huge statistical disparities existed among school performances of children from different cultural groups in the past, even when all the groups were white. As of 1911, for example, the proportion of Irish children in New York City who finished high school was less than one-one hundredth the proportion among Jewish children,¹⁶⁰ and the Italians did less well than the Irish.¹⁶¹ Schools that were 99 percent Jewish were not uncommon, and attempts to bus the Jewish children from such schools to less crowded schools in Irish neighborhoods across town were bitterly resisted by Jewish parents¹⁶² and the Jewish press.¹⁶³ These earlier busing reforms from above were subject to feedback because they originated with elected officials, unlike later busing schemes initiated by courts and administrative agencies.

The institutional settings and institutional incentives and constraints are crucial to understanding the thrust and persistence of school “integration” or “busing” trends — especially as it has proceeded over the opposition of blacks as well as whites. In the 1960s, Blacks were fairly evenly divided, with a slight majority opposed to busing.¹⁶⁴ In later polls in cities like Detroit and Atlanta, where busing has actually been tried on a massive scale, the majority of blacks against it was two-to-one.¹⁶⁵ In the well-known Boston busing case, a coalition of dozens of black community groups urged Judge Garrity to minimize busing of their children,¹⁶⁶ but neither he nor the NAACP Legal Defense Fund were deterred by such appeals. Indeed, the NAACP had gone against its own local chapters in Atlanta and San Francisco on school busing.¹⁶⁷ The head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund said that his organization cannot poll “each and every black person” before instituting legal proceedings,¹⁶⁸ but this sidesteps the larger question of why the organization proceeded in a direction opposed by blacks in general. The answer may be instructive, not only as regards the NAACP Legal Defense Fund but so-called “public interest” law firms in general. The financial costs of the NAACP’s litigation are not borne by its official clients but by third parties, “middle class blacks or whites who believe fervently in integration.”¹⁶⁹ In short, “the named plaintiffs are nominal only”¹⁷⁰ and the black population in whose name this is all done has little or no effective feedback. The NAACP lawyers “answer to a miniscule constituency while serving a massive clientele.”¹⁷¹