Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (6 page)

But all was not lost for advocates of anti-discriminatory admissions programs. The Court went on to say that flexible plans (such as one then in place at Harvard) that considered race or ethnic background among other qualifications for university admission were permissible. Powell, a conservative Virginian who had been named to the Court by Nixon, cited the virtues of campus “diversity” as the basis for his ruling. In so doing he hoped to skirt a troubling question—one that nonetheless aroused great debate in later years:
Which
groups should be compensated for past discrimination, how much, and for how long?

Perhaps the most poignant statement came from Justice Harry Blackmun, another Nixon appointee. Blackmun sided with the majority, but he also made it clear that the need for such programs troubled him. “I yield to no one,” he said, “in my earnest hope that the time will come when an ‘affirmative action’ program is unnecessary and is, in truth, only a relic of the past.” “Within a decade at the most,” he added, American society “must and will reach a stage of maturity where action along this line is no longer necessary.” He concluded: “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. . . . In order to treat persons equally, we must treat them differently.”
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The
Bakke
rulings temporarily quieted some of the controversy over affirmative action. Many people, though uneasy about the divisions within the Court, seemed to consider the outcome to be a commonsense compromise.
Time
, featuring the decision, summed up the result on its cover: “QUOTAS: NO / RACE: YES.”
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So not much changed. Most university plans, which did not specify quotas for minorities, survived. But the issue did not go away, in large part because blacks (and to a lesser extent other minorities) continued on the average to score far below whites on standardized tests used by many university admissions offices. Depressingly, the gaps in these test scores (branded as racially biased by many black people) increased in the 1990s.

Eager to promote diversity—and not to appear racist—leading universities continued to give preferential treatment to some minority applicants, thereby exciting endless debate over the next twenty-five years. In 2003, the Court again felt a need to enter the fray, this time in essence to reaffirm what it had said in
Bakke
.
⁴⁷
In so doing, it revealed a significant fact about race relations and entitlements in the years since 1978: The principle of “diversity,” supported by 2003 by a host of corporate leaders, university presidents, and military spokesmen, had by then taken considerably deeper root in American society. But the trying history of affirmative action also exposed the enduring educational and economic chasms that separated black and white Americans during these many years. Notwithstanding the Court’s position, the issue, continuing to feature highly rights-conscious arguments and counter-arguments, remained an abrasive source of intergroup tensions in the United States.

These debates, along with other racial concerns, dispirited many black people in the 1970s, particularly, it seemed, those who were moving into the middle classes. More than lower-class blacks, who struggled just to make ends meet, those who were upwardly mobile had been especially energized by the great civil rights triumphs of the 1960s. Many had developed high expectations about their rights—affirmative action among them—and their futures. By the late 1970s, however, they had grown increasingly pessimistic about a number of things, including the intentions of the majority of white people. Some seemed to be doubting the American Dream. This was one of the sadder legacies of the troubled 1970s.
⁴⁸

C
LAMOR OVER RACE, OF COURSE
, had long created disharmony in America, so that arguments over busing and affirmative action merely added harsh new notes to old scores. Also disturbing to many Americans in the late 1970s were a number of related social trends that seemed to be provoking ever greater dissonance. Schools, cities, morals, family life, the economy—all appeared to be collapsing. It was no wonder that many people during these unusually restless times fretted that the nation was entering a state of disarray and decline.

Alarm about schools extended beyond the friction sparked by desegregation and busing. Increasingly, it rested on the sense that schools were failing in general. By the late 1970s, a host of complaints homed in on these supposed failings—notably lower standardized test scores and the dumbing down of curricula. Many of these criticisms, emanating from the business community, evaluated schools according to their potential for promoting the economy. They called on the United States to upgrade its educational standards so that it could prevail in the ever more technologically complex and competitive global economy that was emerging. Mounting in the early 1980s, laments of this sort reached an apogee in 1983, when the secretary of education, Terrel Bell, issued a gloomy report card on American education. Titled
A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform,
it declared that schools were swamped in a “rising tide of mediocrity” and concluded that Americans, in danger of being surpassed by nations such as Japan and South Korea, had been “committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.”
⁴⁹
Though this much-discussed report had little substantive effect at the time, it ushered in a growing movement for “standards” and higher “achievement”—and for greater federal enforcement of such standards—that was to gather considerable political strength in the 1990s.
⁵⁰

Exhibit A of this case for educational collapse was a decline in scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), which was said to measure the aptitudes of high school students. These scores had begun to drop in the mid-1960s and fell to all-time lows by 1980. Between 1967 and 1980, the average verbal score dipped from 543 to 502 and the math score from 516 to 492.
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Exhibit B was grade inflation, at both the secondary and university levels. Some pessimists asserted that educational “failures” such as these reflected a more general decline in American culture, owing mainly to “permissiveness” that had supposedly run rampant beginning in the 1960s. As an advocate of “back to basics” later wrote, the public schools suffered their worst days in the 1970s: “When the 1960s animus against elitism entered American education, it brought in its train an enormous cynical tolerance of student ignorance, rationalized as a regard for ‘personal expression’ and ‘self-esteem.’”
⁵²

Many of these complaints rested on faulty premises. Most experts considered the SAT, which evaluated aptitude, to be a less reliable guide to student accomplishment than other measures, notably tests given by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). These tests tracked academic achievement and showed little change in average scores between 1970 and 1990. The main reason why SAT scores fell in the late 1960s and 1970s was that higher percentages of America’s young people, including many from the lower-middle and lower classes, were eager to go to college. For this and other reasons, they were staying in school and taking the tests. Under these circumstances it was hardly surprising that the average scores would dip.
⁵³

Educational policies did not seem to improve matters. Thanks to passage in 1965 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), federal government money—most of it provided by Title I of the law for “compensatory education” to help the poor—had finally augmented state and local spending for schools, mostly for instruction in elementary grades. In the 1970s, as later, real per pupil spending for public schools increased steadily in the United States. Student-teacher ratios got better, not worse.
⁵⁴
These developments reflected a major trend of the late twentieth century: Popular expectations about what schools ought to accomplish—notably better academic achievement—were rising. Yet the quality of public education did not seem to be improving. High percentages of students who graduated from high school were sadly deficient in basic academic skills, including reading.

Schooling for poor and minority children continued to be weakly supported in relative terms. To ensure congressional backing for ESEA, the law dispensed money to virtually all school districts, whether predominantly rich or poor. Especially in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Title I money was not well targeted at the poor. Moreover, federal money was relatively small, never more than 10 percent of overall spending on public schools. Because schools continued to depend above all on state and local government support—that is, predominantly on property and sales taxes—per pupil spending varied enormously across school districts and across states. The inequality across districts and states that had always characterized America’s decentralized public education system endured. No wonder that social engineers fell back on Band-Aids such as affirmative action at the level of university admissions in order to compensate for economic inequities in the public schools.

Rights-conscious interest groups began to change public schools in two significant ways in the 1970s. Both of these changes exposed the unanticipated consequences of public policies. The first, as often happened after the 1960s, owed much to a ruling by the Supreme Court. In
Lau v. Nichols
(1974), a case brought by Chinese Americans in San Francisco, the Court held unanimously that the promise of non-discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 required public schools to make special provision, including separate programs (often in separate classrooms) for students who had limited command of English. This provision must be offered, the Court said, even when there was no evidence of disparate treatment or of intentional discrimination: If there were disparate
outcomes
of academic
achievement
, students had a right to such assistance.
⁵⁵
Congressional reauthorization in 1974 of earlier legislation calling for bilingual education escalated this kind of special provision. By 1982, 500 school districts in the country, including every large urban district, were teaching 800,000 students in bilingual-bicultural education programs.
⁵⁶

In November 1975, Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act. This law, another far-reaching civil rights initiative, did not stem from grass-roots activism by disabled Americans; in the early 1970s, the handicapped had not yet become an effective pressure group. Instead, the act—like many other governmental measures in the rights-conscious 1970s—owed its success mainly to the efforts of public interest lawyers, and to activist federal judges who ruled that children with disabilities had a constitutional right to an education. That fundamental principle having been established, congressional staffers and lobbyists for the disabled pressed for legislation. The act, which had bipartisan backing, entitled all children with disabilities to a “free, appropriate public education.”

President Ford, worried among other things that the bill might commit public officials to raise large sums in the future for costly “special education,” wavered before signing it. His concerns proved prescient: Within the next ten years, the number of special education teachers increased from 179,000 to 275,000. By 2000, the number of children with disabilities served by schools had risen to 5.7 million, or to approximately 11 percent of total enrollments. Though federal spending for special education increased, Congress, concerned about rising federal budget deficits, more and more called upon state and local governments to pay for it. Faced with an unreliably funded mandate from Washington, states and school districts were obliged to spend steadily larger sums for special education (and for bilingual education), thereby cutting into budget lines for mainstreamed academic programs and provoking fights over spending in local communities.
⁵⁷

The growth of specialized mandates such as these—of rights—sparked controversy.
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Critics charged that bilingual education programs isolated non-English-speakers from the mainstream and deterred the acculturation of the students that they were designed to help. Special education programs, expensive to maintain, led observers to charge that school administrators widened the definition of “handicapped” so as to secure greater federal funding. Both programs added substantially to the costs incurred by school districts, especially in metropolitan areas populated by masses of minority children. Many of these schools were already struggling to operate with less money per pupil than did predominantly white schools. Because the Supreme Court had ruled in 1973 that local officials did not have to remedy inequality of resources across school districts, these disparities persisted.
⁵⁹

For all these reasons, American schools fell short of providing equality of educational opportunity. In the 1970s, as later, popular expectations about education increased, as did the percentage of students who completed high school and went on to colleges and universities. Having access to a college education came to be regarded as a right—one of many in an ever longer list of rights—that millions of young Americans and their parents began to demand. By 2000, 63 percent of sixteen- to twenty-four-year-old students who had graduated from high school within the previous twelve months (64 percent of whites and 56 percent of blacks) were enrolled at colleges or universities—up from 45 percent in 1960 and 51 percent in 1975.
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Real per student spending for public schools also advanced, doubling between 1970 and 2000. But serious racial inequities in educational opportunity and achievement, reflecting socio-economic differences in the culture at large, persisted—especially in inner-city schools—long after the 1970s.