Newly-integrated Student Bodies

After a full generation of effort, most southern school systems are now desegregated, and in a number of northern and western cities the desegregation process is now beginning. The experience has shown very clearly, however, that reassignment of students is only the first step in a long process of building integrated schools. If we really believe that the schools are our most important public institution and that race is our central social problem, the difficulty in bringing about effective integration should not be surprising. Desegregation, to be termed successful, must have eliminated widely-held racial stereotypes, broadened the cultural values transmitted by the schools, and increased the access of minority children to quality educational programs-the conduit to preferred colleges and jobs. A social revolution of this scale requires extensive adaptations within the internal processes of the school. Since schools are usually stable-often rigid-institutions, these changes are difficult to accomplish. Whenever possible, the initial desegregation plan-whether court-ordered or Voluntarily drawn up by school officials -should be designed to facilitate successful adaptation within the schools. Some of the "second generation" desegregation problems, widely publicized, have generated responses from lawyers, the courts, and civil rights officials in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. HEW began to impose requirements for faculty desegregation in its 1966 school desegregation guidelines.' Many contemporary desegregation orders include provisions modeled on the Singleton case,' which required ratios of black to white teachers in every school in a school district to reflect the ratio of black to white teachers in the school district as a whole. There has been litigation dealing with the firing of black teachers following court orders to establish a unitary school system,