Maryland Confronts Disparity Among Schools

BALTIMORE (AP) - Frederick Douglass High School in the city and River Hill High School in suburban Howard County seemingly sit at opposite ends of the spectrum of public schools in Maryland.

Students at West Baltimore's Frederick Douglass - 99 percent of whom are black - attend school in a stately, yet aged building that was constructed in 1927, renovated in 1954 and briefly closed a few years ago to permit the removal of hazardous asbestos. Nearly half of the student body lives in poverty. They average a combined 640 on their SATs. The school has just emerged from the state's list of underachieving schools.

Travel some 20 miles south and west from Frederick Douglass to the spacious, modern campus of River Hill High and you find a student body that is more than 80 percent white and Asian, affluent, and overwhelmingly college-bound. They average 1140 on their SATs. Their school ranks as one of the highest achieving in the state.

The disparity in both input and outcome put the schools at opposite poles, state officials said. Yet such differences are typical throughout Maryland.

One dream that followed the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision was that such separation by race, class and achievement gradually would fade away.

But 50 years after Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote "in the field of public education, the doctrine of separate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," public schools in Maryland and throughout the country remain very separate and very unequal, according to Alvin Thornton, who headed a commission that studied inequality in Maryland schools.

"It may well be that if you placed typical schools side by side and asked a time traveler from 1954 to pick out which are predominantly white and which are predominantly black, the time traveler could make some fairly accurate guesses," Thornton said.

But Thornton said there is an important distinction between 1954 and 2004: "separatedness and inequality today are not necessarily race specific but class specific with a racial dimension. Anyone who thinks what we have today parallels the apartheid schools I went to in Gov. Wallace's Alabama is being disingenuous."

University of Maryland law professor Larry Gibson agreed. "The first objective was to remove the legal barriers to get the law off of our backs. I dont want anyone to think that wasn't a big deal," Gibson said. "This is not to say there are not multiple problems to be overcome then and now. But the first step was the matter of the law."

Maryland always has been schizophrenic on matters of race, Gibson said. It was a slave state but Baltimore, its principle city, had the largest population of free blacks in the country prior to the Civil War.

Most of the state was slow to move toward integrated schools even after the Supreme Court's 1955 admonition that the country do so "with all deliberate speed." But Baltimore's school board voted to integrate the city's schools within weeks after the Brown decision was handed down.

Maryland also played an important role in the years leading up to the Brown case and in those that followed the high court's ruling, Gibson said, noting that many of the political and legal strategists of the civil rights movement lived in Baltimore, including native son Thurgood Marshall, who argued the Brown case, and the NAACP's chief political lobbyist, Clarence Mitchell, Jr.

Additionally, the legal foundation leading to Brown was established in part by a successful lawsuit to integrate the University of Maryland Law School. Another case that led to the integration of local public parks represented early successes in applying the tenets of Brown to areas beyond public education.

Many of today's parents feel much of the frustration that drove the challenge to state-sanctioned segregation 50 years ago, according to Gray Orfield, director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. Driven in large measure by housing patterns and by federal court decisions that undercut Brown, public school systems throughout the country are becoming increasingly segregated by race and class, Orfield said.

Orfield said the white migration to the suburbs that began in the 1950s was soon followed by the migration of the black middle class in the 1970s and 1980s, so the "epicenter of segregation" occurs in large metropolitan cities where poor blacks and Hispanics attend racially homogenous, overcrowded, underfunded schools.

But segregation is apparent in the suburbs that surround the central cities, too driven by segregated housing patterns, Orfield said.

The process of resegregation also has been state-facilitated, if not sanctioned - although in more subtle ways than before the Brown decision, according to National Urban League President Marc Morial.

"As important as Brown was in terms of the progress since 1954, there was massive political resistance to Brown that began almost immediately that kept us from progressing further," Morial said.

For Michael Hamilton, president of the Baltimore Council of PTAs, the isolation if not segregation of city children all but cheats them of a quality education.

Hamilton pointed to the chronic underfunding that has hamstrung city schools since the 1970s and the current political and management chaos that grips the system today as the source of pessimism for many students. "For us sometimes it's like Brown never existed," Hamilton said.

(Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)