Hopes Fade for Accord in L.A.’s Desegregation Case

Hopes for a final, negotiated settlement in a 25-year-old Los Angeles Unified School District desegregation battle faded Monday when a federal judge put the case back on course toward a trial, possibly late this year.

U.S. District Judge A. Wallace Tashima approved dismissal of the school district from the suit, leaving the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and state education officials as the remaining combatants. The three parties had tried for seven months to reach an out-of-court agreement, but negotiations broke down several weeks ago.

The latest development breathes new life into the bitter, long-running integration fight that began in Los Angeles Superior Court in 1963 and peaked with nearly three years of court-ordered cross-town busing from 1979 to 1981. Busing stopped after a voter-approved initiative--Proposition 1--limited the ability of state courts to order mandatory busing. The case moved to federal courts in 1981.

Mandatory busing has remained a legal possibility. But civil rights lawyers have generally acknowledged that with minority students now making up more than 80% of the student population, forced busing may no longer be an effective way to deal with segregation in the nation’s second-largest school system.

Recent efforts in the case have focused on devising special educational programs that would improve opportunities for students in low-achieving inner-city schools.

In what appeared to be a breakthrough last June, Tashima granted a conditional dismissal of the case against the school district, but ordered the district, the state and the NAACP to try and work out their differences.

NAACP and school district lawyers said Monday that a settlement, including an $84-million-a-year enhanced instructional program for dozens of inner-city schools, appeared possible until representatives of the state declared last month that they would not pay for any of the program. NAACP General Counsel Grover Hankins told Tashima that the state “pulled the rug out from under us.”

State lawyers, representing Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig and the state Board of Education, said the NAACP and the school district were misrepresenting the situation. No agreement had been reached on funding or the adequacy of the proposed instructional improvements at the inner-city schools, they said.

Keep Talks Alive

Hankins Monday urged Tashima to keep the school district in the case and to keep the negotiations alive. But the judge, citing school district and state arguments, noted that settlement now appears unlikely.

Tashima then finalized his order dismissing the school district as a defendant in the case, an action that the NAACP had endorsed last year when it appeared a settlement was at hand.

The action leaves the state as the only remaining defendant. The NAACP, representing the district’s black students, has charged the state contributed to segregation over the years with a series of actions and inactions, such as approving the construction of new schools in racially segregated neighborhoods.

Tashima, expressing frustration at delays in the case, criticized the NAACP for not having its “act together.” He said if the civil rights group does not quickly produce state-requested documents to support its case, he will consider a motion to dismiss the case against the state also.

Hankins said he is “disappointed” with Tashima’s ruling, but he insisted that the NAACP’s case against the state is strong.

State Laws

One course of action previously discussed in the case by the NAACP would be to try to prove the Los Angeles system was segregated, in part, by state laws allowing the formation of largely white suburban school districts. For example, the largely white Palos Verdes Unified School District, in one of the most affluent areas of the state, was allowed to separate from the Los Angeles Unified district more than 30 years ago.

But Hankins declined to elaborate on his association’s plans, saying the NAACP would have to assess the impact of Tashima’s ruling over the next few weeks.

Peter James, an attorney for the school district, said he was pleased that the district was dismissed from the case but disappointed that an opportunity appears to have been missed to reach agreement on a plan to improve education at inner-city schools.