Bush Endorses All-Male Schools for Urban Blacks : Education: He is ‘impressed’ by a Detroit program to place such boys in ‘academies.’ A federal judge has ordered that girls also be admitted.

President Bush declared his support Monday for all-male educational programs for urban black youth and said that he would support efforts to make such curricula legal if the federal courts find them to be otherwise.

Thrusting himself into the center of one of education’s hottest controversies, the President said that he is “impressed” by a Detroit public school program that placed black boys in special all-male “academies.” The intent of the program is to help them deal with the inner-city problems that often lead to drug abuse, crime and poverty.

“I’m for as much innovation as possible,” said Bush, who spoke at a White House meeting with education reporters. Educators in Detroit “were treating kids who had backgrounds that were plagued by violence,” he said.

Critics have attacked such programs as discriminatory and educationally unproven. Three weeks ago, a federal judge in Detroit ordered that city’s school system to admit girls to its three public academies for males. That decision now is being appealed. Although the academies had excluded students only on the basis of gender, they are in predominantly black areas.

Bush acknowledged that the legality of such programs remains uncertain, and said that “we’ve got to abide by the law of the land.” But he added that “if our experience shows us we need to get modifications to accommodate academies of that nature, we ought to do it, because I do believe that something of that nature has some merit.”

Bush compared his attitude about the academies to his view that the Boy Scouts of America ought to be able to exclude girls, a question that is now being litigated in Florida courts. “I think . . . it’s perfectly OK to have only boys in it,” Bush said. “Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but that’s the way I look at it.”

Bush said that his view on the academies is in complete agreement with that of Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander. But in his pledge to back “modifications,” if necessary, Bush seemed more hopeful than Alexander that such programs could be made legally acceptable.

In a session with reporters last month, Alexander said that he sympathizes with the motives of the advocates of such curricula but that he is skeptical the courts will permit them.

“Brown vs. Board of Education is very simple and to the point,” Alexander said at the time, referring to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision that ended school segregation. “It says segregated schools are inherently unequal.”

The Detroit schools are appealing U.S. District Judge George E. Woods’ ruling against the all-male program. But there are signs that the fight over such academies will continue, no matter what happens in Michigan.

A group called the New York Civil Rights Coalition last month filed a complaint with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights challenging the legality of classes for third-grade boys at P.S. 137 in Brooklyn’s predominantly black Brownsville section.

Michael Meyers, executive director of the group, said in a letter to the education department that with the budding of “academies” in Detroit, Milwaukee, Baltimore and elsewhere, “the deliberate return to ‘separate but equal’ in public education, and the functional repeal of Brown vs. Board of Education . . . are at hand.”