Taking a New Look at Segregation in Classroom : Education: In trying to settle 22-year-old lawsuit, Philadelphia officials will focus on learning results rather than a head count.

For four decades, the U.S. Supreme Court’s idea that “separate but equal” education simply hasn’t endured as a monument to progress in race relations.

Now, a state judge, her court-appointed panel, Philadelphia’s new school superintendent and activists suing to reform the nation’s fifth-largest school district have added a twist:

Separate might be unequal, they say, but it is a reality, and administrators need to face it by making segregated schools as equal as possible.

Experts call the concept part of a broader approach to school desegregation that focuses on results and quality instead of merely head counts.

“Separate can never be equal, because it is missing what goes on in American life. But there is no reason why separate has to be unequal in as many dimensions as it is,” said Michael Churchill, executive director of the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia.

The realization comes after 22 years of battles between the state Human Relations Commission and the school district in one of the nation’s longest desegregation cases.

At stake is how best to achieve racial equity for a student body so large it could fill the city’s baseball stadium three times, but so segregated that only 22% is white.

In February, Commonwealth Court Judge Doris A. Smith found that segregation was virtually unavoidable and ordered a team of outside experts to spend seven months determining why the district is broken and how to fix it.

Last month, the verdict came back.

The team’s 138-page report--which Smith can accept, approve parts of or reject entirely--depicted a district vexed by segregation, poor management, ineffective teaching and “dysfunctional organization” so entrenched that nearly half the city’s 210,000 students fail ninth grade.

It called for comprehensive reform in curriculum, teaching methods and the way desegregation works.

The report saved its most severe criticism for the city’s “racially isolated” schools, where more than 90% of students are minorities. It said educational quality there “is not even up to the low level of quality in the remaining district schools.”

Philadelphia’s school system has 11,000 teachers in 267 schools, 133 of which are considered segregated. It employs more people than the city, has only a slightly smaller budget and, officials say, operates more school buses than the regional transit authority.

The systemwide changes would cost more than $300 million, and where the money will come from remains a question.

The report calls on the state to contribute the bulk, a recommendation that met with harsh criticism in the Legislature.

David Hornbeck, the district’s new superintendent, believes the new emphasis can work.

“It’s not abandoning desegregation and embracing some other doctrine,” Hornbeck said. “It’s saying that at the end of the day, whether kids have learned math, history, geography and science is how we measure our success.”

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. Board of Education that an 1896 decision, Plessy vs. Ferguson, erred in presuming the viability of “separate but equal” facilities for blacks and whites.

But though segregation by law was abolished, de facto segregation--both physical and economic--often remained.

“In many ways, the school system has evolved back into a pre-Brown state,” said Richard Couto, a University of Richmond professor who studies the effects of the civil rights movement.

In 1977, in a Detroit case known as Milliken II, the U.S. Supreme Court amended the idea of the landmark Brown case, effectively ruling that physical desegregation wasn’t the only kind.

Cases since have reflected the ruling.

A state case pending in Alabama deals with equalizing educational opportunity, but doesn’t deal explicitly with desegregation. Lawsuits in Kansas City and St. Louis, under court orders since the 1980s, also incorporate elements of educational equity alongside desegregation. Chicago is under a similar agreement after a consent decree in 1980.

Philadelphia’s case started in 1968, when the Human Relations Commission and the state Department of Education reviewed the state’s schools in racial terms and found a number of districts segregated. It asked the districts to devise voluntary desegregation plans. Some did, some didn’t.

The commission found in 1971 that Philadelphia’s schools were “unlawfully segregated” and ordered the district to correct racial imbalances.

“Philadelphia’s system today is worse than pre-Brown education,” Churchill said.

In 1993, Smith suggested educational improvement instead of busing--an idea that specialists in educational equity say is gaining ground.

“We’re moving from desegregation to educational reform within segregation, which is posed by many people as an easier thing to do,” said Gary Orfield, director of the Harvard Project on School Desegregation.