COLUMN ONE : Segregation by Another Name? : The white schools chief stirred a maelstrom trying to end racial separation in his small Georgia district. His lonely fight also reflects national debate over academic tracking.

Corkin Cherubini was born in Virginia and has lived in rural Georgia for 24 years. But in the eyes of some of his neighbors he’s a Yankee. He does not fit in, they say; he does not understand the South.

Remarks like these can rankle, but in times of reflection--and Cherubini is nothing if not a reflective man--the 50-year-old educator has had to admit that, in some ways, they may be right.

Although he has tried to fit in for most of his time in Calhoun County, since becoming schools superintendent two years ago he has proven himself hopelessly out of step, especially on the issue of race.

Cherubini first got into trouble when he tried to desegregate kindergarten. His efforts, coming almost 40 years after the Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in public schools, drew the county into a maelstrom over an issue that many Americans thought was settled.

But Cherubini’s battle, which has brought federal investigators to the tiny two-school district and sparked months of discord, including threats of violence, underscore an issue that many educators, government officials and integration experts say is a national problem--the persistence of racial school segregation under the guise of academic grouping.

“The overrepresentation of minority children in special education and the underrepresentation in gifted programs, and tracking or grouping practices in general, is a major problem for African American schoolchildren in many, many school districts,” said Norman Chachkin who specializes in school desegregation cases for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York.

Academic tracking attempts to group students according to educational ability, with the aim of helping students get the teaching they need: not so advanced as to be discouraging, not so basic that it is boring. But critics charge that it can damage students, especially in early grades, by creating a lower set of expectations for those in lower groupings.

In Calhoun County, the schools officially were integrated 25 years ago. But in reality, the old system of one-race schools merely gave way to a new form of segregation, one that Cherubini, who is white, considers even more pernicious.

Blacks and whites attend the same schools but they are routed along separate tracks as early as kindergarten, with African Americans often pushed into vocational and special-education classes.

As a controversy over interracial prom dating this year in Wedowee, Ala., showed, the segregation often extends beyond the classroom. It is not uncommon in the South, for example, for whites and blacks to attend separate proms, eat lunch at separate tables and participate in separate school-sponsored extracurricular activities.

Such social separation was easy to spot in Calhoun County. But what Cherubini discovered about segregation inside the classroom “blew my mind,” he said.

With all of the debate raging over intelligence, race and genetics, he said, it was clear that black students in his own school district were not being given a chance. To him, this was not only immoral, but illegal.

When he found that, even as superintendent, he was powerless to change things, he called in the federal government. That’s when the situation really got out of control.

Many locals were outraged. He received threatening phone calls. Parents pulled their children out of school. Rude letters appeared in the local newspaper, suggesting that he get out of town.

“I was upset not necessarily with what he did but his way of doing it,” complained school board President C.E. Cowart, who is white. Calling in the feds, he said, was over the line.

Calhoun County (population 5,013) sits in a depressed agricultural region in the southwest corner of Georgia. Although the county is 60% black, the economic and political leadership remains staunchly white. It is isolated territory. Cherubini began to fear for his family’s safety.

“I feel like the walls are caving in on me,” he said.

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Cherubini first took a teaching job here in 1970, after having worked in other parts of the country. He was taken aback to see that not only did black and white students sit at different tables in the cafeteria, but so did black and white teachers. Every year, the district holds an official prom, attended almost exclusively by African American students, while the whites go to an off-campus “social” sponsored by their parents and usually held at a country club.

The social is “a private party and we have zero to do with it,” said Cowart, deflecting questions about whether blacks would be welcome.

“We have nothing to do with who’s invited.”

While Cherubini found the social separation troubling, what disturbed him more was the segregation he saw inside the classroom. He taught 11th- and 12th-grade English. Every year, he would get classes full of African American students who had been designated early as low achievers and placed on a track toward vocational education.

Some of them seemed much more innately intelligent than their skills indicated, but by the time they reached Cherubini, they were so lacking in basic skills that he knew they would never catch up.

“If they’ve gone through six or seven grades in the low-expectation group, they fulfill the prophecy by junior high school,” said Cherubini, a lanky, gray-haired man who looks a bit like former President Jimmy Carter and has the halting, earnest speaking style of actor Jimmy Stewart.

Cherubini did not make race an issue in his campaign for superintendent. But when he took office, he said, he discovered how “brutal” tracking really is and how resistant to change the in-school system of segregation had become.

Defenders of the system say tracking is an important educational tool that groups by ability, not race. But in Cherubini’s eyes--and in the eyes of some African American community leaders upset over the practice--it was a caste system that relegated three-fourths of the district’s black students to the lowest levels, perpetuating a race-based social-class structure.

In Calhoun County schools, African Americans make up 68% of the student body, 93% of students labeled “mildly intellectually disabled” and 73% of special-education students. In Georgia as a whole, they are 36% of the students, 64% of mildly intellectually disabled students and 38% of special-education students.

Dr. Nancy Peck, associate director for the Southeastern Desegregation Assistance Center in Miami, said Calhoun County is “probably typical of some schools in my region (eight Southeastern states). And, if this is typical, we’d really better take notice.”

Tracking is not unique to the South. Educational experts point to a number of court cases across the country, including California, in which schools have been ordered or have agreed to dismantle their tracking systems.

“In California, you see the same situation with Latino children, although it is complicated because one of the dilemmas that the schools face is how to provide appropriate bilingual support for children without relegating them to a low status of ability-grouped classrooms,” said Dr. Jeannie Oakes, a professor of education at UCLA and author of a book on academic tracking.

“Tracking is one of these problems where there’s a lot of research that says it has negative consequences and no significant gains, especially at the elementary level,” said Gary Orfield, a Harvard education professor. “But a great majority of parents, especially of kids who are in the higher tracks, totally disagree with that research. You run into a political nightmare on this issue.”

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When investigators from the U.S. Education Department’s office of civil rights visited Calhoun County, they did not come in like gangbusters threatening to withhold federal funds. They paid two visits to the county in November, offering “technical assistance.”

But, despite the low-key approach, a faction of the school board and a portion of the county’s white population hit the roof.

A group called Concerned Calhoun County Citizens for Education launched an effort to recall Cherubini, whose four-year term expires in 1996. Richard West, one of the organizers, wrote a letter to the local newspaper addressed to Cherubini: “Most Yankees don’t understand life in the South,” it said. “If you haven’t learned to like it in 25 years, Delta (Air Lines) is ready when you are.”

Then, in early November, around the time the federal investigators arrived, somebody distributed a leaflet calling for “No white teachers! No white workers! No white students!” and urging black locals to “Support Dr. C.”

“We must arm ourselves and be ready to fight . . . “ the leaflet said. “The war of the rases (sic) has started!”

It was followed by an anonymous call to a local business in which someone announced, falsely, that violence had already begun.

Worried parents flocked to the school.

Rumors spread in the white community that the flyers were distributed by James Gibson, a city councilman in Edison, Ga., and a vice president of the local NAACP. Two days before he had been seen distributing leaflets urging a boycott of white-owned businesses that he felt had been unfair to blacks. The hate flyer also urged a boycott.

Gibson laughed at the charge. He and Cherubini said they suspect the flyer was written by a white person in an attempt to smear Gibson and damage Cherubini.

“Some teachers got pretty shook up, but it didn’t affect the students,” said Larry Wilkerson, the principal of the combined high and middle school.

On his visits to the school, though, Cherubini said he could discern a difference in atmosphere. Some white students glare at him when he passes. The tension in the community he and his wife experience among adults, he said, has reached the children.

Kelcey Lovett, 18, a black senior and a school quarterback, said he supports Cherubini, adding: “It’s mainly the parents who have the problems with the blacks and whites in the classrooms.”

But Preston Rish, 17, a white senior who also plays football, said: “In theory, I think this system of teaching everybody on an equal basis sounds real good, but I just don’t know if it will work in real life. Maybe it will. I just wish that Dr. Cherubini would have handled it in a better way . . . Everybody is being forced to take a side.”

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In January, 1993, immediately after he assumed office, Cherubini began talking to principals of the district’s two schools. He wanted to know how the new segregation had developed. One thing that concerned him was the two cheerleading squads, one all black for basketball and the other virtually all white for football. Because of financial support from the white community, the white squad received 29 times the funding of the black squad, he said.

When Cherubini began trying to change things, he said he ran up against resistance and obfuscation.

He asked the principal and the guidance counselor of the elementary school why some classes contained only black students.

According to district records, two of the four kindergarten classes, two of the four first-grade classes and two of the four second-grade classes were all black at the start of the 1993 school year. The other classes in each grade were nearly equally split between black and white students.

Cherubini was assured the groupings were not capricious. Tests determined academic capabilities, he was told. When he pressed school officials to show him the scores, Cherubini said, he was told they were not available. “I just came to the conclusion in my mind that there wasn’t anything substantial or concrete to show why we were grouping in this way,” he said.

Barbra Shannon, chief attorney in the Atlanta office of the federal Education Department, who visited the district twice in November, said she found it unclear how the groupings were devised. “I was told both things--that they were placed there on the basis of their perceived or actual demonstrated abilities and I was also told it was just a random selection,” she said.

Elementary School Principal Andy Sanders did not return a reporter’s phone call.

Cherubini said his concern is that the black students grouped together in kindergarten remain together as they travel from grade to grade. Invariably, he said, the classes earn “C” or “D” designations on school enrollment forms, indicating that they consist of low-achieving students headed for vocational school. The racially mixed groups get “A” or “B” designations, which mean that they are college-bound.

However the groupings are determined, Cherubini said, students designated early as low achievers and lumped into the less-academically oriented classes stand little chance of breaking out.

Cowart, a banker who has sat on the school board for 22 years, acknowledges that, test scores aside, white students are routinely grouped together to keep them from feeling isolated.

“Most of the whites, most of the time, ended up in the top (academic) ranking,” he said. “But when you had whites who didn’t fit the upper grouping, they were put in those classes anyway so they wouldn’t be in a class that was mostly black, and when I say mostly black, I mean 95% black.”

The intent was not to harm or segregate black students, he insisted. Officials “didn’t want to leave (white students) feeling like they’re without their friends,” he said.

Cherubini called this a myth and charged that the rationale was not so benign.

Shannon said the district, at the Education Department’s suggestion, has formed a task force to devise a plan for eliminating racially identifiable classes and integrating the cheerleading squads for the next school year. Rachel Taylor, a teacher who chaired the task force, said there once was one integrated squad for both teams. The task force is recommending reverting to that system, and, officials said, two white girls recently tried out to be basketball cheerleaders.

“I felt after my last visit there, that they were going to address these issues and resolve them appropriately,” Shannon said. But the school board will have to implement the task force’s recommendations, and it remains unclear how far it is willing to go.

Cowart opposes changing the cheerleading squads. A motion to merge the squads died this year for lack of a second. He said blacks and whites join different squads only because blacks tend to be big basketball fans and whites prefer football.

While Cowart appeared willing to change the way students are grouped into classes, he said the board must move cautiously or else more whites will flee the schools.

Some left at the start of the school year when Cherubini, working with the elementary school principal, added a fifth kindergarten class and tried to reassign white pupils so that there no longer were all-black classes.

After white parents starting pulling out their children, one class was left with only one white pupil and another with two. To ease their sense of isolation, Cherubini allowed the white students to be grouped together.

After the tinkering, the district now has one all-black kindergarten class and four that are mixed.

“I’ve got animosity in the county already, and we still haven’t made that much progress,” he said.