THE "RE-SEGREGATION" OF CLEVELAND PUBLIC SCHOOLS? Sunday's PD spread ("66% of Cleveland's minorities attend racially isolated schools") and Roger Jones' column in the current Free Times both draw attention to the same sorry fact: Fifty years after Brown v. Board, and twenty-five years after Reed v. Rhodes, most black kids in Cleveland are going to overwhelmingly black schools. (A lot of Hispanic kids are going to majority-Hispanic schools, too, but that's a different issue with a different history.)

Is this the "re-segregation" of the Cleveland schools? Well, on one level, of course it is. If you go through the 2003 enrollment statistics for all 86 Cleveland Municipal School District ("CMSD") buildings with students in grades K-5 (they're here), you find that 46 of those buildings had student bodies that were more than 90% black. These kids were undeniably isolated from their peers of other races. (Speaking of "isolated", the average number of white students in these buildings was five.)

Most white CMSD students, on the other hand, go to schools that are "integrated" by any usual standard. Only one grade K-5 school was more than 75% white in 2003... William Cullen Bryant in Old Brooklyn, whose students were 86% white, 6% black and 9% Hispanic. Six other schools -- three in Old Brooklyn, three in West Park -- had white enrollments above 60%, with black and Hispanic students filling out their rosters in roughly equal numbers. These seven "mostly white" schools accounted for about a third of all the white kids enrolled in the CMSD's K-5 and K-8 buildings. The other two-thirds went to schools where 40-80% of their classmates were "students of color".

How can the Cleveland schools be segregated for most black kids but integrated for most white kids who go there? The answer, of course, is that there aren't enough white kids to go around... and there are large parts of the city where none of them live.

The CMSD's overall student demographics in 2003 were...

Black students -- 50,480 (70.6%)
White students -- 13,209 (18.4%)
Hispanic students -- 6,528 (9.1%)

... with "others" at less than 2%. So if you took all the white and Hispanic kids and distributed them evenly thoughout the city, all the black kids would still be going to mostly-black schools.

Why so few white kids? It's not mainly because of private school competition... the 2000 Census showed a higher percentage of whites enrolled in K-12 private schools than blacks or Hispanics, but two-thirds of the city's white kids were still in public school. If all the private-school students in Cleveland, of all ethnic backgrounds, rejoined the CMSD tomorrow, black kids would still be 65% of the system's customers, and whites would barely exceed 25%.

The simple fact is that Cleveland has become a "city of color", especially among its younger citizens. White Cleveland residents are now just the city's biggest racial minority. And pretty much all the city's families with school-age kids, of any race, are poor.

In this environment, do "segregation" and "integration" have any meaning in Cleveland 2004? Maybe it's time for a new paradigm.

Or maybe it's the same old paradigm in a new setting. Maybe Cleveland needs to insist on putting a unified city/suburban school system at the top of the "regionalism" agenda.