Integration a work in progress

PHILADELPHIA — Like many large urban schools, West Philadelphia High School strives to accommodate all comers: aspiring collegians and potential dropouts, gang members and gospel singers, teenage moms with their babies in tow.

Yet diverse as they are, in their promise and problems, the 1,600 students are nearly uniform in one respect: 99 percent are black. Most come from low-income families; their school has battled a reputation as one of the city's most troubled.

Ten miles away, schools in the prosperous suburb of Cheltenham have a very different racial mix. Because of fine-tuning of the township's internal boundaries, all seven of its schools are roughly 55 percent white, 35 percent black, 10 percent Asian or Latino. Cheltenham's high school is renowned for academic excellence.

"We are what the country looks like. We're dealing with all the pluses and all the challenges," said Rick Topper, a white English teacher at Cheltenham High.

The contrast between the two high schools is vivid evidence that, nearly 50 years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated public schools unconstitutional, the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling remains a work in progress.

The 1954 decision had immense impact, triggering the steady, though often contentious, integration of school districts nationwide. Yet the trend has started reversing in the past 15 years, even as America overall has become more ethnically diverse.

In communities nationwide, the ruling now poses an abiding challenge: Can America ensure educational equality for all its youth, regardless of race and place of residence?

In Cheltenham, educators and parents know it will take hard work to avert white flight and narrow an academic achievement gap between black and white students. At West Philadelphia, segregation is simply reality — its staff and students clamor for better programs and more resources, not for an overhaul of racial demographics.

"I don't have a magic wand," said Clifton James, West Philadelphia's first-year principal. "But we have to start producing. What schools like this have to fight against is the perception that the grass is greener somewhere else."

The Brown case — one of the launching points for the civil rights movement — consolidated lawsuits filed by the NAACP in four states challenging school segregation. The case was named after Oliver Brown, whose daughter Linda was barred from a white elementary school near her Topeka, Kan., home.