Suppose the stranger also said that her plan would close unfit school buildings, provide bilingual instruction for students who cannot speak English well, provide special services for handicapped students, develop a curriculum that emphasizes special "magnet" programs in some schools, and obtain tangible support for the schools from businesses, colleges, universities, and museums in the community?

Such a plan would appear to be too good to be true. Yet, this is precisely the plan that Judge W. Arthur Garrity, Jr. ordered for Boston. Approximately one year after the implementation of the plan, Boston Globe reporter Muriel Cohen found that "reading tests…show improvement in a number of district high schools, gains for minority children but no loss for whites." She said "such improvement was considered a favorable outcome." Her overall conclusion: "The Boston schools are on their way up." School official James Dougherty (Boston Globe, June 4, 1976) said that after desegregation, more South Boston High School whites were going to college. In the age of segregation, he said "the white kids" in this Irish working-class community "downgraded themselves, felt college was too tough or that they didn't have the ability." He continued, "The 'in' thing with black is going to college. Now, there is a feeling [among whites] that 'if blacks are going to college, why can't we?'" He described this as a positive side to desegregation and said it "was a boon to Southie where almost no one goes [to college]."

What do Boston's citizens think of this plan? A few years ago, my colleagues (sociologist Susan Greenblatt, historian Paul Schindler) and I questioned thirty community leaders regarding their assessment of the outcome of school desegregation in Boston. These were knowledgeable people, television and newspaper editors, officers of the League of Women Voters, Black Education Alliance, Civil Liberties Union, South Boston Information Center, Columbia Point Health Center, Cooperative Metropolitan Ministries, and Federal Dorchester Neighborhood Houses. They were local and state government officials connected with the Police Department, school Committee, City Council, Corporation Counsel's Office, and Action for Boston Community Development. They were business executives in such enterprises as John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company and Station WBZ.

About half of these leaders said that public education in Boston had improved since the court order; only one-fourth said it had deteriorated; the remainder said that some aspects of education were better and others worse.

We asked these community representatives to state specifically what contributed to the improvement. The magnet schools were referred to more often than any other innovation as contributing to improved education in Boston. The pairing arrangement between individual schools, colleges, universities, businesses, and museums were mentioned with the second greatest frequency. Also mentioned were greater parent participation in education policy-making and increases in reading scored. These four items–magnet schools, pairing programs between the schools and other community institutions, parent participation, and reading achievement–were the indicators of improvement referred to by a majority of the leaders who said the schools had improved since desegregation.

But there is and continues to be disruption in a few of the Boston schools. This is a price the community is paying for its progress after years of neglecting its schools, especially the educational needs of racial minorities and poor whites. Most of the leaders in our survey attributed the disruption to "citizens' negative attitudes toward desegregation." One out of every three blamed "inadequate political leadership." It is interesting to note what factors these leaders did not cite frequently as triggers of disruption. Only one-sixth focused on the court-ordered desegregation plan, calling it "inadequate"; and only one out of every ten mentioned the news media and its method of coverage. At a time when cynicism toward the news media and the long arm of federal government is rampant, Boston's community leaders chose not to focus their criticism on either institution as negatively affecting the schools.

Indeed, court-ordered desegregation has given public education, which had become stale, moribund, and narrow, a chance to deal with a broad range of learning issues instead of focusing only on such intellectual skills as communication and computation. In the 194 Brown decision, the Court described an equitable educational process as one in which a student of one racial group is able to engage in discussion and to exchange views with other students. Public education now has an opportunity to include cultural orientation in the learning situation and not limit itself to the normative experiences of the dominant or majority group. With school desegregation, the students of one group are exposed to the value and concerns of those in another, certainly a necessary process if the nation's pluralistic population is t do business as a democracy.

What the Court has ordered in school desegregation may be what many young people wanted all along. Several years ago, H. H. Remmers conducted a series of surveys among high school students and published his results in a book titled The American Teenager. He discovered that although the development of vocational skills and knowledge about our society were important to some of them, a higher proportion thought that "knowing how to get along with other people" was the most important thing to get out of high school. Not surprisingly, moreover, several studies have revealed that people who interact with groups different from their own in elementary school tend to feel more comfortable in the presence of those who are different in high school. And students who interact interracially in high school tend to have more cross-racial contacts in college and in later life.

While there may be turbulence when groups whose members have not associated with each other in the past first came together, they eventually work out some form of accommodation. Nationwide, sociologist Willis D. Hawley has found that desegregation is most effective when: