EDITOR'S NOTE: "Are Efforts to Integrate America’s Schools for Naught?" is the third in BlackAmericaWeb.com's five-part 50 Years After Little Rock series. Coming Thursday: The devaluing of education in the black community.

Click here for "Retelling, Revisiting and Reliving the Crisis at Central High."
Click here for "Where are They Now? How the Little Rock Nine Have Fared."

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Fifty years after nine black students broke through the color barrier at Little Rock Central High School, many of America’s classrooms are now testaments to multi-culturalism. But questions about whether public school integration has ultimately served black interests still persist.

Today at Little Rock Central High School, black students, for the most part, are underperforming, have little hope beyond finishing high school and are in largely segregated classes, while the white students largely populate advanced placement classes.

But will efforts to diversify America's public schools ever reach their intended goals, however well-intentioned? In a pair of cases involving challenges to voluntary desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville school districts, the Supreme Court declared in June that school board plans in each district were unconstitutional, further restricting how far public school systems may attain racial diversity and putting into peril similar plans in school districts nationwide.

A spokeswoman for the D.C. public schools told BlackAmericaWeb.com at the time that since the District’s black student population is about 83 percent black, the Supreme Court’s decision was not likely to impact D.C. students.

However, there are an estimated 1,000 school districts -- or one in 15 nationwide -- that have comprehensive racial integration programs and use race to make assignments like the ones ruled unconstitutional, said Amy Stuart Wells, a professor of sociology and education at Columbia University.

For three weeks in September 1957, Little Rock was the focus of a showdown over integration as Gov. Orval Faubus blocked the black students -- who came to be known as the Little Rock Nine -- from enrolling at a high school with about 2,000 white students. Although the U.S. Supreme Court had declared segregated classrooms unconstitutional in 1954 -- and the Little Rock School Board had voted to integrate -- Faubus said he feared violence if the races mixed in a public school.

The showdown soon became a test for then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who sent members of the Army's 101st Airborne Division in to control the angry crowds.

This week, the Little Rock Nine is helping the city observe the 50th anniversary of Central High School's integration with a series of events culminating with a ceremony featuring former President Bill Clinton, who declared the school a historical landmark during his presidency. Central is now the only school in the country designated as a landmark and under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service.

Several black educators said Tuesday that America’s school systems have a long way to go.

"If you go into a D.C. public school, you may see one or two white students," Shanie Stoddard, a third-year public school teacher in Washington, D.C., told BlackAmericaWeb.com. "The kids are not shown other cultures because the community is segregated. The children are not going to be able to relate to other cultures when they grow up."

"When the school had Hispanic Heritage Month, they did not understand what an Hispanic was," Stoddard added. "We only have one white staff member in the building, and the kids think she is a light-skinned black woman. In social studies, they don't understand where they are in the world, so they don't understand that there are other countries and cultures. Some of my students have not traveled to other quadrants of the city."

Some, however, decry efforts to maintain racial balance in schools as pure folly, maintaining -- as BlackAmericaWeb.com commentator Gregory Kane extolled in a December 2006 editorial titled "The Unspoken Racism in Diversity Plans Suggests that Majority-Black Schools Must Be Bad" -- that they help propagate stereotypes of chronic black underachievement.

"Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, in my hometown, is 69 percent black," Kane wrote. "Students there regularly outperform most of the predominantly white schools in Maryland, even those in ritzy Montgomery and Howard counties.

"The KIPP Ujima Village Academy is a Baltimore charter elementary/middle school with one white and one Native American student. All the other students are black. On recent state assessment tests, KIPP students beat their suburban counterparts at predominantly black AND predominantly white schools in reading and math."

"How did the KIPP students do it?" Kane asked. "Not by concentrating on the shibboleth of diversity, but by concentrating on some fundamentals. Nearly all of KIPP’s students come from a demographic that is black and poor."

Some black teachers in Maryland said this week that school integration is as important today as ever before.

"[It's] definitely still necessary," Charmaine Banks, an elementary school teacher in Landover, Maryland, told BlackAmericaWeb.com. "Our neighborhoods are still segregated, so our schools are still segregated. So until our neighborhoods are desegregated, we will still have segregated schools."

Juan Williams, a political analyst for National Public Radio and Fox News and the author of "Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965" and "Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America," wrote in The Washington Post Tuesday, that school integration has resulted in large numbers of poor black children.

"The movement away from school integration is glaring," Williams wrote. "The Civil Rights Project found in 2003 that the nation's 27 biggest school districts were "overwhelmingly" segregated with black and Latino students."

Williams said nationwide, almost half of black and Latino children are in schools where less than 10 percent of the students are white.

"This trend toward isolation of poor and minority students has consequences -- half of black and Latino students now drop out of high school," Williams wrote in the Post.

"Integrated schools benefit students, especially minorities," Williams wrote. "Research on the long-term outcomes of black and Latino students attending integrated schools indicates that those students "complete more years of education, earn higher degrees and major in more varied occupations than graduates of all-black schools."

In June, after the high court's ruling, Williams wrote in The New York Times that "the argument that school reform should provide equal opportunity for children or prepare them to live in a pluralistic society is spent. The winning argument is that better schools are needed for all children -- black, white, brown and every other hue -- in order to foster a competitive workforce in a global economy."

"Dealing with racism and the bitter fruit of slavery and 'separate but equal' legal segregation was at the heart of the court’s brave decision 53 years ago," Williams wrote. "With Brown officially relegated to the past, the challenge for brave leaders now is to deliver on the promise of a good education for every child."

President George W. Bush weighed in about Little Rock on Tuesday, saying the 2007 Nation’s Report Card, also known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, showed that eighth graders achieved their highest scores ever in math, while fourth graders set records in both reading and math.

African-American and Hispanic students posted all-time highs in a number of categories, which Bush said represents progress toward closing the achievement gap.

"These scores confirm that No Child Left Behind is working and producing positive results for students across the country," Bush said in a statement. "As we commemorate the integration 50 years ago of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, we are reminded of the sacrifices students and their families have made in pursuit of a better education."

"Today’s results demonstrate America’s progress in making their dreams a reality, but we have more work to do," the president said. "Now is not the time to turn back the clock on educational accountability and real options for parents, which No Child Left Behind provides."

But 50 years after federal troops escorted Terrence Roberts and eight fellow black students into an all-white high school, he says the struggles over race and segregation still are unresolved.

"This country has demonstrated over time that it is not prepared to operate as an integrated society," said Roberts, who is a faculty member at Antioch University's psychology program.

He and the other students known as the Little Rock Nine will help the city observe Central High School's 50th anniversary this week with a series of events culminating with a ceremony featuring former President Bill Clinton.

His wife, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, a candidate for president in 2008, said what happened in Little Rock was shocking.

"What we saw here in Little Rock in the Fall of 1957 shocked us and changed us," Sen. Clinton said in a statement. "Mothers and fathers across America saw in those nine children the vulnerability and promise of their own children. They saw in that hateful mob the ugliness of their own prejudices and fears."

Sen. Barack Obama, a Democrat from Illinois who is also running for the White House in 2008, said the Little Rock students should be proud.

"Despite slurs, taunts and all kinds of indignities, these nine students kept their heads high and their backs straight, integrating Little Rock Central High School and helping realize our founding promise of justice and equality for all," Obama said in a statement. "[It was] the beginning of the end of Jim Crow, and making a life of hope and opportunity possible for someone like me."

"And yet a half-century later, much work remains," Obama said. "Too many of our schools are crumbling. Disparities have widened. And our Supreme Court has argued that voluntary integration is the same as Jim Crow segregation ... But I’m hopeful. Because 50 years ago, nine young men and women showed the world that in the face of impossible odds, ordinary people could do extraordinary things."

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Associated Press and BlackAmericaWeb.com reporter Tiffany Bolden contributed to this story.