Evanston/Skokie School District 65 is proposing to reconsider a decades-old racial integration guideline at a time when other districts around the county also are evaluating whether such programs boost minority achievement.

Board members approved Tuesday the creation of a five-year plan that would call for a new elementary school in the predominantly black Fifth Ward, end guidelines calling for 40 percent minority enrollment in each school and revamp minority busing.

Minority achievement levels have not significantly increased since busing began in a “well-intentioned” effort to more equally allocate resources, said D65 board member Bob Eder.

“There are unacceptable levels of achievement,” Eder said. “We have to have black achievement increase. If you keep doing the same thing in the same way, you’re going to have the same outcome.”

Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which found segregated schools inherently unequal, a national trend of desegregation occurred. Evanston desegregated its schools more than 15 years ago by busing minority children to largely white Evanston and Skokie schools, said Fred Hess, director of Northwestern’s Center for Urban School Policy.

The city currently prohibits students of one race from exceeding 60 percent of a school’s population. The measure was taken to increase diversity within schools and boost the achievement levels of minority children.

But several Supreme Court cases in the 1990s made it easier for school districts to gradually move away from desegregation, regardless of how effective the policy had been, said Ed Yohnka, director of communications for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.

“There’s not a question about it, it’s a point of fact that we see cities trying to vacate consent decrees, to elude or end the kind of busing protocols and desegregation protocols that have been in place for a long time,” Yohnka said.

The addition of a Fifth Ward school would threaten the current 60 percent minority guideline, Hess said. But he said D65 is not abandoning desegregation.

“The efforts are based on one community, where all the students are bused out and don’t have the option of busing or going to school in the community,” Hess said. “People are saying, ‘Let’s rethink the value (of busing), especially around the issue of African-American achievement.'”

Schools with predominantly minority enrollment often are poorly funded compared to predominantly white schools – giving rise to disparities in facilities and teaching quality, said John Jackson, the NAACP’s national education director.

“If you look at socioeconomic status, there is a strong correlation between class and race,” Jackson said. “The fact remains that the resources are not there to help these students.”

A neighborhood school in the Fifth Ward will not be successful unless it receives enough funding to compensate for the overall lower economic level in the community, Eder said.

“Lower-income students bring a lot less to their school situations than do children of middle and upper income levels,” Eder said. “The main question is: Is the community willing to use a differential and higher rate of funding to make a school in the Fifth Ward a success?”

D65 is trying to balance its operating budget, and plans for a new school will involve serious community-wide financing discussion, said Mary Erickson, a D65 board member.

Jackson said D65 may actually see itself in a situation of resegregation. In order to truly achieve desegregation, white students must be bused to minority schools, not only the other way around, he said.

“Desegregation will only work if it is done both ways,” he said. “There is a definite and lasting educational benefit in diversity.”