White Flight & Political Retreat

Charging that desegregation of schools causes “white flight,” the neoconservatives have now joined the fight against large-scale integration of big-city school systems. The signal for the attack was James S. Coleman’s recent repudiation of his findings that had for some 12 years served as the main factual and analytical underpinning of the pro-integration argument.

In 1966 Coleman, a sociologist then at Johns Hopkins University and now at the University of Chicago, di...