Rosy Reporting

Desegregation works. That was the major conclusion of a report the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued last August. The $2.3 million study (TIME, Sept. 6) declared that despite headlines about busing violence, 82% of the nation's school districts have desegregated without serious disruption, and only 10% report any decline in the levels of education. A pleased Commission Chairman Arthur Flemming stated: "We are prepared to debate the soundness of this conclusion with anyone."

Just such a debate is now taking place within Flemming's own organization. Researcher Duane Lindstrom of the commission's Midwest regional office has resigned in protest against what he calls the report's distortion. Said Lindstrom: "We were told beforehand by Washington that the purpose of the study was to show desegregation worked." Advisory committees in Illinois and Michigan have also denounced the report as biased in favor of good news.

Though all these critics support desegregation, they nonetheless accuse the commission of rigging the evidence. Produced by 162 commission staffers in ten months' time, the report based its findings on four hearings (in Boston, Louisville, Denver and Tampa, Fla.), four open meetings (in Berkeley, Calif, Minneapolis, Stamford, Conn., and Corpus Christi, Texas), a mail survey of 1,300 school districts, and analyses of 29 school districts scattered across the nation. But in a memo to the eight regional directors, the commission director of field operations, Isiah T. Creswell Jr., wrote: "In the hearings, the emphasis will be more on districts that have made positive steps toward desegregation, or that have achieved a relatively higher degree of desegregation with relatively fewer problems."

New Thrust. The four open meetings were intended to cover only districts where desegregation was working --in order to determine why it had worked--while the 29 case studies were to be divided among those districts where there had been no progress, moderate progress, and substantial progress. Yet, in the end, only three of the districts chosen fell into the first category.

Three weeks after the report was issued, the commission renewed its demands for favorable data. It sent to all the regional offices a memo titled "New Thrust Follow-Up," asking for reports on the "applicability of the commission's findings." Specifically, it directed: "Your monographs will show that desegregation has been successful at the local level for the reasons the commission reports, or that it can and will be more successful if local leadership responds as the commission recommends."

At Washington headquarters, the staffers' criticisms have put top officials on the defensive. Chairman Flemming, who instigated the hastily prepared report after being impressed by testimony at a 1975 commission hearing in Boston, concedes that "some of the writing in the memos was not good." But, he adds: "We obviously are advocates for the implementation of the Constitution. When we started this study we had a feeling there was more positive evidence for desegregation than appeared on the surface." Dissenter Lindstrom speaks for the critics, however, when he argues that it might have been possible to "prove the same damn thing" if the commission had used an unbiased approach. He adds: "I don't think the report proves desegregation does not work. It just doesn't prove anything."

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