Passage Two
Questions 57 to 61 are based on the following passage.
After the year 1958. a more modern Supreme Court agreed with Justice Helen. In a historic decision in 1954 it held that laws that forcing black students lo go to racially segregated schools violated the US Constitution because such schools could never be equal. The opinion of the Court was that "to separate (black school children) from others solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority--that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely over to be undone".
The Supreme Court’s decision in 1954 led to changes which brought an end to the system of segregated public education in the southern state. However, problems in race relations continued to trouble the public schools, even though schools were legally desegregated throughout the country.
Black Americans were still mainly in the lowest income and occupational groups and frequently lived in slums in the nation’s largest cities. The public schools in these areas were composed predominantly or entirely of black students and often shared the neighborhood problem of high crime rates and other forms of social disorder. The schools in the black slums were clearly unequal to those in the predominantly white, middleclass neighborhoods.
The problem of schools where racial separation results from the makeup of neighborhoods rather than from laws requiring segregation exists in all parts of the United States, not just in the South. Numerous efforts to solve this problem have not succeeded very well. The most controversial method used to deal with unequal neighborhood schools was the busing of school children from their home neighborhoods to schools in more distant neighborhoods in order to achieve a greater mixture of black and white children in all schools.
Black children from poor or slum neighborhoods were bused to school in predominantly white middleclass neighborhoods, and students living in the middle-class neighborhoods were bused into the poorer black neighborhood schools. A new question dealing with racial equality in education was brought to the Supreme Court in the late 1970s. The question dealt with the admission policies of professional schools such as medical and law schools, which arc attached to many of the nation’s colleges and universities. Some of these schools have attempted to do more than treat all applicants equally. Many have tried in recent years to make up for past discrimination against blacks and other minorities by setting aside a certain number of places specifically for applicants from these groups, this practice came to be described as setting minority quotas, lowering somewhat the academic standards for admission for a limited number oF minority applicants.
In 1954, the racially segregated school was gradually out of existence in ______.