Everywhere in America, segregation is returning to our schools. But because it is happening without the pressure of racist laws, few seem to care. In New Jersey, half of all black students attend schools in which minorities are in the majority, and according to a survey released in January, segregation is increasing. In Texas, a new method of diversifying colleges has been suggested: Instead of using affirmative action, the University of Texas will accept the top 10 percent of each Texas high school's graduating class. The idea that this method would be an effective tool of diversification serves to accept the trend of re-segregation and embrace it as valid.The New Jersey Board of Education decided last week to end a 13-year injunction against local students in Englewood, N.J. - my hometown - attending public high schools in other towns in the county. Englewood, a diverse city of 30,000, is located in wealthy Bergen County, across the Hudson from Manhattan and the Bronx. The city is about 43 percent white and 39 percent black; of the five towns that surround it, only one has a black population greater than 3 percent.

Outside observers are often led to assume that racism has caused the overwhelmingly white towns bordering Englewood to reject the city's largely black and Hispanic students, but that would be missing the real issue here, one that should resonate throughout the United States, that segregation, not affirmative action - so often perceived to be detrimental - is at the heart of this country's race problems.

Segregation in public schools has been illegal for nearly 50 years, but the methods that have been used to correct the problem are no longer prioritized. No one seems to care if segregation happens "by chance," even though the phrase is used as a means to ignoring the fact that it is hardly ever by chance. Segregation exists because of the legacy of laws no longer on the books, the history of racial steering of blacks to one side of town and whites to the other and the lasting effects of socio-economic disadvantage of opportunity. Chance is not the cause and chance will not be the solution. The only way to correct the social and economic imbalance between whites and others is to ensure that there are no societal barriers between ethnic groups. To accomplish this, ending segregation in our schools must be our first priority.

In Englewood, segregation is a cardiac ailment, as the city is divided at its core -blacks in the west and whites in the east. Black parents send their children to Dwight Morrow High School, a gothic-style public school designed after Oxford and named for the former U.S. senator and presidential hopeful, and white parents send their children to Dwight-Englewood, a private school a few miles up Palisade Avenue, the main street of town.

The injunction in Englewood was intended to stop white parents from pulling their children out of Dwight Morrow and putting them in other public schools; they have come to send their kids to private school instead. In 1985, when the problem was first defined, Dwight Morrow was two-thirds black and Hispanic, but today there are only five white students out of 587 in the high school.

The injunction made the problem worse by suggesting to parents that they should not want their children in a school the state must legally mandate students to attend. Ending the injunction, however, is unlikely to change the stereotypes about Dwight Morrow that have developed among Englewood's whites, that the school has poor teachers and violent students. These widely held beliefs are without basis, but white parents openly claim them as their reasons for not sending their children to public school. The real reason is that white parents don't want their children in a school that is 97 percent minority. Bergen County has established a magnet school in Englewood to attract a more diverse student body, but it is feared that this will create a small white school within a large black school, which certainly will serve to sharpen the dividing line between the two communities. The line instead must be eliminated.

Americans - both black and white - don't like the idea of busing. The word arouses images of students being forced out of good schools close to their homes and into bad schools in far-away neighborhoods. The solution to the problem of segregation is not busing, but regionalization of school systems. In my county, regionalization would not lead to students being bused farther than 20 minutes from their homes, and it would finally bring white students from the towns surrounding Englewood into the city that is their natural center, as well as allowing black and Hispanic students from Englewood to attend schools that don't have stigmas. And everyone would finally be forced to meet one another - including white students from Englewood, currently separated from the general public school system.

Affirmative action cannot solve the problem of racial inequity, but ending inequities on the high school and grade school level can. Perhaps Englewood can be the first town to benefit from such a change in priorities.

- Matthew Bettinger '05 submits a column to the Justice.