ABSTRACT
Few issues in education have aroused as much con-troversy as desegregation, the differences in opinion sometimes even extending to the meaning of the term itself. Often used synonymously with integration in casual discourse, desegregation more precisely "refers to the removal of both legal and social practices" that separate pupils of differing ethnicities and race, as well as to the physical presence of these pupils in the same schools. Integration, on the other hand, "occurs only if there then develops joint participation and mutual acceptance in all activities normally associated with school attendance, from classroom to extracurricular activities" (Jaynes and Williams, 1989:81). Among other things, the definitions indicate that segregation and integration can be considered ends of a continuum, one position on which might be the attendance of blacks and whites in the same school, but their systematic enrollment in different classes [see Datnow and Cooper (Tracking), this volume, p. 687].
