The “white flight” issue was raised by Dr. Coleman, who recently concluded in a study that busing accelerated a White exodus from the public schools, leaving fewer and poorer whites in the cities for blacks to integrate with. He ‘found this trend strongest in the largest cities, where there is a high proportion of black students and where there are largely white suburbs. Mr. Coleman was the principal author in 1966 of the landmark study of equal educational opportunity which bears his name. Since its publication, the Coleman report has frequently been cited as evidence that integration would improve black children's academic performance.

Concern about white flight has been spurred by growing black enrollments and diminishing white enrollments in many major cities. Nine of the largest twelve cities in the country and fourteen of the largest twenty now have majority black enrollments in their public school systems. According to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, more than 70 percent of the black students who are in all‐minority schools are in 19 cities—north, south, east and west.

At the same time that racial concentrations in the cities are growing, the over‐all level of racial isolation in the nation's schools has been reduced since 1968. This is because two‐thirds of the nation's seven million black pupils do not go to school in urban districts where blacks are a majority of the enrollment. And, even in districts where blacks are a majority, there are varying degrees of school integration.

The South's public schools are now the most desegregated in the country, mainly because of extensive court‐ordered busing. But white flight has also been a problem in Southern cities, many of which have lost white enrollment, either to the suburbs or to the 3,000 or so academies which sprang up to receive white pupils. New Orleans, Memphis, Atlanta, Richmond, Jackson, Savannah, Birmingham and Norfolk have black majorities in their schools.

Mr. Coleman's conclusion that coerced desegregation causes white flight has been attacked by proponents of integration who point out that many of the cities in his recent study had not had any busing. Gary Orfield of the Brookings Institution, author of a book about Southern school desegregation, holds that there are so many different reasons why middle‐class whites and blacks move to the suburbs that “it is impossible now to demonstrate that school integration, in itself, causes substantial white flight.” The contretemps about Dr. Coleman's findings is to some extent a tempest in a teapot, for no one disagrees that white flight from urban schools has been large or that this trend has made school integration far more difficult. The only real disagreement is whether desegregation is a major cause or merely one among many.

White flight in Boston does appear to be directly related to the bitter battle over busing. From 1964 until 1970, Boston lost 13 percent of its white pupils, or about 1,600 a year. From 1970 until 1975, the white pupil enrollment dropped by 40 percent, or about 5,000 a year. Most Of the decline was in the past two years, since busing began, when Boston lost 8,500 white pupils each year.

Whatever the cause, there has been a sharp decline the number of white children in many urban public school districts. Between 1968 and 1973, the number of white pupils dropped by 62 percent in Atlanta, 41 percent in San Francisco, 32 percent in Houston, 21 percent in Denver, 40 percent in New Orleans and 26 percent in New York City. During these years the national decline in white enrollment was about 1 percent annually,