Fifty years ago this week the Supreme Court handed down the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. Back in 1954, the Supremes unanimously decreed that public education cannot be separate but equal, that all students must be educated within the same local school system.

Lately, I've been reading story after story about the re-segregation of American schools. About how the apparently-increasing trend of majority-white suburban schools and majority-black urban schools is a terrible thing.

Yawn.

As a child, I attended schools that were almost all-white, almost all-black, evenly split between black and white and evenly split between "white" and hispanic (though, as my hispanic high school Spanish teacher liked to quip, "We're all caucasian here.") The main difference in quality between the schools had nothing to do with racial proportions or even money spent per student. The difference was good teachers and solid school administration--precisely the sort of thing you can't legislate or litigate.

Here in Durham, N.C., white folks between the ages of 40 and 60 are fleeing in droves. This loss is offset by a significant increase in whites aged 20 to 40, which means that for the last 15 years or so, the white, non-hispanic, population of the county has remained fairly steady at 110,000. In the meantime, the black and hispanic population has ballooned from about 70,000 to 125,000 or so. In addition, the county has become much more affluent as professional workers have replaced departing tobacco and cotton mill workers.

Which means that our county-wide school district is majority black and yet relatively wealthy. Test scores (hardly a perfect measure of school success, but still reasonably indicative), especially among minority students, are rising. The "achievement gap" between whites and minorities is closing. And yet a few folks are predicting disaster because white, non-hispanic, children make up only 28 percent of students in the district.

Recent headlines in the Durham and Raleigh newspapers decried "white flight" in Durham, but that's not what's happening. Indeed, the white preschool population in the county is exploding--this despite the fact that we're supposed to be in the middle of another "baby bust." In five to ten years, there will be a lot more white kids in the schools. And there will be even more black and hispanic kids. No matter the percentages, the schools are likely to continue to improve.

So we get to the one pernicious implication of Brown v. Board of Education: That majority-black schools are somehow inferior--just because of the skin colors of their students.

Yes, white flight was--I repeat, was--a big issue. Back in the 60s and 70s, a whale-load of white families trucked out of urban school districts, crippling the property tax bases of many large cities and putting the schools into serious distress. This is still a major problem in many cities whose school districts are delineated by municipal, rather than county, limits. These big cities have to pay much higher maintenance costs for ancient and decaying facilities, and they are faced with large numbers of children whose parents are ambivalent--if not outright antagonistic--toward the public schools. And if the parents can't get behind the schools, there's no way the kids are going to behave in class or bother with education at all. But that's an old story, one that fails to interest people any more.

The days of active white flight are mostly past. And so education "crusaders" have turned their attention from those massive urban districts--where significant problems remain unaddressed--to the rapidly-growing, largely urban-suburban school districts of southern metropoli, and they see black everywhere.

Damn straight. The great black migration north in the first half of the 20th century has reversed itself. Back in 1975, the "most desirable" mid-sized were places like Ft. Wayne, Ind., and Des Moines. These days, folks are flocking to developing southern metropoli like mine. Raleigh, N.C., barely topped 100,000 back in 1970. Now it's well past 300,000. Durham (city, not county) has grown from 60,000 to 200,000 in the same time span. This growth, as I mentioned earlier, is diverse, particularly so in Durham.

Some elementary schools here are almost exclusively black. And they test well. Not as well as they should, perhaps, but much better than they did 10 years ago. And while I don't think test scores tell the entire story, increasing scores mean that teachers are reaching their kids, even if it is only to fill in the correct circles on a test sheet.

Should we be concerned about the apparent increasing self-segregation of the public schools in this country? I guess so. We should always try to make sure that our schools are doing their jobs. But should folks around here be concerned that some white parents are afraid of sending their kids to Durham schools? Hell no. Laws and the courts cannot change the hearts of people; they simply level the playing field. And well-funded, well-supported majority-black or all-black schools are certainly within the spirit of that momentous decision of 50 years ago.

I'm not condoning the irrational fear that causes some white parents to pull their kids from schools where their children will not be part of a racial majority. White parents who refuse to send their children to schools where most of the kids are black and brown are racists. But I can't do anything about that. Such fear, ignorance and hatred hurts them and their children much more than the rest of us. What I can do is make sure that the schools my own children will attend are as good as they can be. And when it comes to schoolmates, as in life in general, what's important is the content of character, not the color of skin.

Jon Worley is not a NASCAR dad.