CALIFORNIA HAS published its worst-schools list. The vast majority of the humiliated sites serve students who are predominately poor and/or minority.

This comes as no surprise, of course, because California's and the nation's schools are more segregated by race and class today than ever — and we've long known that concentrating our disadvantaged kids in decrepit schools staffed too often with our least-qualified teachers might make it difficult for those kids and schools to succeed.

Now we're going to "reform" those schools by, for example, giving the boot to their principals and teachers (thus discouraging other educators even more from considering a position in them).

How did our schools end up so segregated more than 50 years after the Supreme Court ruled such an arrangement was, if not immoral, at least unconstitutional?

For an explanation, look no further than hapless Kansas City, Mo., which must now close 28 of its 61 schools.

As William Moran explained in his seminal book, "Race, Law, and the Desegregation of the Public Schools":

"In 1954, Kansas City's segregated schools were more than 80 percent white, enrolled about 60,000 students, and