“Racial composition does not determine the level of learning,” said Thernstrom, who along with his wife Abigail recently published “No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Education.”

He said he recognizes the challenges associated with race and education, but emphasized that focusing on desegregation is not the way to improve education.

“It is a very curious view that black or Latino or Asian children cannot learn without a majority of white classmates. It is old-fashioned, liberal ideology,” said Thernstrom, asserting that the logic behind Orfield’s assumption about integration’s potential to improve minority education assumes that blacks and Hispanics must be able to model their white peers in order to have a “proper education.”

And citing the same statistics used by Orfield, Thernstrom said that trends which appear to show resegregation are simply a function of declining white enrollments.

“It is inevitable in schools that there are fewer whites in schools. There are less to go around. We can’t helicopter kids in from Utah or Vermont,” he said.

Thernstrom agreed with Orfield on the need to improve the nation’s schools, but instead of focusing on problem-plagued urban schools, Thernstrom advocated giving parents vouchers that would allow them to enroll their children in private, charter or parochial schools.

He cited KIPP Academy in Bronx, NY, and Frederick Douglass in Newark, NJ as examples of excellent charter schools without a white population, attributing their success to discipline, excellent teaching and more hours devoted to instruction.