Sweet! Thanks much - starting by Googling "white flight" as a phrase and then etymology (and some other search strings too) wasn't getting me near as far. OED was a much better starting point (and doesn't show up as a Google result presumably because it's a subscription resource). The whole world hasn't been indexed for everyone's free consumption yet after all
Fortunately I was able to find the full text (via EBSCO's Academic Search Premier, which curiously enough only lists full-text availability back to 1990 in its own publication details for New Republic, but then went ahead and offered full text of the 1967 article anyway). And yup, it's page 19 of an article titled "No More Nonsense About Ghetto Education".
Joseph Alsop wrote:
This is only one item of evidence - there is a mass of it, for instance, in the supporting studies behind the Watts report - to show that school quality is a far more important factor than racial feeling, in this white flight from desegregated schools that has made such a mockery of the good intentions of people like Judge Wright. When a middle-class school receives a massive infusion of children of extremely deprived background - whether Puerto Rican, or Mexican-American, or Appalachian white, or Negro — there are only two possible results. Either the added burden of the disadvantaged, educationally retarded children becomes too much for the teaching staff, whereupon school quality promptly and shockingly deteriorates and middle-class emigration quickly begins. Or the local school authorities take all the special measures that are needed to maintain school quality, in which case - thus far an almost unheard-of case - there is an excellent chance that most of the emigration can be averted.
He died in 1989, so Joseph Alsop Memorial Park it is
