"Anybody heard of this actually happening in American? Anybody? Anywhere?"
Yes I have, but I don't remember any details. As a tangent, black parents are some of the biggest supporters of vouchers because they know the current learning environments suck.
The problem Phillips is trying to address is stated early in the article, "Mr Phillips said many suffered from a culture where it was seen as uncool to be clever."
A friend pointed out to me years ago, and I believe it to be true but have no access to data, that black children perform as well as their white counterparts up through the 6th grade. After that the peer pressure hits them like a ton of bricks and it's no longer cool to make good grades because that would make them "too white".
Well, of course. My boys loved the ballet until the age of 8 or 9 when suddenly it became "girl stuff" and they would no longer go. And my own parents put us girls in a girls' high school because school was about education, not about pimping yourself to boys.
My own opinion is well known: allow the parents to decide what form of education is best for their kids. Many, many people in Atlanta were horrified when the Black parents decided that neighbourhood schools were best, even if their kid didn't get to sit black/white/black/white in the classroom and both teachers and students were black. They failed to figure out that the parents put their childrens' education more important than what colour their classmates are, and they found it insulting to the highest degree that anybody would believe that black kids could not learn unless white people were involved.
If the idea is to not only teach these black boys to read, write, figure and think, but to teach them that skin colour matters not at all, why should it matter who teaches them or what colour their classmates are?
"After that the peer pressure hits them like a ton of bricks and it's no longer cool to make good grades because that would make them "too white".
And that is a difficult problem to solve, because that is cultural. It reminds me of my daughter, who for a while, got into this idea that she was fat, which she wasn't. Even though I don't even own a scale, have never been on a diet, and hadn't had a fashion mag in the house since my mother died. It didn't become a big problem, but it made me realize how pervasive culture is and how just your home life isn't a guard against it, unless maybe if you live some very insulated life style.
I don't mind the idea of separating boys from girls, it's probably a good idea at the HS level, but I don't like the idea of forcibly segregating people by race, that's for sure.