Posted on 09/03/2002 9:15:44 AM PDT by mhking
Racial Indexes Do Little To Aid Education
Published: Sep 1, 2002
F or the last three years, just in time for the beginning of the school year, the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University has released a study that concludes many of America's largest metropolitan school districts have ``resegregated.'' According to an Associated Press article on the study that ran in this newspaper, ``Almost 50 years after state-sponsored school segregation was outlawed, public schools are becoming increasingly divided by race, even as minority populations increase nationwide.'' And why is this happening? The study notes that community public schools ``reflect the segregation that exists in housing throughout metropolitan areas.'' As the kids say, well, duh. These folks are trying to make it sound as if the clock is being turned back. It isn't, and they shouldn't get away with implying it is.
Report Misses The Mark It's important to remember that the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision was about a little girl, Linda Brown, being denied admission to a school near her home because of her race. She was forced to walk to a school a mile away because of the racial segregation of public schools in Topeka, Kan. Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, the dual systems responsible for her plight no longer exist. The Harvard study, however, implies that it's wrong for schools to reflect the racial and ethnic demography of the communities in which they are located. Even worse, the authors suggest that minority students need to be around white students in order to perform well in class. The notion of ``osmotic uplift'' - skills flowing from the haves to the have-nots - is dubious, to say the least. In fact, it should be considered outright racist. I went to an integrated high school, but my parents had more to do with my academic performance than did my ``exposure'' to white kids. In fact, many all-black schools in the era of legal segregation produced scholars who went on to excel at some of the nation's top universities. What the students stuck in these schools were lacking was resources, not white classmates. The report's authors blame this ``resegregation'' trend on recent court rulings that dismantled race- based desegregation orders. This is ivory-tower elitism at its worse. After three decades of forced busing, parents and students of all races were sick of it, preferring neighborhood schools regardless of racial percentages. And this is where we went wrong. What started out in the 1950s as requirements of nondiscrimination and public access began, in the late 1960s, to be used as a mandate to mix races in public schools. Thus 20 years after the Brown decision, a black girl in Linda Brown's situation still might not have been able to attend her neighborhood school because of a federal judge's notion of ``racial balance.''
Spend Time On Important Issues Since the study looks only at race, it is dealing with only one variable in the education equation. The authors should, for example, look at whether minority parents are making education a priority in the home. Are majority-minority schools adequately funded and staffed? If not, what can be done about it? Looking at those issues would help a lot more than an ``exposure index'' describing interaction between races in school districts, which the Harvard report uses. We should also stop counting how many students at a school receive free lunches, as it only tends to stigmatize. We need to assume every child can learn regardless of his parents' income. And quit using the term ``resegregation.'' Barring dual education systems, the word has no place in today's world. Joseph H. Brown is a Tribune editorial writer.
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Well articulated.
BUMP
When the riff-raff associate with good kids, the likely result is the good kids will adopt some of the more dubious character traits of their underclass peers.
A fair point. I would agree that being poor does not necessarily imply anything about one's character.
The actual effect of multi-racial schools has been quite different than either the "liberal" advocate expected or the Conservative opponent feared. If those schools are also--as the "Liberals" seek, "multi-cultural," they have the effect of undermining the positive social values of all groups involved. The key destructive agency appears to be the lack of personal identification with the school.
The neighborhood school used to be seen as something of an extension of the family. The family's values were reflected in the school. With the "multi-cultural" concept, that goes out the window. Instead of reinforcing the family, it becomes a quest to adjust, to cope, and to find new parameters. This process, to return to the school integration aspect of the broader concept, led to an explosion in illegitimacy in the 1960s. (We had had the ADC since 1938, and it was slowly spreading its corrupting influence; but the real explosion came after the schools ceased to have the familial identification they had previously had.)
I realize that this assertion will startle many. I would only urge that anyone who feels the need to assail me for it, check out the statistics before he or she does. I believe that we are going to come to a point in this country, where people are going to realize that the debate is not between the races; that the antagonists are not the races, but the Leftwing fanatics who have undermined all of our people, because for all their poses of humanitarian concern and compassion, they never "gave a damn," how any of our societies really worked; they never chose to test their ideology against the realities of American life, but forged ahead with no concern for anything or anyone, but to prove a point.
It is past time that we looked more closely at their harvest.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
even the voices of moderation on the left are insane; consider the following:
in d.c., we spend over ten thousand dollars per student per year. a classroom has, what?, thirty students? twenty?
anyone who can maintain with a straight face that there remains some question about whether government schools, in d.c. or elsewhere, are 'adequately funded', is a fool, a charlatan, or worse.
When the riff-raff associate with good kids, the likely result is the good kids will adopt some of the more dubious character traits of their underclass peers.
remember that old george carlin bit about how white kids, when they hang around blacks, always start affecting black mannerisms, but the opposite was not true?
Well I am reluctant to couple "good kids" with "haves" and dubious character with being poor across the board...
Fair enough...
Social pathology is concentrated in the lower distributions of intelligence and income. I've lived on both ends as a kid, and have seen it first hand.
You can read the best book on the subject The Bell Curve, by Herrnstein and Murray. It was published in 1994. Be certain not to read it around any PC types, or you may be at risk for physical assault.
Where poverty, ignorance and violence are a way of life, crime and lawlessness and depravity breed all the better... Privileged white kids ain't exactly little angels these days though, and that is what I'm trying to get at.
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