Posted on 01/19/2003 2:54:02 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
School desegregation 'clearly regressing,' study says King's dream fades as suburban sprawl leads to racial separation
WASHINGTON -- On the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a new study shows that the nation is "clearly regressing" from his dream of an America in which black and white children study and play together, the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University reports.
In his "I Have a Dream" speech, King said he envisioned a world in which one day "little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers."
In 1970, two years after King's assassination, the average African-American attended a school in which 32 percent of the students were white. The white share rose to 36 percent by 1980, but has been falling since the late 1980s.
The center's new figures, covering the 2000-01 school year, show the white share in the average black student's school was down to just under 31 percent.
About 44 percent of the average Latino's schoolmates were non-Hispanic whites in 1970. That slid to 29 percent by the 2000-01 school year.
"For blacks there were two decades of solid progress before the retreat," said Erica Frankenberg, a co-author. "For Latinos, it's been steadily downhill for the last three decades."
The pattern is especially visible in cities such as Atlanta, where King was born. Of the city's 91 public schools, 65 have five or fewer white students, and 21 of those have no white students at all.
Frankenberg, Chungmei Lee and Harvard professor Gary Orfield, co-director of the Massachusetts-based center, compiled the report, "A Multiracial Society With Segregated Schools: Are We Losing the Dream?"
The most segregated group of students, Orfield said, is whites.
Currently, the average white student attends a school in which 80 percent of the students are white. By comparison, black students on average attend a school that is 54 percent black. The averages are 54 percent for Latinos, 30 percent for Native Americans and 22 percent for Asians.
"Asians are the most integrated, and also are the most educated and successful of minority groups," Orfield said. "The problem is, you have a pattern of racial and economic isolation for other minorities, and poverty and minority status overlap, so you see a pattern of delinquency and unsuccessful education in the schools where they are concentrated."
The report said many trends had contributed to the resegregation of schools: a growing residential separation by race and income levels, a heavy reliance on neighborhood schools, lower immigration and birth rates for whites, and courts and policy-makers who oppose race-conscious decisions.
In King's hometown, Stan Williams, president of the Atlanta Committee for Public Education, a nonprofit watchdog group, said, "Even though we want diversity in schools, what drives it is not really the school system's policies but the overall housing patterns of the city.
"Diversity is a goal we ought to embrace, because that's what [children] are going to face once they get out of school when they get into the work force," said Williams, who is a former regional official with the U.S. Department of Education.
Dennis Parker of the New York-based NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund said, "Between the decreasing number of desegregation cases in the South and the increasing housing segregation in so many places, the trends are hardly surprising."
The report called for programs "that diminish segregation" by letting parents send their children to magnet schools and charter schools -- not just in their own school district, but also across district lines -- at public expense.
The Harvard center is generally considered liberal, but conservatives will like several of its proposals that would increase "school choice, letting parents decide where their children go to school," said policy analyst Matt Moore at the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis.
-- Staff writer Paul Donsky contributed to this article.
Teachers from Philippines arrive in Boston to teach math and science*** ''We have an obligation to children to find the best math teachers we can find, wherever we can find them,'' he said.
At first it seemed as though the Philippine teachers wouldn't make it. Bureaucratic problems with obtaining visas for the teachers delayed their arrivalfor several weeks. US Representative Michael Capuano and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, both Massachusetts Democrats, worked with the Immigration and Naturalization Service to speed up the process.
''Their arrival means that a significant number of students will be able to get the good education they need and deserve,'' Kennedy said in a statement welcoming the teachers.
The teachers left the Philippines for Los Angeles Friday, stayed a night, and came to Boston yesterday afternoon. The district chartered a bus to take them to dinner at the Seaport Bar and Grille in South Boston, and then to their apartments in Quincy. Orientation for some begins today.***
TEACHERS BACK DNC WITH MONEY, MUSCLE In Iowa, New Hampshire, and other key primary states, teachers knocked on doors, staffed telephone banks, and helped get out the vote for Gore. In New York, members of the United Federation of Teachers helped distribute more than one million fliers for Gore in one day. In Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Teachers Association contacted each of its 90,000 members three times by phone and by mail, urging them to vote for Gore over Bradley .
The teachers and their unions have long been a force in American politics. From 1991 to 1999, for example, contributions to the Democratic Party from the NEA, AFT, and the Service Employees International Union, which includes some education workers, totaled $6.7 million, making teachers by far the party's biggest donor bloc, according to the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity. The largest single contributor to Democrats - the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees - gave $3.7 million in that period ..***
Disillusioned with the public school system - Black families explore home schooling*** The reasons African-American parents give for choosing to teach their children at home varies from family to family. Some cite poor instruction, low student achievement and a lack of safety in the public schools. Others fret over the lack of moral or religious values taught in public schools.***
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Okay...step me through this! So after all the busing, quotas, money spent and pure BS over the last 30+ years the same people are whining that something has to be done because their pet projects were failures. I think I was robbed of a decent education. I'm gonna call Johnny Cochran!...oh yeah...I am white so I just have to suck it up!
The possible solutions are: 1. to force whites to have more kids, 2. Force blacks to have less kids, 3. Decrease hispanic immigration. Hmmm, not very appealing!
Wait! There's another solution! Why not just recognize that the majority of hispanics are white? If you run the numbers, classifying hispanics as white, I'll bet there is more integration today than there was 20 years ago.
Case closed! Problem solved!
Imagine that concept as applied to housing. Or military affairs.
The government-run schools are failing, and the white population is stable while the black and Hispanic populations are exploding. So the government's schools are filling up with blacks and Hispanics, while whites are fleeing them for private alternatives, suburban school districts where the rot isn't yet as advanced, and homeschooling. Shall we, then, lock whites out of the suburbs or deny them access to private schools?
What gives away the real nature of the "problem" is that affluent blacks and Hispanics are doing the same things as whites, when they can. They do so in lesser numbers because, occupationally, affluent blacks and Hispanics tend to be tied to urban areas -- their jobs are more often in government, or in corporations whose main customer is government, or in family businesses cemented to a particular locale. These can be hard ties to break.
Even if you look upon this as a "problem" that requires a "solution," there's no "solution" short of privatizing all of education once more. How do you suppose the Left would look upon that?
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Memphis is going to spend DOUBLE to air condition 2 schools. They constantly whine their schools are falling apart.
DUH simple QUIT PAYING DOUBLE to repair and build new ones and use the extra money to repair MORE schools.
But one of the points that I'm trying (unsuccesfully) to make is that hispanics are classified as non-white when the majority of hispanics are white. If we didn't use the classification of "hispanics" our schools would appear to be more integrated. It's all in how you run the numbers.
As a diclaimer, I am classified as hispanic, but consider myself white.
Only if they have lousy jobs.
Actually, the premise of the white liberals is that whites are so superior to blacks that schooling of blacks without whites is an impossibility. A similar belief undergirds white liberal support for Affirmative Action, as outlined in this letter to the New York Times yesterday.
Blacks are starting to tumble to the fact that their white liberal "friends" hold them in the deepest contempt, which is a hopeful sign for the GOP.
I used to live in the city, back when I was a Democrat. One year paying taxes in the average American city will erase all political delusions.
The only industry that remains in the American city is the one involved in the procurement and control government funding. The acceptance of methadone clinics, halfway houses and homeless shelters is invariably a part of any urban redevelopment largesse. Obviously anyone with the means chooses to live somewhere, anywhere, else. I suspect that the surrounding suburban communities support these initiatives in order to keep those "services" away. Protection money? It's not done out of kindness, you can bet.
The government has been in the ghetto business for the last thirty-plus years.
LOFL!!!!
This subject matter mastery by teachers is a radical concept that just might set the NEA on its ear, knocking its cherished "Socialization" theory of education into a cocked hat!
Now where this "foreign teacher" idea has come a cropper elsewhere in the USA, is when the foreigners try to discipline the American students and enforce some sort of minimal classroom decoprum. The very best of Phillipino luck to this group!
Perhaps next they will import Phillipino Social Studies teachers who can lecture to the inner city students on the value of legitimate birth, family structure, staying out of jail, and other social concepts, which the school boards of major cities have been unable to explain.
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