| | "Racial isolation and the concentrated poverty of children in a public school go hand in hand, moreover, as the Harvard project notes. Only 15 percent of the intensely segregated white schools in the nation have student populations in which more than half are poor enough to be receiving free meals or reduced price meals. By contrast, a staggering 86 percent of intensely segregated black and Latino schools have student enrollments in which more than half are poor by the same standards. A segregated inner-city school is “almost six times as likely” to be a school of concentrated poverty as is a school that has an overwhelmingly white population.” “So deep is our resistance to acknowledging what is taking place,” Professor Orfield notes, that when a district that has been desegregated in preceding decades now abandons integrated education, “the actual word ‘segregation’ hardly ever comes up. Proposals for racially separate schools are usually promoted as new educational improvement plans or efforts to increase parental involvement…In the new era of ‘separate but equal,’ segregation has somehow come to be viewed as a type of school reform”- “something progressive and new,” he writes- rather than as what it is: an unconceded throwback to the status quo of 1954. But no matter by what new name segregated education may be known, whether it be "neighborhood schools, community schools, targeted schools, priority schools," or whatever other currently accepted term, "segregation is not new...and neither is the idea of making separate schools equal. It is one of the oldest and extensively tried ideas in U.S. educational history" and one, writes Orfield, that has "never had a systmatic effect in a century of trials." Thoughts? |
| | Posted 10/21/2006 3:12 PM - 54 Views - 4 eProps - 3 comments
- recommend
  - recs0
- share
- email
 - sent0
|
