Word: aclu
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...experiment. Last week, Parkwood Middle School, in a suburb of Charlotte, bowed to pressure from the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and ended a half-year tryout in which 55 of 335 of Parkwood's eighth graders were separated by gender into two different classes. The ACLU claimed the exercise, which school officials hoped would highlight any intellectual benefits of segregating adolescents by gender, was discriminatory toward the girls involved; in their argument against the separation, the civil rights group cited a 1972 law banning sexual discrimination at federally funded schools...
...this endeavor actually hurt the female students, or did it provide them an opportunity to study and learn without the often overpowering presence of boys? While the relative academic merit of separate girls' schools is in itself a subject of much debate, the ACLU wasn't interested in educational theory in this case. Their concerns were motivated primarily by what they considered disturbing echoes of racial segregation and discrimination...
Before the Supreme Court's 1954 decision on Brown v. Board of Education, the idea of maintaining "separate but equal" facilities for different groups (generally blacks and whites) was widely accepted, especially in the South. ACLU officials found Parkwood's idea of separate classrooms a bit too reminiscent of a less enlightened era, says TIME legal reporter Alain Sanders. "The ACLU is approaching the problem from a historical perspective, and the history of segregation, racial or gender-based, is one in which women and minorities have consistently gotten the short end of the stick," says Sanders. So just...
...cases where the ACLU is divided on an issue, the board votes and the majority position becomes the official ACLU stance, she said...
...Strossen said the majority of the cases taken on by the ACLU are clear violations of the First Amendment...