Word: racially
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...proportion of black students attending nonwhite-majority schools has increased over the past dozen years from 66% to 73%. In some parts of the country, Latino segregation is even higher, according to Harvard University's Civil Rights Project. Many school districts have given up trying to break up racial concentrations and instead are working to deal with the achievement gaps that accompany largely segregated schools-- a de facto return to the separate-but-equal idea that Brown v. Board of Ed. sought to abolish...
...critics offer a lot of complaints about the system, not the least being that some just find it galling. Why should schools that are more black than white be inherently suspect, even if they don't reflect the racial breakdown of the district as a whole? "It doesn't make sense," local PTA-board member Dreema Jackson says of the guidelines. "It's O.K. for the minority to be between 15% and 50%, but if you flip those percentages, a school is no longer diverse...
Worse, by stressing racial balancing, critics say, you take the focus off improving educational outcome. Thirty years of seating black students next to white ones has failed to close Jefferson County's achievement gap. Black high school students still trail their white counterparts by 25% in reading-proficiency tests and by 34% in math. The gap is closely linked to factors like parents' education level and income, which no amount of school balancing is likely to fix. "We have the most integrated school system in the country," says Carmen Weathers, a retired Jefferson County schoolteacher. "That sounds good...
...challenge facing the Jefferson County school district is to convince the Supreme Court that racial integration not only does no harm but offers concrete benefits that would be lost without the guidelines. To help make this case, 553 social scientists--including professors at Harvard, the University of Hawaii and myriad institutions in between--have submitted a friend- of-the-court brief detailing how racial integration in schools reduces prejudice and prepares students to enter a diverse workforce. More support will come from a study to be released this week showing that blacks and Latinos perform better academically in integrated schools...
...grader there). While dozens of civic organizations, the Louisville Chamber of Commerce and five former Secretaries of Education have sided with the school district, the Bush Administration has taken up Meredith's cause. The Solicitor General submitted a brief arguing that schools should not be in the business of racial balancing and that even Brown v. Board Ed. declared that public schools should ultimately admit students "on a nonracial basis...