Neighborhood schools are great unless your neighborhood is the ghetto, in which case the sensible parent is putting her child on the first big yellow bus to the safer, happier place where white people live, where there's money and hope.
In a nutshell, that's what the city's entire black leadership has been trying to explain to the white establishment since the debate over the Metro school rezoning plan exploded into the headlines this summer like something out of the Sixties. Predictably—since when have white people listened to black people in this city?—the point seems to have been lost, even though there's decades of social science proving the common sense of it.
To illustrate, here's an anecdote, one of those it-would-be-funny-if-it-weren't-so-sad stories. Teachers take fourth-graders on a field trip to Nashville's jail to frighten them away from drugs and guns. But who's afraid? The kids are smiling and waving to their relatives behind bars.
"It was not scary to them," one stunned teacher says. "It was familiar."
True story. As told to Vanderbilt University researchers. It makes it easier to understand why, when educators discuss what poor African American children need to succeed in life, no one mentions neighborhood schools.
Forty years of studies, beginning with the famous Coleman Report in 1966, have shown that sending a lot of poor kids to school in the same place is a really bad idea. It's a central issue in education—how to teach poor urban children—and in all the research there's no more consistent conclusion than this: In schools where poverty is concentrated, students learn less. All the problems these children face—poor health, hunger, drugs, gangs and violence, and a culture that scorns education—it's all just too overwhelming for schools.
Poor children learn more in middle-class settings, the research shows. That happens, as the Coleman Report states, "not from racial composition per se but from the better educational background and higher educational aspirations that are, on average, found among whites." Blacks not only learn more with whites, studies show, but they gain entrée to white social networks and jobs later in life. It's a way out.
For more than 1,300 poor children in Nashville, the school rezoning plan would close that door of opportunity, according to the city's black leaders. Under the plan, beginning next school year (unless opponents succeed in stopping it), those students no longer will be bused 40 minutes to the upscale neighborhoods of Hillwood, but will go instead closer to home in the Pearl-Cohn cluster of schools in predominately black North Nashville.
The black enrollment at Hillwood High, located next to a country club and luxury dream homes, will drop immediately from roughly 50 percent to 25 percent. Pearl-Cohn's eight schools, already heavily black and poor, will become that much more so. In all but two schools, more than 90 percent of the students will be African American. Overall, nearly 90 percent will be poor enough to receive federally subsidized school lunches.
Already in Nashville, the black-white educational achievement gap is yawning, with more than double the percentage of elementary- and middle-school blacks failing to perform at their grade levels in math and reading, just to name two subjects. Black leaders are convinced the rezoning plan will exacerbate that.
Jerry Maynard—a Pentecostal preacher and, as an at-large Metro Council member, the city's highest-ranking African American elected official—has been the most outspoken.
"We are dooming these children to failure," he says. "Study after study shows that any positive benefit derived from going to a neighborhood school is totally wiped out by issues of poverty. We've been screaming this at the top of our lungs."
To try to placate blacks, the school board promises to spend $6 million a year to add an array of social services to Pearl-Cohn schools and to pay teachers more. There are a couple of obvious thorns on this olive branch: (1) No one can guarantee the funding. The city had to dip into reserve accounts to pay for schools this year, and any future tax increase will be hard to come by, requiring voter approval under a new Metro Charter amendment. (2) And even if more money is spent in these schools, it probably won't help students learn more.
The latter point comes from research by the aforementioned Vanderbilt education professors. From 2002 through 2004, Claire Smrekar and Ellen Goldring studied schools in poor Nashville neighborhoods that already had been given extra money for the same things promised Pearl-Cohn—nurses, guidance counselors and smaller class sizes. Their research paints a devastating picture of the effects of poverty on Nashville children.
In one elementary school, identified only by the pseudonym Olive by the researchers to encourage parents and teachers to speak freely, all the students lived in two adjacent housing projects extending side-by-side, four blocks northward. In a single year alone, 576 serious crimes—murders, rapes, robberies, car thefts—were committed there. More than 70 percent of the children were from single-parent households.
Only about one in five families owned a car, and the median income was $11,349. Out of 1,300 residents over the age of 25, only 31 had a college degree. The population was 92 percent black.
"In critical ways," Smrekar and Goldring reported, "these neighborhood conditions roll into Olive's school corridors and classrooms with a penetrating influence and effect, shaping the interactions, norms and expectations of students, families and school staff."
One teacher said of students, "They see a lot of fights.... They talk about all the gambling and the throwing dice and the stuff that goes on out there, the betting. I had a child last year who came in late because she said, 'Someone got shot outside my house and my mom didn't want me to leave until the cops were all gone.' "
Another teacher said, "They come in from the weekend and tell me how this person has been shot, in the middle of the street, how they have to run in and take cover and everything. It is like a war, a battle over there in that neighborhood and they are trying to survive. That is why we have so many young children being, trying to be adult, trying to lead, and the problems that we have here are because over there in the neighborhood, they are learning to survive."
That teacher continued, "There are children in this building who have witnessed one parent murder another. There were children here whose parent was in prison for trying to kill one of their younger brothers and sisters.
"These children see a lot of trauma. They see a lot, they know a lot of death. They know a lot of people getting shot and getting killed. A lot of them have relatives in jail, relatives on the way to jail. I had a little boy who saw a lot of domestic violence, so they see a lot of trauma. They talk about it a lot of times."
Despite the additional services provided at the schools, the researchers found, "the penetrating and punishing effects of neighborhood poverty undercut these efforts." Because of the difficulties at the schools, teachers were typically less experienced, and turnover was high. Test scores didn't go up. The students weren't learning any better.
One guidance counselor told them, "We have so much here, and it still isn't enough."
Before 1998, when court-ordered busing ended in Nashville, Olive school was racially balanced. Teachers said things were better then. The students from the housing projects found role models in other children at the school.
"I really believe if children come into a diverse classroom, they model each other," one teacher said. "You'll find them looking and seeing the children who are getting the praises and they start to mimic that because they want to be noticed right away."
Another teacher put it bluntly, "I think it needs to be diverse, both economically and culturally. If we are living in a diverse nation and world, we need to have that here as well. They need to know what is going on out there, not just drugs, alcohol, prostitution and new babies."
Smrekar and Goldring reported their findings to the task force appointed by the school board to study rezoning issues this year. The task force unanimously recommended the plan eventually adopted by the board.
Board members have never explained to the satisfaction of critics why they approved the rezoning plan even while knowing that it's basically the opposite of what educators would advise.
Rezoning was sold as a money-saver. "We can pay for bricks and mortar and transportation, or we can pay for kids' education," school board chair Marsha Warden says. And the plan will save $2 million by closing four schools.
But there will be a net loss of $4 million if the board keeps its promise to spend more on Pearl-Cohn's schools. Plus the plan actually creates inefficiencies, overcrowding North Nashville's schools and leaving vast open spaces elsewhere. With so many blacks no longer going there, Hillwood High will be half-empty.
The board only raises more suspicions about its motives when it says it'll provide transportation for any child who wishes to continue to attend Hillwood schools. If students can keep going to Hillwood, why rezone them? That answer lies in the plan's fine print. There's a catch. Transportation will be provided only if there are enough students to make it practical. No one's said how many students that is, and black leaders suspect it won't be practical for long.
"None of this makes any sense," says Mebenin Awipi, a former school board member and retired Tennessee State University professor who heads the NAACP's education committee. "We're asking the school board, what are your real intentions? What are you trying to accomplish?"
Actually, black leaders think they know what's behind the rezoning plan. In their view—which is not without supporting evidence—board members, acting in cahoots with the Chamber of Commerce, want to remove as many black children as possible from Hillwood to make those schools more acceptable to white people.
It's not a pretty conclusion, and school board members deny it. Warden retorts, "This is no more racially motivated than the man in the moon." But is there another plausible explanation?
"I'm not saying they're racists because I do not know what's in their hearts," Maynard says. "But I do know they don't care. They shoved this down our throats."
How Nashville got to this stage—with the city torn in two over schools once again only a decade after finally winning release from court desegregation decrees—is an interesting, if depressingly familiar, tale involving backroom deals, strong-arm tactics and rich white people's money.
All summer, pressure built against the plan. Reporters found themselves in possession of tell-all memorandums from ousted school superintendent Pedro Garcia. The memos chronicled a secret white conspiracy involving the chamber and various board members to reduce the number of blacks attending schools in upscale white neighborhoods, the better to attract new white families and businesses to Nashville.
Warden, one of the rezoning plan's main proponents and the Hillwood district's representative on the board, came off like a scheming segregationist. Garcia wrote that, when he opposed the plan and wouldn't succumb to intimidation, he was tossed out of office.
The NAACP called it a resegregation plan—a statement of obvious fact that nevertheless drew outrage from white officials. Even The Tennessean, ever cautious on its editorial page, called for delay. School board elections were only a month away, critics pointed out. Should such an important decision be made at the height of a political campaign?
At a Metro Council budget hearing, Maynard warned the rezoning plan could fracture an alliance of blacks and whites focused on improving schools. The district has failed for five straight years to meet student achievement standards under the No Child Left Behind law. In the law's mounting scale of sanctions, the state Education Department controls spending and hiring in the system, which remains leaderless anyway without a superintendent since Garcia's ouster at the beginning of the year.
"It seems to me the school board is taking its eye off the ball," Maynard said at the hearing. "It seems that a grenade has been thrown in the middle of this alliance, that this new school zoning plan will break up this alliance and will cause all the good will that we have earned...to go out the window. I just can't see us resegregating schools."
This is the point in the story where you might expect the school board to acquiesce in the interest of racial harmony, demonstrating for all to see how far we've come as a shining city of the New South at the beginning of the 21st century. That's some other story.
Instead, at a raucous meeting peppered with protests from the audience, the board adopted the new student assignment zones by a vote of 5-4. One black member—Antioch's Karen Johnson—joined the board's four whites to make the majority. Some blacks in her district, outraged by what they saw as a betrayal, started a recall petition against Johnson. She took $10,500 in contributions from business interests in her election campaign two years ago—almost two-thirds of what she raised altogether. She denied on her blog that she was unduly influenced by the chamber and called the assertion "an insult to the democratic and educational process."
The vote left black leaders fuming. The board was obviously determined to rezone students even if it alienated an entire segment of the city. It smacked of the days of desegregation.
"I'd never seen anything like this before in my life as long as I've lived here in Davidson County," Maynard says. "There was total disregard. There was no consideration of our issues and questions."
According to Garcia's memos, parts of which are published here for the first time, the move to rezone schools began last fall during a Chamber of Commerce-sponsored conference in Baltimore.
Every year, the chamber takes Nashville leaders to another city to study education, among other issues. Nearly 100 elected officials and business people went to Baltimore. They were troubled by what they saw there—a failing school system made up almost entirely of poor black students with high dropout rates and low achievement.
"...[T]he Baltimore experience was a warning shot that [Nashville's school system] could easily become another Baltimore and perhaps was headed that way," Garcia writes.
White flight began in 1971 in Nashville with the start of court-ordered busing. In that year alone, 8,600 white children—18 percent of the district's white students—left the system. Busing built Brentwood, whose population doubled to nearly 10,000 by 1980 as white families scampered just across the Davidson County line.
The white exodus didn't stop once Nashville's 43-year-old federal desegregation case finally ended in 1998. The Nashville school system's white population, still at 48 percent in 2001, has now fallen to 36 percent. Forty-seven percent of the district's 78,000 children are black. Alarmingly, the percentage of children poor enough to qualify for subsidized lunches has jumped from 47 percent seven years ago to 71 percent today.
Nashville's leaders discussed their fears at the Baltimore meeting. As Garcia puts it, they worried that the departure of middle-class families would become "a downward spiral," making problems of poverty overpowering throughout the district, Garcia writes.
After the conference, Garcia says, "The question was, 'How do we turn the trend around?' Chamber of Commerce leaders, the mayor, as well as other community leaders began to meet secretly to discuss this essential question. They wanted to find a way to avoid becoming another Baltimore. They had seen the signs."
The upshot, according to Garcia, was the plan to stop busing black children into white neighborhoods. What became of the black children—isolated in poverty as they would be—was not the main concern, he says.
"Business and community leaders met with selected board members while other board members were excluded. The agenda clearly became to have a student assignment plan that pushed for neighborhood schools. In essence, a neighborhood school plan is a disguised resegregation plan. It brings back to their neighborhood schools the African American students presently being bused. The underlying assumption is that if done successfully, perhaps white middle-class parents would return and balance the district's demographics."
Of his ouster, which was never fully explained publicly at the time, Garcia says, "I took the stand to oppose resegregating the district. It was the right stand and I would do it again."
With Garcia out of the way, lobbying was intense for the plan's adoption. At the next chamber-sponsored conference, in May in Miami, sources tell the Scene that businessmen were buttonholing public officials behind the scenes, "twisting their arms and browbeating them."
One source says he was told, " 'Middle-income families don't want their kids to be exposed to poor kids or adopt behavioral qualities or characteristics from poor kids.' "
Despite all this, the Chamber of Commerce insists it's taken no position on rezoning. The claim becomes all the more absurd when you consider that, in this month's school board elections, the chamber endorsed and funded an obscure candidate named Cordenus Eddings to run against the respected Ed Kindall, one of the rezoning plan's more vigorous opponents. It was the first time he faced a challenger in more than two decades on the board.
The reclusive Eddings, who wouldn't talk to reporters and named a convicted felon as her campaign treasurer, lost but made a race out of it with chamber cash.
"I had the deck stacked against me," Kindall says.
One of the chamber's followers on the school board, David Fox, insists the news media—particularly, the Scene—has been grossly unfair in its reporting on the whole controversy.
"This myth that the Chamber of Commerce is out here trying to take over the schools and ruin how our kids are educated is the most ill-informed crap I've heard in a long time. The reporting has been pitiful," says Fox, a hedge fund analyst and ex-business journalist.
"I've never heard anyone at the chamber talk about rezoning, " says Fox, who was endorsed and funded by the chamber when he ran for the board two years ago. "I keep reading that rezoning is all they care about, and I've never heard them mention it."
As for Garcia's memos, which he sent Kindall early this year, Fox scoffs. He says Garcia was pushed out of office after six years as superintendent because he was inept, not because he opposed the rezoning plan. Anything Garcia says should be taken as sour grapes, Fox asserts.
"To treat a document from Garcia as if it's some sort of inviolate word of God is remarkable," Fox says. "It's bizarre. It's like a parallel universe."
Personally, Fox says he voted for the rezoning plan because he thinks all children should attend neighborhood schools, whether they like it or not. Entering a parallel universe of his own imagining, in which urban squalor might resemble scenes from Disney movies with bluebirds singing and fresh-scrubbed children playing on pretty green lawns, Fox dismisses all the research warning against his idea.
"I'm not persuaded that the location of the kid is the critical factor," he says flatly.
Fox argues that blacks attending schools in middle-class neighborhoods haven't done any better than those in the inner city. The state Education Department, which is now effectively running this district, could point to no data that backs up that assertion. Fox is undeterred.
"If the government is going to send children 13 miles away to their school, the government is preventing the parents from getting involved in the school at all and also preventing their children from having any after-school activity," Fox says. "That's not the right side of the public school system to be on."
Besides Fox and friends, everyone generally agrees that most Pearl-Cohn parents likely won't find time to attend PTO meetings and other such activities once their children are going to neighborhood schools. That's because they're too busy trying to survive.
"I'd like to dispel this myth of automatic parent involvement due to proximity to home," Vanderbilt's Claire Smrekar says. "There's no data to support that assertion, that simply locating children closer to home will lead to higher parent involvement in these communities. These parents are distracted by the debilitating conditions of poverty. Talk to teachers. They'll tell you that these parents are stressed and often hard to locate because they're either enrolled in school or working two jobs to make ends meet."
Black leaders aren't finished fighting the school board. In an inflammatory letter that compared the rezoning plan to a hangman's gallows for children, the NAACP told the board to reconsider its vote. This month at its most recent meeting, the board ignored the demand.
Now the plan's foes hope new board members elected this month will agree to make changes. One, Alan Coverstone, is seen as the key vote because he replaces Warden, who didn't run for another term after helping push through the plan. But Coverstone, an administrator at Montgomery Bell Academy, says he's OK with what's happened.
"I've stated pretty clearly that I think the plan is on balance good, and I think the process was on balance fair, and I support it," Coverstone tells the Scene. "Labeling it as resegregation or 'separate but equal' is overly simplistic and does a disservice to the kind of discussion and dialogue we need to have to work together. I don't think we gain by going back and reinventing the wheel on that."
In that case, it's probably on to Plan B for the NAACP: Sue the city for discriminating against black children. Oddly enough, the school board never bothered to seek legal advice on whether its action could expose the district to a lawsuit.
It might be hard to win such a court action. In recent rulings, the Supreme Court has created a mandate for plaintiffs to prove "intent," the decision-makers' actual motivation to discriminate against a minority group. It's a near-impossible standard and rarely met. But Garcia might have delivered what lawyers like to call "the smoking gun" in the form of his memos, which cast players in this little drama as anything but high-minded public servants.
Another possible lawsuit could accuse white officials of violating the state open meetings law. Garcia's memos describe various secret meetings in which resegregation was discussed. All of them could have been illegal under the law, which at the time prohibited two or more members of a governing body from deliberating or deciding an issue except in a public meeting. A judge who finds sunshine law violations could nullify the vote on rezoning.
Mayor Karl Dean could play the role of peacemaker. Blacks so far have been disappointed in his public comments. At first, he kept a conspicuous silence, then said he supported the rezoning plan, then suggested the school board might reconsider it. Maynard says he was encouraged that Dean would take a more public role in the dispute when our supposedly progressive mayor mustered the political courage this month to speak out against council member Eric Crafton's "English Only" ballot initiative.
"We need his leadership," Maynard says. "He says he's the education mayor. We need to hear what he thinks. We need him to bring all the stakeholders together to review the rezoning plan and renegotiate it. My hope is that we will put the children first."
Comments (31)
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Oh please! Jeff Woods is now the champion for blacks in Nashville? This is the same guy who patronizingly tore down Howard Gentry at every turn in last year's mayor's race, including a one-source (real journalists get at least two) story about Howard's "night on the streets" that turned out to be a complete fabrication by the person Woods quoted. (His excuse for not spiking it until he got another source? He was tired from handling editing chores while Liz Garrigan was on maternity leave.) Woods, you haven't listened to blacks in Nashville any more than the other whites you hypocritically castigate.
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Aside from being the most slanted article I believe I've ever read, it's certainly one of the most insulting things I've seen in print. Black people can't break from their downward cycle without the help of whites? Please! Go check out Bill Cosby's book "Come On, People".
INCREDIBLE!!! Inaccurate facts abound in this article. It's interesting that the author failed to contact the MNPS administration in order to check the facts. It's too bad. The facts are: 1. MNPS does NOT have 78,000 students. 2. MNPS did NOT lose 8600 white students from '71 to '72. 3. Pedro Garcia knew the inctricacies of the plan last September, yet he waited until November to announce his opposition to it, and only after pressure increased from various Afro-American groups who do not understand how the plan benefits the children of their constituents. Pedro has attempted to reconstruct the facts while throwing certain members of his own administration under the bus. It's sad and it's wrong. 4. The Vanderbilt study cites the many additional resources current MNPS enhanced option schools in areas of high poverty have. So what is their conclusion, that we just eliminate all those resources and bus all children miles and miles away? The 2 schools cited in their study have made average yearly progress while 3 schools to which north Nashville children are bussed have not made average yearly progress. So why are we bussing students 10 to 15 miles to these schools? 5. All that is offered students in North Nashville currently is a bus ride. The new plan offers pre-kindergarten, smaller class sizes, more guidance, social work and other resources, more stability for students in elementary schools with a grade span of PK-5, more opportunities for after school tutoring and mentoring, more opportunities for parental engagement and a feeling of being connected with their children's school, and less time on a bus. These are the facts of the new plan. 6. If parents don't wish to take advantage of all these additional resources, they can opt to have their children attend Hillwood cluster schools. Instead of enabling parents to withdraw from their child's education, the plan empowers parents to make choices for their children. Why can't more people read the plan and see what it really does? 7. Finally, the plan created by the Task Force requires additional funds for the additional resources. By approving the plan, the Board is now on record as supporting the required resources. It will be the Board that will make sure these resources are there. Not the Mayor, the council, or the NAACP. It is the Board's responsibility to do that and no one else's. So the Board members who question whether or not the money will be there, it's their decision and responsibility. Plans are now underway in the MNPS administration to get the accurate information to parents. It seems clear the Nashville media cannot be counted on to help in this effort, and that's a real shame. The bottom line is this: If parents believe that the new plan and additional resources are good for their children, they will choose to send their children to schools in their community. If not, they will choose to send their children to the Hillwood cluster. Those are the facts.
“Another teacher put it bluntly, “I think it needs to be diverse, both economically and culturally. If we are living in a diverse nation and world, we need to have that here as well. They need to know what is going on out there, not just drugs, alcohol, prostitution and new babies.” No! Absolutely not! I do not want my children to learn about drugs, alcohol, prostitution, childhood sex or any of the other Black-pathologies. How dare this “teacher” suggest that my children need to be exposed to this or that my children will somehow benefit from such exposure. Keep your Utopian-communist plan away from my family.
What is it about a school full of white kids not being corrupted by the psychopathic street culture of the inner city that infuriates liberals so much? The most glaring omission in this article is the utter lack of concern for the education and well-being of the white children. "Teachers take fourth-graders on a field trip to Nashville’s jail to frighten them away from drugs and guns," says the writer. "But who’s afraid? The kids are smiling and waving to their relatives behind bars." What white parent in his right mind would want his children to attend school with children who aren't afraid of going to jail?
Look, white folks are going extinct in America. We ar expected to be down less than 50% of he population by 2030 or so. We are busting our butts, not having kids, and paying taxes for poor black and brown folks who are flooding into the country and breeding like crazy. Read my lips, white boy: the gravy train is over. Black folks and brown folks are going to have to learn to solve their own problems. Maybe 40 years ago when America was 90% white and 10% minority we could do something. With a 9 to 1 white to black ratio, there was plenty of money to be shoveled out for black folks with a little guilt trip on de white man. But now, with a 2 white folks to 1 black/brown ratio in America, there just ain't enough white money or white children left to socialize all your kids. And the numbers are even worse at the grade school level. There are fewer than 50% white kids in the City of Nashville. From 90% white we are less than half. And the numbers are going to be less than one fourth white (25%) in twenty years. Have you ever seen what happens to white kids in a 2 minority to 1 white school? It is ugly and cruel to the white kids. And ANY white hell hole school would be better than a 1 white kid to 3 minority school. White folks are in survival mode now, bruthah. We know we can' help black folks, and we damn sure know we are going to be held responsible. Why should we let our kids be tortured just to provide a good example to black kids? Sorry, brutahs and sistahs, our time is done. Y'all are going to have to figure it ot by yourselves. We are NOT going to sacrifice our children in the vain hope that their talents and abilities will rub off on yourn, PARTICULARLY since your kids want to beat the sh!t out of ours for "acting white". Sayonara, my brutha. You should have voted against open borders, because y'all are going to pay the price, big time when the Mexicans have taken all your jobs and Obama has legalized them and their 100 million chain-migratin' relatives. Just don't ask our kids to die for you. THAT ain't going to happen. Hope y'all can figure it out, but at 65% and dropping we no longer have the cash or the time or the interest to carry y'all any longer.
"In that case, it's probably on to Plan B for the NAACP: Sue the city for discriminating against black children. ... It might be hard to win such a court action. In recent rulings, the Supreme Court has created a mandate for plaintiffs to prove "intent," the decision-makers' actual motivation to discriminate against a minority group. It's a near-impossible standard and rarely met." Are you guys insane?!?!?! In the very first paragraph of the article you explain how ghetto moms desperately want to get their kids away from the OTHER murderous ghetto kids and send them to go to school with those nice white kids. But it is WHITE people who are discriminating because THEY WANT TO DO EXACTLY THE SAME THING?!?!?! Are the black moms "discriminating against minorities" because they want their little darlings to escape black trash? NO! SO WHY ARE WHITE PEOPLE DISCRIMINATING FOR DOING EXACTLY THE SAME THING FOR EXACTLY THE SAME REASON!?!?! Sheesh! Y'all will do ANYTHING to blame white folks. When htey do exatly what black folks do for exactly the same reason, you say "it may be difficult to prove [discriminatory] intent". Hell, white boy, if black folks are trying to get away from their murdering black neighbors I would hope it would not be "difficult", I hope it would be IMPOSSIBLE to provie discriminatory intent. It's called "survival" It is what living breathing animals do. Sheesh!
Why are White people still being held responsible for EVERYTHING that Blacks do - or fail to do? Why can't Blacks create a decent learning environment, all by themselves? Why are White children FORCED to carry the burden of Black expectations? This ENIRE article posits that Blacks are IMPROVED by contact with Whites? Thus, the collary is that Whites are degraded by contact with Blacks. So - why should White parents be forced to engander their children, and lessen their opportunities for learning and achievement, by FORCING contact with Blacks? WHY?
Where to begin? We were told that the reason blacks did poorly was because schools were segregated. We were told that once schools were integrated, the achievement gap would vanish. It didn't happen. What followed was endless manufactured excuses. We were told that black kids weren't getting breakfast so they were given breakfast and lunches in school. That did nothing. We were told that low percentages of blacks in integrated schools made blacks feel isolated. The numbers when up and test scores went down. That didn't work. We were told that black kids weren't learning because they needed black teachers as role models. That didn't work. We were told that black teachers needed the support of black principals and black administrators. That didn't work. We were told that schools need the support of black school boards. That didn't work. (Please note that some of these some of the 'solutions' were simply recreating black neighborhood schools in white neighborhoods. They wanted to attend white schools because white schools were better and then they insisted they be remade into black schools; the same black schools systems they wanted to escape because they were deemed 'inferior'). We were told that children were bring brought up in old homes that had lead paint and that's why the achievement gap remained. (It's interesting to note the relationship between IQ and lead where Rome built an empire using lead as a sweetening agent in food and wine). Now, after integrating schools and seeing the failure of the system, they want to move black kids into the white suburban schools for the same reasons. Shuffling black kids around hasn't worked and yet they want to repeat failed policies and programs. Blacks should just admit that whites are superior and that blacks are incapable of doing anything for themselves because that's what they do every time they demand that whites are the solution and their salvation. They blame whites for their problems but do everything they can to be around whites. How screwed up is that? I invite everyone to go to www.amren.com and join the discussion.
The black students who attend upper-middle class white schools usually do not perform much better than the black students who attend all black ghetto schools. As the Coleman Report proved, the problem is not about how fancy the schools are or how good the teachers are. No, the problem mostly relates to the average IQ of the students in question. It is a well substantiated fact that blacks tend to have much lower IQs than whites and Asians. Of course some blacks like Barack Obama have high IQs and high character, but far more common are blacks with low IQs and antisocial character. Once a school system gets more than about 30 or 40% black students it soon gets the reputation as a "BAD SCHOOL" amongst upscale white and Asian parents. This results in lower property values and declining investment in the community. The solution, stop pretending that all ethnic groups have the same average IQs, just accept ethnic diversity as it truly exists. Do not expect Jewish and Chinese students to be as dumb as "normal whites" and do not expect black and Hispanic students to be as smart. We might not like it, but these are just the facts of Nature.
To claim that blacks can't educate themselves absent of white students is about the most racist and insulting remark one could possibly make! Instead of wasting all this money on fuel for busses, not to mention the time spent by the students riding on them, the money should be spent on supplies for the urban schools. This forced integration through bussing is every bit as wrong as forced segregation and has long ago proven to be no solution at all. Children should go to school in their own neighborhoods. Maybe there would be more of a sense of community if the children went to school where they lived instead of just giving up on that community and bussing them off to the "white" schools.
African-Americans consider themselves victims, which makes them victims. Stop being a victim! If you don't like your community or school, then do something about it. Don't sit there and beg for the "White Man" to come solve all your problems. Black man -- get some cahjonies! Do what White people would do. Clean up your community, do not tolerate low grades, crime, drugs, truancy, sex among children, irresponsible behavior, and thug-rap. Stop abandoning your children and their mothers. Grow-up. Stop acting like children. Take responsibility for your lives. White people are sick and tired of bailing you out. All other ethnic groups in this nation have succeeded. You are the only group that has failed. It is time that Blacks carried their own weight.
The author of this article seems to hold out no hope for the black school in the ghetto -- he basically writes it off, while providing excuses for all the social pathogies of its residents which totally absolve them of responsibility. Has he finally abandoned all hope that government funding could improve things, or that black parents could change their ways and start getting involved in the school? It seems so. Instead, the remedy is simply to send the surplus students off to a faraway school that still has a few whites, and hope that those whites will hang around long enough to perform some of their "white magic" on the blacks (although it has never happened in some 37 years). Of course they will not hang around, and soon the only whites that will be left, even there, will be those too poor to easily move. Rather than the blacks adapting to the presence of the black students, it will then be the few whites who will be adopting the ghetto behaviors of the majority blacks. Meanwhile, what will happen to the Pearl-Cohn schools? I assume they are to remain 90%+ black, and will get none of the benefits of "diversity" that are mentioned by the teacher. Continuing the status quo thus leads to only one conclusion that I can see: the final exit of white students from the county school system, and the takeover of the system by blacks. The whites will then have three choices: a forced move out of the county, enrollment in an expensive private school (while still paying public school taxes, though they can no longer send their children there safely), or home schooling. Perhaps this is nothing but well-intentioned but misguided advocacy on behalf of black students by the author and many of those quoted, but by looking at the predictable consequences it looks like something quite different is going on. Something which a few other commenters have picked up on.
I wonder why it is working class whites who are made to pay for the sins of wealthy capitalists of this and all other eras. It is wrong that white people have to take flight in order to ensure a healthy environment for their kids. We don't owe black people a damn thing! Stand up for your rights, you white cowards!
The comments on this board are shameful! It's clear that most of you have never moved (or lived) in multiple areas, which is why your way's of thinking are tainted. I am African American and I work very hard to get everything that I have. I do not blame other's (white or male) for my issues. But that does not mean that I haven't faced racism. I know it when I feel it and after reading this board, everyone on here (1-14) are the next generation of racist fascist. Too bad; there simply aren't enough of you to carry on the hate since the caucasian race is being deleted. And as soon as your all gone, we'll glady move into the neighborhoods and schools you so proudly leave behind.
This is in reply to Sheree: You need a course in both reading comprehension and critical thinking. From the beginning of this piece, we are told that the reason black continue to fail is because white folk don't listen to or care about blacks. You seem to have missed this point. I'm old enough to remember the school desegregation debate when we were told that the problem of black underachievement was separate and unequal schools. We were told that the solution was integrated schools. We were told that once schools were integrated, the achievement gap would disappear. It hasn't and it never will. Where you fail in your critical thinking is that you look forward to whites being eliminated. Clearly blacks can't create schools even they want to attend. When whites disappear, where are you going to find quality schools for blacks to attend? If blacks can't create quality schools with the help of whites, do you believe that blacks are going to create quality schools after whites are gone? The answer to that question can be found in any black neighborhood, black city, black school district, or black nation because black failure is universal. www.amren.com
The venom and one-sidedness of the comments to this article only speaks to me of how deeply racism still runs. One writer states that the problem is that Blacks have lower I.Q.s than Whites. Please. Whoever wrote that needs to be tested and given remedial classes. Historically, uninterrupted racism ensured the promise of educational segregation even after the Supreme Court ruling of Brown v. Board of Education, holding that racially segregated schools are inherently, and factually, not equal, and thus requiring integration. The result? White flight took off as affluent and middle class White families moved out of urban areas and close-in suburbs to outer areas, rather than have their White children go to school with Black children. Private schools and religious-based schools popped up overnight, with many Whites in Nashville leaving the public school system all together. Religion became a a substitute language; there was no longer a need to talk about race and culture, one could just hide behind the language of religion. High-end private schools have little incentive to care about the community at large or persons less affluent than their own students' families; those kids are on a track of concern solely of self- how to make connections, get into the right school, make the most money. An occasional can food drive can take care of any social conscience. So many Whites, as illustrated by the large preponderance of mean-spirited comments on this article, would rather engage in hate mongering and self- righteous claims of "just being good parents," than admit to their complicity in the demographic trend, a trend developed with the intent to escape living with Blacks, that has led to the concentrated poverty of many Blacks. The same is true of the government's pathetic and racist policies, e.g., development of housing projects and other faiild policies, that have only served to concentrate poverty, again, especially among Blacks. Those who comment so viciously on this article don't look at the boy on the front page as a child worthy of choices. Instead I suspect that they see someone who looks like the people that they shun and with whom they have no connection, someone who looks different from their children and presumably deserving of less. That child, if he is like the Black children living in the concentrated poverty described in the article, will go to an overwhelmed and inferior school that will likely lead him to a nonproductive life. He likely lives in an area with disproportionately high unemployment, no jobs, failing schools, high levels of crime, fragmented families and,using a borrowed phrase, in a "hopeless and hostile urban landscape." We don't even need to get into the racist notion that it is Blacks' fault that these conditions exist, that it is personal failure not institutionalized racism. These conditions were guaranteed with the start, 300 years ago, of Whites owning Blacks to build an economic infrastructure to solely benefit some Whites, and have continued to this day with misguided if not just racist failed government policies and White racism, more than any other factor. Too many Whites, including the present school board, don't care about the faceless Black children in the inner city. Accordingly, it is past time for Mayor Dean to make education of these children a priority and for him to take a leadership role to ensure that Black children, trapped in extremely poor segregated neighborhoods, get a good education in order that they can have the same chances and choices that we all want for our children. Don't assume that these parents are so different from you, those of you who write these comments, in what they want for their children, and don't assume Whites as a whole haven't benefited from the racism that puts these families in such severe social and economic distress. Reading these comments makes me think that under the veneer of support for Barack Obama, that racism runs too deep in the U.S., including deeply in the South, for him to be elected. When the curtain to the voting booth closes, there are many Whites who I fear will not vote for a Black man for president. Perhaps my young Black son, so proud of Senator Obama, will never see a Black president in his life time, just like every generation before him. Ok, so now bring on your self-righteousness, your hate, all of it. I'm reading.
Linda McLemore wrote: "One writer states that the problem is that Blacks have lower I.Q.s than Whites. Please. Whoever wrote that needs to be tested and given remedial classes." Obviously Ms. McLemore knows almost nothing about the science of human intelligence or social science in general. As I wrote in my prior comment- It is a well substantiated fact that blacks tend to have much lower IQs than whites and Asians. I stand by this entirely true statement. Ms. McLemore appears to be quite ignorant of the fact that all reputable social scientists agree that blacks have lower IQs than whites; the only question is whether it is due to genetic differences or environmental (cultural) differences. It is becoming increasingly clear that most evidence strongly supports Dr. Arthur Jensen's theory that ethnic group IQ differences are mainly due to genetic differences. (Berkeley professor emeritus Arthur Jensen is considered to be the world's top expert on IQ-type intelligence). Abundant factual evidence regarding the IQ differences between blacks, whites, and Asians is available in a review article coauthored by Dr. Jensen. http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf In the famous Minnesota Interracial Adoption Study, Dr. Sandra Scarr studied black children, inter-racial black-white children, and white children who were adopted at ages one to four into upper-middle class white homes in Minnesota. By the time the children became 17 years old their average IQs were exactly as would be expected if racial IQ differences were due to genetic differences (black-black 83.7, black-white 93.2, white-white 101.5). This data is cited on page 185 of the Handbook of Intelligence edited by Robert Sternberg (he is a leading liberal researcher on human intelligence). Low IQ is often linked with antisocial behavior and other social pathology (crime, single parenthood, unemployment etc.) Ms. McLemore seems to think that if blacks were able to escape from the ghetto and live in suburbs that everything would be okay. However as a recent study of blacks in the Memphis area that were given housing in various suburbs, it appears that the blacks take the crime and other problems with them into whatever neighborhood they are placed. See article in the Atlantic by Hanna Rosin: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/memphis-crime Here in Pittsburgh, some lower class and working class blacks attend some of the same city public schools as upscale whites in neighborhoods such as Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, and Point Breeze. Eventhough the white students in these East End city public schools regularly post some of the highest achievement test scores in the state, the black children attending these same schools invariably post the low scores that are commensurate with their lower IQs. Clearly these schools that are good (whites highly excel in these schools) are unable to raise the academic achievement of the black students. This is entirely understandable, since the problem is the innate low IQs of the black students. Obviously the black-white academic achievement gap is due to the black-white IQ gap. It is time that people face up the facts and quit pretending that all ethnic groups have the same average levels of intelligence. The reason that Jewish and Chinese students tend to be so academically successful is because they tend to have higher IQs, conversely the reason that black and Hispanic students tend to be so academically unsuccessful is because they tend to have lower IQs. Everything about the black-white test score gap is really quite simple to understand once you grasp the facts regarding human ethnic diversity in IQ-type intelligence.
To SB native: When White America admits the harm they deliberately caused towards Blacks, I'll start listening to you. Until then, Whites will be partially held responsible. Deal with it. And for the record; I never said what class (upper, middle or lower) of black's will move into these neighborhoods where "white flight" is taking place. I don't want anyone to "feel" forced to move anywhere; I don't want white people to disappear. And I visited amren.com. The story that stood out to me was the one about progressive blacks in Denver; how they lived BETTER once they moved into mixed-race neighborhoods. Hmmmm, sounds like all the research your quoting may not be valid anymore.
To SB native: When White America admits the harm they deliberately caused towards Blacks, I'll start listening to you. Until then, Whites will be partially held responsible. Deal with it. And for the record; I never said what class (upper, middle or lower) of black's will move into these neighborhoods where "white flight" is taking place. I don't want anyone to "feel" forced to move anywhere; I don't want white people to disappear. And I visited amren.com. The story that stood out to me was the one about progressive blacks in Denver; how they lived BETTER once they moved into mixed-race neighborhoods. Hmmmm, sounds like all the research your quoting may not be valid anymore.
To SB native: When White America admits the harm they deliberately caused towards Blacks, I'll start listening to you. Until then, Whites will be partially held responsible. Deal with it. And for the record; I never said what class (upper, middle or lower) of black's will move into these neighborhoods where "white flight" is taking place. I don't want anyone to "feel" forced to move anywhere; I don't want white people to disappear. And I visited amren.com. The story that stood out to me was the one about progressive blacks in Denver; how they lived BETTER once they moved into mixed-race neighborhoods. Hmmmm, sounds like all the research your quoting may not be valid anymore.
To SB native: When White America admits the harm they deliberately caused towards Blacks, I'll start listening to you. Until then, Whites will be partially held responsible. Deal with it. And for the record; I never said what class (upper, middle or lower) of black's will move into these neighborhoods where "white flight" is taking place. I don't want anyone to "feel" forced to move anywhere; I don't want white people to disappear. And I visited amren.com. The story that stood out to me was the one about progressive blacks in Denver; how they lived BETTER once they moved into mixed-race neighborhoods. Hmmmm, sounds like all the research your quoting may not be valid anymore.
To SB native: When White America admits the harm they deliberately caused towards Blacks, I'll start listening to you. Until then, Whites will be partially held responsible. Deal with it. And for the record; I never said what class (upper, middle or lower) of black's will move into these neighborhoods where "white flight" is taking place. I don't want anyone to "feel" forced to move anywhere; I don't want white people to disappear. And I visited amren.com. The story that stood out to me was the one about progressive blacks in Denver; how they lived BETTER once they moved into mixed-race neighborhoods. Hmmmm, sounds like all the research your quoting may not be valid anymore.
To rifraf: Great work. You know your stuff. To Linda: The relationship between IQ and race is well established. If you don’t want to look into the research, all you have to do is look at white nations, Asian nations, and black nation to see corollary. Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Detroit are as they are because of race. Africans and Caribbean blacks are moving to England in record numbers and we see the same increase rates of crime and scholastic failure. You can go to www.amren.com and read the articles for yourself. What you want to believe is true because it makes you feel good or morally superior doesn’t change facts. What you can’t seem to grasp is that your argument is that whites are superior and blacks can’t achieve anything unless they attach themselves to whites. Your argument says that blacks can’t do anything for themselves. Your suppositions are as racist as you charge ours to be. “Those who comment so viciously on this article don't look at the boy on the front page as a child worthy of choices.” What is the choice you believe he’s being denied? The choice to go to schools with white children because he can’t learn unless he’s sitting next to white children? Here are two articles from the Buffalo News concerning black instructors, black administrators, black school board members, and black superintendent. This is what white students see and experience and white parents read in the newspaper and see on local news. The only surprise to me is that there are any white students left in the Buffalo Public Schools system: http://www.buffalonews.com/cityregion/buffaloerie/story/425046.html http://www.buffalonews.com/cityregion/buffaloerie/story/425967.html The posters you disagree with have presented you with facts and real life experience. It’s the truth you refuse to see or believe while you manufacture excuse after excuse. The venom and hate I see are coming from you. www.amren.com
"The story that stood out to me was the one about progressive blacks in Denver; how they lived BETTER once they moved into mixed-race neighborhoods. Hmmmm, sounds like all the research your quoting may not be valid anymore. Comment by Sheree from Antioch" If this is the article to which you refer, http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2008/08/blacks_in_denve.php then I think we're back to the issue of reading comprehension. Blacks are not talking about how much better it's been for them since they moved into different neighborhoods. Just the opposite. Integration has meant fragmented community and loss of political power.
