Monday, January 26, 2009
Education / Politics / Woods NAACP Fights 'Separate But Equal' in Nashville Schools; Which Decade Is This?
Posted by Jeff Woods on Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 5:57 AM
Nashvillians made a persuasive enough statement Thursday: They're all for diversity, and they feel kindly toward newcomers who haven't yet mastered standard English, much less the dialect spoken around the Grand Ole Opry.The vote wasn't overwhelming, but the message to the world was clear: Y'all come.
Isn't that nice? Now, it's time to demonstrate our newfound broad-mindedness and tolerant spirit by ditching that school rezoning plan. The NAACP is finally showing that it's serious about fighting the plan. It's backing a family's discrimination complaint with U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights.
You'll recall that last July the school board thumbed its nose at the city's entire black leadership by voting 5-4 to end the busing of hundreds of black children to white suburbia. Black leaders think the rezoning plan would roll back decades of racial progress and doom the city's poor, black children to a substandard education in segregated schools. The school board has promised to spend an extra $6 million a year to improve those black schools, but officials have admitted all along that they can't guarantee the funding. In fact, it seems fairly obvious at this point that no additional money will go to those schools. The district is running around $13 million in the red this year.
Here's the choice for superintendent Jesse Register and the school board: Kill the plan and unite the city behind the district's new leadership, or wage a long, protracted fight to spare white kids in Hillwood the terrible trauma of going to school with inner-city blacks.
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