Miss. county schools ordered to comply with desegregation order (55 Yrs After Brown v Board Of Ed)

[kpete]

Source: Washington Post

http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/April/10-crt-400.html

Miss. county schools ordered to comply with desegregation order

By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 13, 2010; 2:58 PM

A federal judge Tuesday ordered a rural county in southwestern Mississippi to stop segregating its schools by grouping African American students into all-black classrooms and allowing white students to transfer to the county's only majority-white school, the U.S. Justice Department announced.

.......................

“More than 55 years after Brown v. Board of Education, it is unacceptable for school districts to act in a way that encourages or tolerates the resegregation of public schools,” said Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “We will take action so that school districts subject to federal desegregation orders comply with their obligation to eliminate vestiges of separate black and white schools.”

According to the motion, the district’s practice of permitting hundreds of students — the vast majority whom are white — to attend schools outside their assigned residential attendance zone without restriction prompted a disproportionate number of white students to attend a single school in the district, leaving a number of other schools disproportionately black.

Indeed, evidence in the case suggested that the community regarded certain schools in the district as “white schools” or “black schools.” The United States also asserted that officials in certain district schools grouped, or “clustered,” white students together in particular classrooms, resulting in large numbers of all-black classes at every grade level in those schools.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/13/AR2010041302867_pf.html

[Recursion]

1. I remember the Ayers case when I was growing up in MS

I had (naively) hoped that had finally settled things...

[onpatrol98]

2. Nope...

One of the ways the Ayers case was completed at the collegiate level was to say to HBCUs(Historical Black Colleges and Universities) in Mississippi..."You can get more money IF you bring in more white people." There were other measures as well.

Desegregation has happened to a large degree, now we're witnessing re-segregation. Versions of private schools exist now. These are not necessarily better schools, they're simply schools with only white children.

One school district in Cleveland MS has two high schools. One that is all black and the other has been predominately white. But, as the population of white students diminish and the overall scores TANK...the local private schools are filling up.

Now...Mississippi doesn't want two high schools in Cleveland. It's expensive to maintain. The Justice Department isn't thrilled either, but many parents tend to want to avoid the one high school solution.

School districts across the state are having all kinds of segregation issues.

Unfortunately, its students who suffer...a good school district is a rare find in the state of Mississippi. But, they do exist. And, generally in a neighborhood the average Mississippian couldn't afford to live in.

We're "zoned" into academic disaster areas. I know there are good reasons to oppose charter schools. But, Mississippi has been either unwilling or unable to fix its public educational system so that your zip code doesn't mean you get a poor education. This ought to be a crime. With our focus divided between public schools and private schools in small rural areas, its poor and middle class children left getting uneducated.

I would LOVE to see something besides our current system.

[Recursion]

3. Yeah, I remember the zone fiasco

Though the county I grew up in (Oktibbeha) zoned it so that

A) all of the county's white people were in the "city" school district
B) enough black people in the county were zoned into the "county" school district to keep the public schools about 50% black and 50% white

[Solly Mack]

4. k/r

[Unvanguard]

5. Ah, "post-racial" America. n/t