Re: Racial Diversity in Schools
I can say that this is a great step in the right direction. I have first hand experience that this little diversity experiment does nothing but ruin community and bring the education down to the lowest common denominator.
When I was in high school in the mid-eighties, the city school board decided they needed to desegregate. I lived in a predominently white neighborhood that went ot the community highschool that was also predominently white (this is with the exception of a large contingent of Hmong immigrants).
Just across the river was the exact opposite. So the mental giants conceived this idea that each student in these schools would spend one trimester each year of their Fresh, Soph, and JR years at the other school. Just so we could sit next to somebody of a different color.
From an educational perspective, they had to standardize the curriculum and materials between the schools and identify points where the trimester would break so that you could easily go from one school to another. In reality what happened is that the long time teachers that had built up their own lesson plans, materials, etc were now forced to use new textbooks and to use them as their primary teaching tool. Well those teachers retired and we were instead taught by teachers that new how to say "read chapter 1 and do the questions at the end". Wow, exciting. In my school, we would actually get to the end of the trimester material 2-3 weeks early and just stop because we had to pickup at the pre-defined stop at the other school.
I also had to get up an hour earlier to catch a bus for a 1 hour drive across the river to the other school. YOu didn't want to miss you busride home because there was a reasonably good chance you would get the pulp beat out of you by the local boyz.
Now the controversy.. My school was an 80 year old building with windows that would rattle in the cold minnesota wind. They designated our school the Cosmotolgy magnet school.
The school across the river was a new facility with state of the art media center, SECURITY, etc.. It was also designated the math and science magnet.
Our school had vastly higher test score and grad rates of the other. What I am trying to show is that this school district threw money at the other school and it didn't bring the success of education up. To bring the educational level up it has to be from the home and family. it is not black or white.
The desegregation only brought the education level down and really spent a lot of money and effort for some liberals experiment.
I currently send my kids to private schools and will do so throughout highschool. that way they are not pawns in some other hair brained liberal experiment.
http://today.reuters.com/news/artic...31511_RTRIDST_0_USA-RACE-SCHOOLS-UPDATE-2.XML
