An Actual Case of Segregation?

The NY times posted an article regarding a school rezoning plan which may or may not be a case of legalized racial segregation:

After white parents in this racially mixed city complained about school overcrowding, school authorities set out to draw up a sweeping rezoning plan. The results: all but a handful of the hundreds of students required to move this fall were black — and many were sent to virtually all-black, low-performing schools.

Question: Were any of the black parents concerned about this supposed overcrowding? Was the question even asked? It's important.

Black parents have been battling the rezoning for weeks, calling it resegregation. And in a new twist for an integration fight, they are wielding an unusual weapon: the federal No Child Left Behind law, which gives students in schools deemed failing the right to move to better ones.

An interesting tactic, but one I'm going to ignore right now since it doesn't really matter here.

Tuscaloosa, where George Wallace once stood defiantly in the schoolhouse door to keep blacks out of the University of Alabama, also has had a volatile history in its public schools. Three decades of federal desegregation marked by busing and white flight ended in 2000. Though the city is 54 percent white, its school system is 75 percent black.

Now that 54-75 split is very interesting. As I discussed earlier in my posting on the recent US Supreme Court ruling:

Again, the issue at hand was equal protection under the 14th amendment. Not diversity. Not anything else. Equal protection. Legally sending black students to black schools due simply to their race was a denial of due process and equal protection. That also meant that sending white students to a school simply because they are white is ALSO a denial of equal protection. The ruling cut both ways....

An optional majority-to-minority transfer provision has long been recognized as a useful part of a desegregation plan, and to be effective such arrangement must provide the transferring student free transportation and available space in the school to which he desires to move. Pp. 26-27.



You will note that the "majority" student must "desire" to move. The case recently decided was clearly about students (and parents) who did NOT desire to be transported.

So we have to keep in mind that it is apparent that a good percentage of white parents have been opting out of the public school system which resulted in:

During court-ordered desegregation its schools roughly reflected the school system’s racial makeup, and there were no all-black schools.

That would imply that the schools were 75% black. The recent changes to the system created three general districts that created one school that maintained the "racial balance" another school that was 99% black and another that is "majority white" with a high school with a 54% black population. Another important question is what is "majority white?" Clearly something has been done in order to drop the black population in the schools to where whites could be the majority in any part of the system.

But the real problem rears it's head once again: Economics. It is simply unconstitutional to tell people where they can and cannot live. It is clear from the report that the majority white schools are also the ones in the most affluent areas. It is also clear that the majority black schools are in poor areas. It is no doubt that the clamoring by the black parents to have their children sent to the white school is to get access to the better schools (even though new High Schools were built in each area). It would seem to be prudent to ask why, after 50 years a school that is 99% black is a school that is underperforming? Why after 50 years, black students are still expected to have to leave their neighborhoods in order to receive a quality education?

I'll reiterate my position on the matter. There needs to be a complete change in how public school systems are funded. funding ought to be either distributed equally across all school districts or in proportion to the students attending school in each district. funding schools based on property taxes guarantees an unequal system of education.

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