It's Like Progress, Except it's the Opposite

CNN notes that

Schools have not been as racially unbalanced since 1968, the start of a series of Supreme Court decisions that put muscle behind desegregation, said researcher Gary Orfield, co-director of The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University.

Desegregation reached a high point in the late 1980s, but has since eroded, his research shows. Most white, black and Hispanic students still go to a school where they are in the racial or ethnic majority.

"The ultimate irony is that a lot of people in 2004 are talking about everything else but desegregation, and the country has resegregated many of its public schools," said Theodore Shaw, director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which argued the Brown case in court.

Of course, public education is in such a crisis that I don't think anyone knows quite where to begin. Do you seek to remedy the problem of a de facto (and sometimes not so de facto) resegregation of the system? Or do you first try to raise overall standards? I don't know.

One thing I DO know, however, is that public schools are a crowning achievement of modern society. Primary education is the best gift we as a society can provide to the next generation--and it's a damn good investment for us as well. The fact that our public education system is in crisis is shameful, particularly considering just how much wealth we as a nation posess.

I for one would like to see both increased funding for public schools AS WELL as increased effort to ensure a diverse student body. I don't know what it's like in every community, but down here, I think we've had exactly ONE new school built in the last thirty years. Many of the school buildings in the parish are not in good repair. One thing we HAVE had, though, was an ongoing challenge to the original desegregation order from 1959. In other words, forty years of litigation that was finally settled, IIRC, last year. That's way too much lawyering and way too little effort on facilities, much less curriculum.

Of course, as noted below, we can't even tackle bullying here in the gret stet--'cause some folks think that's being to easy on "the queers."