^It's enough for folks in Richmond, VA to come study the system to get ideas for Richmond.

I'm sure there are other examples, as well. I'll work on finding some for you.

11/29/2006 5:10:57 PM

Quote :

"My true motives? Is it a secret that blacks are more likely to receive reduced priced lunches? "

Actually, my point was that if you want racial integration, then why the crap are you fooling around w/ school lunches? Yes, there is a high correllation between those two, but why don't you simply skip the middle man and integrate BY RACE? I mean, if it's so freaking important to have this integration, then wouldn't it be important enough to do it right? You know, make sure you actually integrate the races?

nah, we just need to pussyfoot around and waste more of the taxpayers' money

11/30/2006 12:35:50 AM

^I've already addressed that. I do want racial integration, and I also value public schools that include people affected by different social and economic factors.

We used to assign schools based on race, but people were uncomfortable with that so now we assign schools based on the lunch method. And since using the lunch method does create integrated schools, I don't see it as pussyfooting around.

[Edited on November 30, 2006 at 1:48 PM. Reason : sss]

11/30/2006 1:47:06 PM

^who told you that? And does 'we' mean wake county, because i know thats not how gboro does it, and our schools are quite integrated.

11/30/2006 2:00:51 PM

^No, schools in Greensboro (Guildford County) are not integrated.

There are some issues with Wake County. Some schools have more free/reduced price lunch students than others, and naturally, they don't think it's fair.

[Edited on November 30, 2006 at 2:26 PM. Reason : sss]

11/30/2006 2:21:42 PM

^^Here's an article about how Guilford County schools are not integrated anymore. I've also italicized the part where it discusses the switch from using race for school assignments to using free and reduced priced lunches (Guilford County is a little late on this tip). Either way, Guilford County uses the neighborhood system, and no, Guilford County schools are not integrated--don't know where you got the idea that they were, as Greensboro is notorious for segregated schools.

Quote :

"SCHOOLS SEEING INTEGRATION ABOUT-FACE< ALTHOUGH JOSEPHINE BOYD BRADLEY HELPED PAVE THE WAY FOR INTEGRATED SCHOOLS IN THE 1950S, HISTORY HAS MADE A 180-DEGREE TURN IN GUILFORD COUNTY, WHERE CLASSROOMS ARE NOT AS RACIALLY DIVERSE TODAY AS THEY BECAME AFTER THE SUPREME COURT BANNED SEGREGATION.(SERIES: BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION: 50 YEARS LATER)(GENERAL NEWS) Source: The News & Record (Piedmont Triad, NC) Publication Date: 05/16/2004 Author: Wireback, Taft COPYRIGHT 2004 News & Record Byline: TAFT WIREBACK Staff Writer Tomatoes and eggs were thrown at her. Upturned thumbtacks were left on her seat in classrooms. Welcome to the Greensboro public schools as experienced in 1957 by Josephine Boyd, now Josephine Boyd Bradley. She was the first black student to attend what is now Grimsley High School, three years after the Supreme Court's historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which outlawed segregated schools. The ruling, issued 50 years ago Monday, brought profound change to a divided Greensboro and briefly made the city a bellwether for the nation's civil rights movement. "You couldn't find a place where there was more drama, more profound issues being discussed or, quite frankly, more profound history being made," says historian William Chafe of Duke University, who wrote about the impact of the Brown decision on Greensboro in his highly acclaimed book, "Civilities and Civil Rights." But the issue Josephine Boyd Bradley ponders most these days is: Fifty years later, how much, really, has changed? "It's almost like being back in 1957 and 1958," Bradley, a professor at Clark Atlanta University in Georgia, says of today's racial divide. "You begin to wonder: Why did people make that kind of sacrifice only to have it wind up in the same place?" Certainly, Brown forced some irreversible changes. No longer are there two "separate but equal" school systems, with the "colored" system always getting short-changed. Guilford County schools' administration and faculty are integrated. Students of varying ethnic origins interact in ways that would have been unthinkable five decades ago. But the Brown ruling did not create a settled, comfortable system of racial equality. In Greensboro, High Point and other urban areas, white families pitted "For Sale" signs and private school tuition against the 1970s' forced, crosstown busing to achieve racial integration. Since then, there has been a complete turnaround at such traditionally African American schools as Dudley High School in southeast Greensboro, where white students made up 30 percent of the school's roster 30 years ago. Now the student body is 95 percent black. "That is segregation," Dudley senior Emerson Evans says. "It's just not as obvious from the outside as it was in the 1950s." At Grimsley today, the student population is one-third African American. But in interviews, seven black students there described friction between black and white students built on stereotypes neither seems capable of laying aside. Black students too often are pigeonholed without justification as poor learners, then steered into courses that do not prepare them to become productive citizens, they say. "I feel upset that when I came here, nobody told me, 'You can do that,"' Keishawn Niblett, a Grimsley senior, says of more challenging Advanced Placement or honors courses he feels he should have taken. Reversing course The Supreme Court ruling started a pendulum that continues to swing in Greensboro and across Guilford. It went from school leaders who initially promised to comply in full, to those who dragged their feet, to those who - under court order - actively promoted integration 30 years ago, to those who backed the "neighborhood schools" that, because of housing patterns, are more segregated. During the 1990s, white flight and the neighborhood concept made Guilford's school system one of the state's most "resegregated" urban districts. Today, an African American student in Guilford County is about half as likely as he or she would have been in 1968 to attend a school with an overwhelming majority of nonwhite students. But in 1971, no black student attended such a school. More recently, the pendulum seems headed the other way: The Guilford Board of Education triggered controversy by proposing to distribute less affluent students more evenly among three High Point high schools. "It's another step in a long, difficult effort to bring justice and equity to the public schools," says board member Dot Kearns, a supporter of the plan, which sparked opposition in predominantly white northern High Point. But both black and white parents increasingly object to having their children bused to schools outside their neighborhoods - the black parents because they don't believe that an integrated school is necessarily superior to one that's mostly African American. "It wasn't that I needed to get on the bus and ride across town," says Nettie Coad, a matriarch of the predominantly black Ole Asheboro Street neighborhood who also leads race-relations seminars. "It was that I needed to have the same kind of books, the same kind of opportunities that are on the other side of town." The inevitable, delayed The high court's unanimous decision, written by then-Chief Justice Earl Warren, struck down "separate but equal" school systems, saying such divisions created an "inherently" inferior education for minority students. Greensboro school officials got national headlines that week because, unlike many of their Southern peers, they promised to comply with the ruling. But they didn't say anything about complying quickly or completely. Boyd was one of several black students recruited by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group, to apply for admission to all-white Greensboro Senior High School. Two other black students were turned down in May 1957 because they didn't live in the school's attendance zone. But Boyd, then a rising senior at all-black Dudley, lived squarely within the white high school's district. School officials rebuffed protests from a segregationist group, the Patriots of North Carolina, and accepted Boyd for Greensboro Senior High. Five black students also were accepted to attend Gillespie Park School, previously limited to white students in grades one through nine. Boyd and her mother, Cora Boyd, marched up the long walkway to Greensboro Senior High's front door Sept. 4, 1957, past a gantlet of about 100 protesters, some yelling "Go home, nigger!" The following spring, Greensboro's first tangible reaction to the Brown decision gave it a prominent spot in the annals of integration: Josephine Boyd became the first black student in the South to graduate from a school previously limited to white students. But the next year, the Greensboro school board approved only two of 18 black students whose parents had applied for them to attend all-white schools. Then began obfuscation and delay as white school leaders sought to satisfy the federal courts without alienating white families. Seventeen years after Brown, the schools finally capitulated to a federal lawsuit initiated in 1970 by the late civil rights leader George Simkins and 10 other Greensboro residents. It was the final salvo in a series of legal maneuvers that had been begun in 1958 by attorneys including future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Under a 1971 court order, the city agreed to give its predominantly white schools a student population that was 30 percent black and its predominantly black schools a student body that was 30 percent white."

[Edited on November 30, 2006 at 2:50 PM. Reason : rest of the article and link is below]

11/30/2006 2:48:19 PM

Quote :

"The 'cure' that failed Success was fleeting. Black and white parents worked for a year or two to help the change go smoothly, only to see many white families switch to private schools or move out of neighborhoods targeted for crosstown busing. "Some were forced, and others ran," says Gladys Robinson of Pleasant Garden, who leads the state NAACP's education committee. African American neighborhoods also came to resent the process because their children were more likely to be bused far from home than were children from white neighborhoods, says Claude Barnes, a political science professor at N.C. A&T. Also, the best black teachers often were reassigned to mostly white schools, he says. But integration also affected students in profoundly positive ways. John Allan Wall, one of 454 white students reassigned to Dudley High School in 1971, says the fact that he makes his living as a lawyer in Chicago specializing in education issues is "attributable directly to the experiences I had at Dudley." He learned how students from different backgrounds could forge new friendships and become better students through interaction, Wall says. "The shoe was on the other foot," Wall says of becoming a minority member for the first time in his life. "It was eye-opening, life-changing." Perry Coad, Nettie Coad's son, was among 244 black students assigned to Grimsley High School that year. Coad, then a junior, says teachers and students accepted him immediately. "I have nothing but positive things to say about my experience at Grimsley," says Coad, who owns a construction company. "The people at Dudley seemed stuck in a rut, and when I went to Grimsley there were more opportunities." At Grimsley, white and black football players already were practicing by the time school started that year and had formed fast friendships, Perry Coad says. That set the tone for the rest of the school. Some people who opposed the 1971 plan opposed the means, not the ends. Joe R. Brown Sr. found his niche in opposing the forced busing that was central to the proposal. He lived in eastern Greensboro, where his son went to kindergarten at nearby Bessemer Elementary School. "You could no longer choose your school," he says. "They assigned my child to a school farther away." He led a largely white parents' group that started an unsuccessful boycott of the 1971 busing plan. Racism wasn't a factor, Brown says: Bessemer, where he wanted his son to continue, was almost evenly divided in 1971 between black children and white children. That was the problem with the fix for segregation emerging from the Brown ruling: Although some white people didn't want their children going to school with black children, others simply resented that government was making such a personal decision for them. Longer distances to school also forced some families to start their days 30 minutes to an hour earlier. Some parents couldn't stay involved with a school farther from home. By 1979, school ratios were out of whack again, largely because of white flight. Greensboro school leaders had to find more white students to bus. "We had no choice. We were bound by court order to make these adjustments," says Jim Betts, then-chairman of the Greensboro Board of Education, which ceased to exist a decade ago when the county's three school systems merged. Those adjustments changed neighborhoods. In northeast Greensboro, for example, many white families left the O. Henry Oaks neighborhood and were replaced by black families during the 1980s after its high school was changed from nearby, mostly white Page to Dudley. "People did move out after that. More talked about it and were not financially able to go," says Edna Leonard, who is white and still lives in the neighborhood on Guest Street. Leonard's daughter stayed at Page by moving in with an ailing grandmother, who needed a live-in helper at her house in that high school's attendance zone, Leonard says. But some current and former O. Henry Oaks residents say the school change was no big deal. Frank Livengood, another white resident of Guest Street, recalls that both of his children were happy to attend Dudley rather than Page "because, frankly, it was the better school then." Livengood's beef came when his part of the neighborhood was transferred back to Page. "My son wanted to finish at Dudley," he says. "He was playing basketball and doing real well." But many white residents fled, both in Greensboro and in High Point, says Kearns, who served on High Point's school board during the period. The logical solution, which took a decade, was merging Guilford's two city districts with the suburban system, to whose neighborhoods many white families were moving. The new, countywide school board, under former Superintendent Jerry Weast, did little to change school lines during the early 1990s. It also backed away from magnets, schools that promote voluntary integration by offering special courses. In addition, when the board revised district lines in 1999, it returned to neighborhood schools, nudging Guilford further toward resegregation. By then, federal courts had begun reinterpreting the Brown decision to lessen its support for mandatory busing. Now, the board and Superintendent Terry Grier are signaling they want to try to limit schools from having disproportionate percentages of one race or the other. But they're searching for ways to foster integration without calling it that. Because poor families are disproportionately African American and other minorities, family income has become a more palatable criterion for school assignment in the plan for High Point's Andrews, Central and Southwest high schools. Scholars are left to wonder what the true impact of the Brown decision will be - and just how far Greensboro and other communities will drift back toward racial isolation. "I'm more inclined to see the glass half-full because there has been a tremendous amount of change," says Charles Clotfelter, a Duke University professor who has studied resegregation in Guilford and other parts of North Carolina. "A great revolution swept the land, but ... the revolution was not as sweeping as it might have been," Clotfelter says. "I think ... it's now up to local school boards to ask how much importance we are going to attach to these issues.""

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-1411246_ITM

11/30/2006 2:48:45 PM

The latest...

http://www.newsobserver.com/662/story/521733.html

12/16/2006 2:02:40 AM

If racism is wrong, it's wrong no matter which group it benefits.

12/16/2006 5:18:08 PM

While I think that concerns about "white discrimination" are overblown it is probably time we start to rework affirmative action.

If I have a daughter she will black and women (and jewish by the way) but by almost no concievable measure will she be underprivledged. It would be a miscarriage of justice to deny a poor rural white boy a spot in University so that she could have it.

I think the best use of Affirmative Action would be to switch from race and gender based preference to family history based preferences. If you would be the first generation to go to college then extra encouragement is in order.

This would in fact hit most of the minorities that we are actually concerned about. No one is concerned about the kids who grew up in Baldwin Hills.

[Edited on December 16, 2006 at 7:39 PM. Reason : .]

12/16/2006 7:38:38 PM

Quote :

" If racism is wrong, it's wrong no matter which group it benefits."

Racism IS wrong, and it doesn't benefit any group.

Profiling though isn't wrong in all situations.

12/16/2006 8:57:36 PM

^^Sensible, efficient, and moral

12/16/2006 9:26:39 PM

^^^Regardless of the topic of this thread...admissions is what most people have a problem with.

And, in North Carolina, they're admitting poor, white/black, rural folks just like they do poor black folks in the inner-city...

12/18/2006 2:51:27 AM

More true colors, again from Boston, but this time Tufts University:

Quote :

" Tufts editor apologizes for satire aimed at affirmative action By David Weber, Associated Press Writer | December 11, 2006 MEDFORD, Mass. --An editor at a Tufts University conservative journal has apologized for publishing a satirical Christmas carol that ridiculed black students and campus affirmative action policies. Article Tools The controversial carol, entitled, "O Come All Ye Black Folk," was published in the most recent edition of the Primary Source, which bills itself as "the journal of conservative thought at Tufts University." The parody of "O Come All Ye Faithful" calls black people "boisterous" and proclaims, "Born into the ghetto. O Jesus! We need you now to fill our racial quotas." The lyrics also say, "No matter what your grades are, F's, D's or G's, give them all privileged status.""

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2006/12/11/tufts_editor_apologizes_for_satire_aimed_at_affirmative_action/

THe entire lyrics:

Quote :

"O Come All Ye Black Folk Boisterous, yet desirable O come ye, O come ye to our university Come and we will admit you, Born in to oppression; O come, let us accept them, O come, let us accept them, O come, let us accept them, Fifty-Two black freshmen. O sing, gospel choirs, We will accept your children, No matter what your grades are F's D's or G's Give them privileged status; We will welcome all. O come, let us accept them, O come, let us accept them, O come, let us accept them, Fifty-Two black freshmen. All come! Blacks, we need you, Born into the ghetto. O Jesus! We need you now to fill our racial quotas. Descendents of Africa, with brown skin arriving: O come, let us accept them, O come, let us accept them, O come, let us accept them, Fifty-two black freshmen"

12/19/2006 10:21:31 AM