If you live in the Triangle you’d think the Klan was riding nightly and that Jim Crow is the chairman of the Wake County School Board, given the way the local and national press have covered the newly elected board. At issue, of course, is neighborhood schools versus school assignments made with an eye toward a diversity goal.

Predictably, the media translate “neighborhood schools” into Little Rock circa 1956, before integration, and accuse the new school board majority of desiring “resegregation.” The media and liberals love to spread minority students, which they euphemise as low socioeconomic status students, around the county in dribs and drabs. This has the advantage of hiding the system’s failure to adequately educate these students by diluting their test scores among those of a predominantly high-socioeconomic population.

They make the condescending claim that they do this because black students benefit from being around affluent white kids. The obvious assumption, then, is that they think black kids would be adversely affected by sitting in class with too many other black kids. If it could be shown that busing black students all over the county, away from their neighborhoods and communities, into predominantly white areas, actually had any salutary effect on the black students’ test scores, that would be one thing. But it can’t.

On the other hand, when resegregation is proposed by liberals in an effort to aid black academic achievement, there is nary a squawk from the media or liberal activists. Black academies that began cropping up 20 years ago, and segregated classes for black males in some systems were seen as progressive. These efforts were not tagged as resegregation, though that’s exactly what they were, to a far greater extent than moving to a neighborhood-schools assignment system.

The latest example comes from Lancaster, Pa., where a school principal separates blacks, and then separates the black males and females, for special instructional sessions. Has the educational world and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan rained down criticism on Lancaster, Pa., as it has on Wake County? Uh, no:

What’s stunning is the presumption of rightness the policy seems to be getting. Although the school has taken some flak, the comments in the Daily Mail story are almost all favorable. A Temple professor of something called “urban education” salutes the school for “trying a new strategy to effect change” and helping “students feel engaged and connected to what the school has to offer.” NAACP head Benjamin Jealous and Children’s Defense Fund President Marian Wright Edelman, who have lately been slamming a North Carolina school district for trying to move from busing to “neighborhood schools,” don’t appear to have anything to say on this issue.