Like screaming anti-Semite at anyone who questions the policies of the state of Israel or generally abusing language to generate wholly specious and inflammatory soundbites, CMS board member Richard McElrath insults, demeans, and sidetracks civil discourse by misusing the term “segregation” at virtually every opportunity.
Hence the CMS board decision to enshrine neighborhood schools as the system’s top, but not only, priority is met with this from McElrath:
McElrath argued that students consigned to mostly black schools in impoverished neighborhoods face bleak academic prospects.
“The people who have always been at the bottom are still going to be at the bottom,” said McElrath. The vote signals that “the standard for CMS is segregation, and if you value diversity you can go to a magnet…if you’re lucky.”
All this because the board slid back from adopting an ill-defined notion of “diversity” at the system’s top priority — primarily because CMS honcho Pete Gorman cut to the chase to ask if the system should bus for diversity purposes, a la Wake County has for years. Speaking of Wake, now that the exact same policy has proven a failure and a board majority is moving to nix it, guess what fans of cross-county busing for “diversity” are screaming?
Segregation.
As Maximum Leader Hood pointed out, this is nonsense on stilts:
Segregated public education was a noxious and destructive policy of identifying and separating students by race, assigning them to schools based on their color of their skin. It should have been declared unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment long before the Supreme Court acted in the 1954 Brown decision. It was never consistent with the principles of a free society and should never be reimposed.
In order to justify their allegations, busing proponents have resorted to redefining “segregation” so that it refers simply to differences among schools in student demographics, regardless of what those differences reflect – variations in birth rates, for example, or suburbanization. Fundamentally, it is the Left that wishes to assign students to schools according to skin color or family income. The rest of us, the vast majority of citizens of all backgrounds, want to focus attention on the needs of individual students and the preferences of individual parents.
Not only that, the Wake policy has failed the very students McElrath says he is so concerned about, those traditionally at the bottom of the performance scale. Again Hood:
Charlotte-Mecklenburg and most other urban systems in North Carolina have higher test scores than Wake does among disadvantaged students. The 2010 test scores, scheduled for public release later this week, confirm the trend. Wake students posted a gain this year, but so did most other North Carolina students. Wake actually underperformed Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Guilford, and other systems – again.
In an irony utterly lost on them, many of the protesters at a recent Raleigh rally against the Wake school board actually reside in other North Carolina counties that don’t use forced busing and that outperform Wake County among disadvantaged students. They quite literally had no idea what they were talking about – or, more to the point, screaming about.
In sum, McElrath wants to adopt a policy that does not work and when rebuffed, resorts to calling those opposed to that policy the heirs of Bull Connor, water cannons, and attack dogs. This suggests that he might want to consider some adult education classes over at CP.
Bonus Observation: Not that I think Pete Gorman has remotely solved his issue of how to close mostly empty schools and save money next year, not with the magnet mommies and the segregationists-under-every-bed crowd still so inflamed.
