School Integration Draws Scrutiny — From the Left By John Hirschauer
Long considered a signature achievement of the civil-rights movement, the integration of schools is coming under scrutiny in odd places.
EXCERPT:
More than fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, the Left has yet to make up its mind on the question of integration. Voices ranging from New York mayor Bill de Blasio to The Atlantic writer Jemele Hill have proposed radical changes to the way we approach the integration of our educational institutions, long considered to be a signature achievement of the civil-rights movement.
Bill de Blasio is weighing a proposal to halt most admissions to the city’s various “gifted and talented” programs, from specialized high schools such as Stuyvesant to special educational opportunities in ordinary public schools. A disproportionate number of Asian and white students are enrolled in gifted programs — the two groups accounted for 75 percent of enrollees last year — which, some say, creates a regime of de facto segregation in public schools. Maintaining strict racial quotas in public education is of such importance to the de Blasio administration that the mayor is earnestly considering removing race-blind programs that, at their best, are avenues to upward mobility for some of the poorest students in the state.
This is in stark contrast to Jemele Hill, who — though focusing on collegiate rather than elementary or secondary education — encourages black student-athletes to voluntarily segregate themselves at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Her latest piece in The Atlantic, “It’s Time for Black Athletes to Leave White Colleges,” decries “the flight of black athletes to majority-white colleges,” a process that she insists “has been devastating to HBCUs.”
Hill relates how, in some cases, “black students feel safer, both physically and emotionally, on an HBCU campus,” and insists that, as currently constructed, “Black athletes have attracted money and attention to the predominantly white universities that showcase them.” What if a movement began to, in effect, embrace de facto re-segregation?”
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