Article: "Black Students Lose Again"

An emotional article in today's New York Times by John Tierney.

Black Students Lose Again

Democrats once went to court to desegregate schools. But in Florida they've been fighting to kick black students out of integrated schools, and they've succeeded, thanks to the Democratic majority on the State Supreme Court.

The court's decision on Thursday was a legally incoherent but politically creative solution to a delicate problem. Ever since Florida's pioneering statewide voucher program began, Democrats have been struggling to deal with the program's success.

Most of recipients have been black students like Adrian Bushell, whom I wrote about last year. Without a voucher, he would have attended Miami Edison, a big public high school in a poor area with a 94 percent black student body and a total of six non-Hispanic white students.

Instead, he's now a 10th grader at Monsignor Edward Pace, a Catholic school that is 24 percent black. His experience is typical. In other places that have tried vouchers, like Milwaukee and Cleveland, studies have shown that voucher recipients tend to move to less segregated schools.

Besides helping Adrian (who's got a 3.1 average and plans on college), the Florida program has also benefited students in public schools like Miami Edison. Because each voucher is worth less than what the public system spends on each student, more money is left for each student in the public system. And studies have repeatedly shown that failing Florida schools facing voucher competition have raised their test scores more than schools not facing the voucher threat.

A program that desegregates schools and improves test scores wasn't easy to attack in the Legislature, but the courts offered a more promising battleground for the teachers' unions trying to stop it. Florida's Constitution has a version of the Blaine Amendment, a ban on aid to religious institutions that might be construed in some states (but not in others) to prohibit school vouchers.

A lower court in Florida ruled that the voucher program violated the ban on religious aid. The State Supreme Court could have simply affirmed that conclusion, which would have been legally defensible (although mistaken, in my view). But then it would have faced a messy set of new questions.

If the Blaine Amendment prohibited vouchers, couldn't it also prohibit the state aid now going to hospitals, colleges and preschool programs run by religious institutions? Would the court have to end programs that were popular with the public and inoffensive to Democratic teachers' unions?

The judges ducked these inconvenient questions by ignoring the Blaine Amendment and using another rationale. They ruled that the voucher program violated a state constitutional requirement to provide a "uniform" system of public schools.

The majority's decision was eviscerated in a dissent by two Republic judges who use adjectives like "nonsensical" to describe the legal reasoning. The dissenters argue persuasively that nothing in the Constitution forbids the Legislature from setting up other programs beyond the public school system.

The decision has disillusioned Adrian and his grandmother, Ramona Nickson. "I just don't even want to think of sending him back to public school," she said. Other parents in Florida worry that more programs are in jeopardy, like the scholarships given to thousands of disabled students in private schools. Or the many charter schools in the state, which may not suit the judges; personal vision of a "uniform" system.

"It's difficult to predict what will happen next after a decision as devoid of legal principle as this one," said Clark Neily of the Institute of Justice, which represented the voucher recipients in the case. "The judges decided what decision they wanted to reach and worked backward from there."

Adrian was supported by the Urban League of Miami and other advocacy groups for blacks and Latinos, but not the NAACP. It abandoned him - and the majority of African Americans who favor school vouchers - and sided with the teachers' unions.

The group that once battled the segregationists' fiction of "separate but equal" schools signed on the to legal fiction that there's something admirably "uniform" about a public school monopoly that keeps students in Adrian's neighborhood trapped in a segregated, inferior school.

It's sad to see the NAACP working to keep them there, but it's not surprising now that the group is virtually an arm of the Democratic Party. The unions dominating that party have no qualms about sending Adrian back to a segregated school that has just lost its chief incentive to improve. The party now has a new educational motto: separate but uniform.

 

This is exactly what pisses me off about democrats/NAACP. They don't want blacks to be equal but separate. I think both of them are scared of losing power if they don't keep blacks down.

 

I find it hard to trust and take seriously, an organization that is titled with an outdated word, such as 'colored', to refer to us as a people, as if times were still in the 1940's and 50's, but then argue equal rights for blacks and blah-blah-blah, when all they do is feed off of the plight of blacks in order to sustain social-political powers.

This article also reminds me of why I am an Independent.

 

thats why those bums, the NAACP, would never get a dime from me. the United Negro College Fund, though, I still give to because I believe Negro is the correct term

 

yes Mosh, these people are pathetic!

 

It's not, because of:

1. How the dictionary defines it:

A member of the black race distinguished from other races by usually physical and physiological characteristics without regard to race or culture, especially a member of a group of people belonging to the African branch or black race.

A person who's ancestors came from Africa, or comes from Africa.

Of, or being of a major racial classification traditionally distinguished by physical characteristics, such as brown to black pigmentation, and often tightly curled hair, including indigenous peoples of Sub-Saharan Africa.





Synonyms: Blackamoor, Sambo.

2. Keep in mind that this was the word we were dubbed during the slave trades, and the one white racists/supremacists use when referring to us.

 

God, I actually didn't know that! Last time I ever use that word, even in jest.

 

they used black derogatively as well, so using any words other than your original tribal name or african then must be correct

 

But, black is our skin hue, just like white is theirs, and we use the term white, derogatorily on BET, don't we?

 

my skin hue is brown as is the majority of people of african descent. only a very few would be considered truly blue black in hue.

whites are not white but pink, they have red blood cells which gives them color in their face

these are political terms and sociological term used to seperate based on color

 

I made that point last week and got told off!

 

But, there are people who are actually full-colored black and white, mostly from foreign countries...

and, we Americans are closely related to this people. Caucasian isn't accurate either.

 

:?:

 

there may be some people who are as black as the color of night or white as a bedsheet, translucent--but most people caucasian or negro are either brown or pink in hue.

sardonic--are you talking race or color, because I dont understand your points?

 

I'm talking color, because there is only one race altogether.