Obama Administration Tells Black Parents Their School Choices Are Racist

Here's an interesting case.

Everyone knows that Mississippi has, well, issues when it comes to education. Part of that has to do with it being an economically depressed state with a lot of fairly poor people in it. Poverty and poor educational outcomes tend to go hand in hand very often no matter your other background demographics.

So let's examine the case of Cleveland, MI, in Bolivar County. This is a delta community, and it has overcome slave labor, the cotton industry and school integration. Only now, the Obama Administration is telling it that it must consolidate it's two high schools in order to integrate, and the parents, of all races, aren't happy.

But while Cleveland, Mississippi, has transformed itself from the land up, federal government has chosen to make the city’s schools a national example, forcing local schools to consolidate in the name of desegregation. But many local families of all races don’t want that, and they don’t necessarily consider the effects their individual choices to constitute systemic racism.

U.S. courts hold a legal responsibility to eliminate forced integration. So last May, Judge Debra Brown ordered Cleveland’s middle and high schools to consolidate, in keeping with a 2011 U.S. Department of Justice motion “to enforce the previously-entered desegregation orders governing the district and compel the district’s compliance with federal law.”

What is happening is that the DoJ is doing is using a court case precedent set in Cowan v. Cleveland to erase the progress the community made toward integrating on its own. The mechanism the community chose was school choice, you see, so the parents and students of Cleveland, MI, are free to decide which of the two high schools they want to attend, and it has been this way since 1960. As a result, one school is mostly on race and the other is mixed.

“Fifty years ago, desegregation focused on improving academic opportunities for African-American children who had been forced to attend under-funded, under-performing public schools,” Hiner said. “Today, in Cleveland, African-American children have the right to choose the public school, and public school classes, they wish to attend.”

In other words, forced desegregation was a policy for times in which individuals had less leverage to solve their own problems, before today’s greater access to school choice. Since Cleveland lets families choose which school their kids will attend, the fact that East Side is majority black is only so because families choose to put their children in a school with that composition. The federal lawsuit is telling these mostly African-American families that their choices have created systemic racism that requires federal intervention.

So basically, the solution for Cleveland, MI, was to say that if African-American children had been denied opportunity through desegregation, then they would have freedom of choice. Nothing could bar them from either of the two high schools in the town. They could go to either one as they and their parents chose. So really what the new Federal decision is telling these black parents is that because their choices have created a mostly black high school, they have created a racist system that the DoJ now needs to destroy by removing one of the two schools and removing everyone's right to choose.

See how this is anti-choice?

“Cleveland School District has genuinely tried to find ways to continue black and white students going to school together while keeping the character and identity of neighborhood schools,” Carr said. “East Side is a neighborhood school, and that neighborhood happens to be black. It’s the majority race in Bolivar County. It has always been that way since our county was founded.”

Oh, and one other little detail I left out, blacks are the majority in Boliver County. So it would be very hard for them NOT to be a majority in at least one of the schools if not both. Well, in THE school now.

According to locals, while poverty and uneven funding for public schools still remain, the racism that once dominated Cleveland’s education system is not foremost in the high schools today. In fact, Cleveland parents’ ability to choose which public schools to enroll their children in allows for more freedom than many school districts nationwide, let alone the Delta.

“Cleveland High School is the last truly integrated public high school in the Mississippi delta,” Carr said. “It is literally 50-50. You will not find another integrated high school until you get to the hills, at least a one-and-a-half hour drive in any direction.”

Carr could have attended East Side, but chose to attend his neighborhood school, Cleveland High. Nevertheless, the students in both schools regularly spent time and exchanged classes with each other.

“We also went to East Side every day to take certain classes, like calculus and French,” he noted. “East Side students came to Cleveland High to take drama and Spanish. And we all went to a local vocational tech center to learn trades… They still do it to this day.”

When parents are the ones making the decisions about where their children will attend school, it takes away the worry that racism has influenced someone else’s placement decisions, Cleveland school board attorney Jamie Jacks noted: “Parental choice is a key component in maintaining community buy-in for a school district.”

This is a bit about how the two schools operated. Just attending one was no bar to taking a class or two in the other if it had a class you wanted. Students often went back and forth. I know some of you will ask why the consolidation is such a big thing, but I would counter with why it is necessary if this system was working? Did the Feds need to step just to make their numbers look better in DC?

If it ain't broke, then why fix it?

In fact the concern is that all the parents have been able to make choices they are happy and comfortable with no matter their race, and while the strict legal interpretation might disagree with what you see in Cleveland, the locals have a system that works out for everyone and keeps everyone in the local schools and invested in them.

The worry is that if this ruling passes, those who can afford it might flee to seek better, more comfortable situations for their children in private schools which is a form of unintended segregation caused by a ruling intended to end segregation. The parents and the funding are what is needed to keep things going, not flight out of the system and into other schools. And why should any parent be robbed of their power to choose for their child?

a reply to: ketsuko

Can you quote where "Obama Administration Tells Black Parents Their School Choices Are Racist"?

originally posted by: Benevolent Heretic
a reply to: ketsuko

Can you quote where "Obama Administration Tells Black Parents Their School Choices Are Racist"?

Because parents were allowed to freely choose which school their kid would attend and it created a situation naturally where kids were not integrated enough for the Federal quota system established in a prior court case, they basically assumed this was due to racism. But there were no artificial barriers that created this situation. It grew up organically.

The case itself was decided based on a system with artificial barriers put in place that created the racial percentages.

So the assumption is that the numbers exist as they do through racial reasoning which is the rationale behind forcing the new system in place.

The point of the entire article is that things that seem to quack like a duck aren't always ducks.

In this case, “the Department of Justice appears to be arbitrary and unfair to African-American parents, who stand to lose their freedom to choose what’s best for their own children,” Hiner said. “African-American children are being pushed around by bureaucrats in Washington to achieve what the bureaucrats believe is a perfect balance of the races—regardless of the wishes of parents, regardless of the impact on those children and the quality of their lives.”

In other words, they didn't choose to mix the way the DoJ felt they ought to, so the DoJ is forcing them to.

originally posted by: ketsuko

originally posted by: Benevolent Heretic
a reply to: ketsuko

Can you quote where "Obama Administration Tells Black Parents Their School Choices Are Racist"?

Because parents were allowed to freely choose which school their kid would attend and it created a situation naturally where kids were not integrated enough for the Federal quota system established in a prior court case, they basically assumed this was due to racism. But there were no artificial barriers that created this situation. It grew up organically.

The case itself was decided based on a system with artificial barriers put in place that created the racial percentages.

So the assumption is that the numbers exist as they do through racial reasoning which is the rationale behind forcing the new system in place.

The point of the entire article is that things that seem to quack like a duck aren't always ducks.

In this case, “the Department of Justice appears to be arbitrary and unfair to African-American parents, who stand to lose their freedom to choose what’s best for their own children,” Hiner said. “African-American children are being pushed around by bureaucrats in Washington to achieve what the bureaucrats believe is a perfect balance of the races—regardless of the wishes of parents, regardless of the impact on those children and the quality of their lives.”

In other words, they didn't choose to mix the way the DoJ felt they ought to, so the DoJ is forcing them to.

Kind a reverse of disparate impact.

Rather than make an eloquent post, im just going to bullet point it:

- federal intervention in schools has been wholly disastrous. given the accusations by former DOE employee Charlotte Iserbyte, and how they dovetail perfectly with what has actually happened, I see no reason whatsoever to allow Uncle Sam to even have an opnion on education.

- assuming neither building is sufficient to house the entire population, it seems the fed will need to fund the building of a new school

- the primary issue to be looked at is funding and access, not skin color. If one school is predominantly black, but both schools are funded the same and staffed the same, then it seems that "access to education" is being achieved

- with the prior point in mind, why on earth are we wanting to bus kids across town instead of just making sure that we are providing for the end result: the improvement of our nation through the superior education of our children?

The more people try to meddle, the more effed up it all becomes.

Knowing how racist the Obama administration is. He probably blames the white population for having a 50-50 high school instead of being the minority

a reply to: ketsuko

Thank you! I like your term "racial reasoning". And I think the government is wrong to force this. I think changes are probably needed, but this seems like a bandaid on the situation, instead of dealing with the cause, which is the disparity between the 2 schools (as bfft said), in funding and access.

While I agree it shouldn't have been done and was done for "racial reasoning", I wouldn't call it "racist", but that's such a typical charge today. Anything that mentions race, or alludes to it, someone cries "Racist". And I don't just mean the left.

Thanks for the great explanation.

a reply to: ketsuko

Heads up Mississippi is abbreviated MS. MI is Michigan.

originally posted by: zardust
a reply to: ketsuko

Heads up Mississippi is abbreviated MS. MI is Michigan.

Beat me to it...I was wondering where Cleveland, Michigan was and why it was pertinent in a story about MS.