Advantages of Attending a Racially Diverse School?

AthensPatch
Visiting scholar says yes.
By Rebecca McCarthy
Email the author
10:12 am

In Athens, where most of the population is white, the public school system is more than 60 percent minority. This statistic routinely prompts some white families to flee to private school or into neighboring counties, like Oconee, which is less than five percent black.

Full Story: http://athens.patch.com/articles/advantages-of-attending-a-racially-diverse-school

Affirmative Action Is About Helping All of Us

The Chronicle of Higher Education
William Brown for The Chronicle
By Elizabeth Anderson

It's no secret that race-based affirmative action in higher education faces a crisis of legitimacy. It has been banned in California, Florida, Michigan, Washington, Arizona, and Nebraska. Even as the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of affirmative action in 2003 in Grutter v. Bollinger, the justices expressed an expectation that the policy would soon no longer be needed, practically inviting relitigation. Although the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently upheld affirmative action at the University of Texas—in Abigail Fisher v. State of Texas—the forthcoming appeal may give the conservative Roberts court an opportunity to end it once and for all. One might expect colleges to rise to the challenge of forcefully articulating a clear case for their policies. Instead we find the same tired arguments on the left, and critiques of affirmative action on the right that reflect ignorance of the realities of race in America.
We need new arguments for affirmative action. We can find them by resurrecting the ideal of integration from the grave of the civil-rights movement.

Full Story: (Subscription Required) http://chronicle.com/article/Affirmative-Action-Is-About/127632/

Episode 15: After 55 Years, and Social Change, an Integrationist Graduates

The Chronicle of Higher Education
May 9, 2011, 8:58 pm
By Sara Lipka

“This is what I’m back here for. I can feel it.”
Burlyce Logan
University of North Texas
In this episode, we hear from Burlyce Logan, 73, who enrolled with the first group of black students at the University of North Texas in 1956, left because of harassment, recently returned, and will graduate this month.

For the audiotape of Ms. Logan, go to: http://chronicle.com/blogs/saysomething/2011/05/09/episode-15-after-55-years-and-social-change-an-integrationist-graduates/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Maintaining racial diversity in schools

The Washington Post
Arne Duncan, Washington
The writer is U.S. education secretary

Thursday, January 13, 2011; 7:16 PM

America's strength has always been a function of its diversity, so it is troubling to see North Carolina's Wake County School Board taking steps to reverse a long-standing policy to promote racial diversity in its schools ["In N.C., a new battle on school integration," front page, Jan. 12]. The board's action has led to a complaint that has prompted an investigation by our Office for Civil Rights, but it should also prompt a conversation among educators, parents and students across America about our core values.

Full Editorial: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/13/AR2011011305529.html

Berlin to consider affirmative action for immigrants

Today's Zaman (Germany)
May 6, 2010

The government of Berlin, one of the 16 states in Germany, is planning to propose a bill in the state parliament giving immigrants priority in job applications and public tenders to promote integration. The state’s executive body, the Senate of Berlin, expects to finish drafting the bill and present it to parliament before the end of the year. The government, controlled by social democrats and leftists, believes the bill will be enacted by March 2011. Berlin is known for its large immigrant population.

Full Story: http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/news-209354-100-berlin-to-consider-affirmative-action-for-immigrants.html

A Successful Plan for Racial Balance Now Finds Its Future Uncertain

New York Times
August 22, 2007
On Education
By JOSEPH BERGER
WHITE PLAINS

For 18 years, this city of 55,000 has maintained racially balanced schools without the white flight that has followed integration plans in places like Boston and Canarsie, Brooklyn.
But in June, the Supreme Court rejected school assignment plans in Louisville and Seattle that, like the one in White Plains, are also based explicitly on race. And there are fears that should a court turn down White Plains’s plan in the future, white families may abandon some of the neighborhood schools. That is not a fear restricted to White Plains, as dozens of other cities are having to reconsider similar plans.
“The demographics in some of the schools might change dramatically, and I don’t know how parents in those schools would feel about the demographics,” is the discreetly worded warning from Laurette Young, who administers the White Plains plan.
As in most cities, housing in White Plains, the Westchester County seat that has sprouted skyscrapers among its suburban patches, is identifiable by race. The southern end is dappled with tree-shaded homes inhabited mostly by white families, while the northwest has housing projects populated by black families and aging apartments crowded with Latinos.
Under a strict neighborhood zoning plan, children of those northwestern black and Hispanic families would be assigned to the Post Road School, but so would children from adjoining middle-class white enclaves, and it is not clear how many would attend if they were reduced to a tiny minority.
Conversely, school officials believe the south end’s Ridgeway School would be stripped of the ethnic palette that residents have long prized.
In 1989, White Plains, tired of perennially gerrymandering for racial balance, began a “controlled choice” plan that essentially jettisoned neighborhood zones and required each school to have the same proportions of blacks, Hispanics and “others,” a term that includes whites and Asians. The plan allowed for a discrepancy among schools of only 5 percent. Similar plans had been adopted in Cambridge and Fall River, Mass., and copied by Milwaukee, San Jose, Calif., and dozens of other cities.
White Plains’s plan takes pains to give parents genuine choices. In January and February, parents of entering kindergartners visit elementary schools and rank their top three picks. A family will get first choice, which 90 percent of families do, unless the number of applicants of that child’s race exceeds certain caps, which at a school with 100 kindergartners might be 13 blacks, 46 Hispanics, and 41 “others.”
Should that happen, a lottery is held for all students in that racial group, with assigned numbers on colored slips of paper picked out of a basket at a public meeting. Remaining kindergartners get second choice or, rarely, third.
Buses are provided for students living more than half a mile from school. The plan also balances assignments at the two campuses of the middle school.
As a result of the plan, enrollment at each elementary school is roughly 45 percent Hispanic, 17 percent black, and 37 percent other. Officials say the plan works because transparent rules are enforced without favoritism. No school is more overcrowded or receives more dollars. All groups share the burdens and benefits of integration, though the unspoken assumption is that white parents will send their children to public schools only up to a murky “tipping point.”
“Over the history of the plan, no school has emerged as most desirable or least desirable, so no racial group is disadvantaged by not getting into that school,” said Saul Yanofsky, a former superintendent who spearheaded efforts to draw up the plan.
While the plan would not work in many cities — either because they have too few whites or schools too geographically spread out — in White Plains it has, by most accounts, been a success. Although enrollment has grown to more than 7,000 largely as a result of a Latino influx, schools have retained roughly the same number, if not the proportions, of whites and blacks that they had in 1989. That is not the usual urban pattern.
Achievement levels in the schools are comparable. At Ridgeway, 76 percent of fourth graders passed the state’s English test in 2005; in Post Road, 67 percent did. At the end of the line, the high school, with 17 Advanced Placement courses, gets top graduates into Harvard and Yale.
[To see the entire article, go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/22/education/22education.html?_r=1&ref=education&oref=slogin ]