"I didn't realize it was getting to the point anyone should worry about it," said Jay Boyd, the school board president, who is white. "I just thought we need to do what's best for students -- if they're happy, let them go to Salem. Who's it hurting?"
[...]
Boyd, the school board president, reluctantly acknowledged that racism probably played a role in the transfer requests. "I thought that was a thing of the past," he said. "You live and you learn."
[...]
The ruling has led some white parents in Walthall County to reconsider the systemic effects of individual choice. Roger Ginn, a white parent whose children graduated from both Tylertown and Salem, said he'd always considered the transfer issue to be a simple matter of student happiness, not race.
"But if all that adds up to segregated schools?" he asked, and then paused for a while. "That wouldn't be right, no."
It's easy to lapse into defensiveness when faced with an order like this -- a tendency, I can't help but think, that is accentuated when the rest of the country is holding you up as the racist hillbillies who got stuck in the last century. To their credit, it looks like the residents of this county aren't taking that route. And that's worth commending.
***said he'd always considered the transfer issue to be a simple matter of student happiness, not race.
ReplyDelete"But if all that adds up to segregated schools?" he asked, and then paused for a while. "That wouldn't be right, no."***
Well, it's not ideal but is ordering the children to go to another school fair either?
Also for some examples of the downsides of integrated schooling read Dr Aric Sigman's 'New Improved' or Howard Stern's 'Private Part's'. The examples of bullying/abuse in those books may not be the case here, but it would be interesting to speak to students themselves.
Well, it's not ideal but is ordering the children to go to another school fair either?
ReplyDeleteLife isn't fair. The public school system certainly never has been.
What it is is a legitimate adjustment in pursuit of a legitimate goal.
When Rahm Emanuel sends his children to all white Jewish Day School, he is doing what is best for his children. When Joe Biden sent his children to all white private school, he was doing what was best for his children. When President Obama sends his daughters to very white Sidwell Friends, he is doing what is best for his children.
ReplyDeleteHowever, when blue collar white parents send their children to the better high school even though it still has a student body that is 35% black, they are acting like "racist hillbillies who got stuck in the last century."
Maybe when the left leads by example instead of court order, they will have more credibility.
Politicians possibly hypocritical! This validates my opinion because I vote for the other party! Alert the internet!
ReplyDelete(Of course, those "blue collar" parents have every right to try to get their kids into Sidwell Friends, therefore they have the exact same legal opportunities as the First Family. It's just then they have to figure out how to pay for it, but that's certainly of no concern to anyone claiming to adhere to principles of limited government.)
However, when blue collar white parents send their children to the better high school even though it still has a student body that is 35% black, they are acting like "racist hillbillies who got stuck in the last century."
ReplyDeleteWhy am I unsurprised that Superdestroyer's response was anticipated in the article linked in David's post?
'"In my class of 2012, there's just seven white girls now," said Harness, raising her chin slightly. "The ones that left, they think Salem's smarter because they have more white kids, but it's not." ... 'Salem, whose academic record and course offerings are similar to Tylertown's.'
In the face of all evidence to the contrary, some people will still unembarrassedly assert that if it's whiter, it must be better.
PG,
ReplyDeleteIf you look at greatschools.com, Salem gets a four out of ten and Tylertown gets a 3 out of ten based on test scores and I suspect drop out rates. However, if you look at test scores, the two schools are very similar are almost the same except for the algebra scores.
However, if you are going to quote the Washington Post article, it is obvious that white students are outsiders at Tylertown, Brown and others also noted that at Tylertown, white children and parents rarely attend graduation ceremonies, and that white students have often held a separate prom out of town.
If you look at publicschoolreview.com, you would see that the Salem High School is much smaller with a graduating class of 35 whereas Tylertown High School has a graduating class of 91 students.
Also, you should look at the website for Tylertown High School (http://www.wcsd.k12.ms.us/ths/index.htm). The girls basketball team is all black but the girls soccer team is mostly white. Like most public schools in the south with large black and white populations, there are the sports and extracirriculars that they white kids do and then the sports and extra-curriculars that the black kids do.
Superdestroyer,
ReplyDeleteEr, how did your comment negate anything I said? It seems to reconfirm that you do in fact believe whiter = better.
PG,
ReplyDeleteDid you miss the point that Salem is rated higher or do you refuse to acknowledge that whiter schools are almost always rated higher than less white schools (See DC versus Montgomery County or Fairfax County).
Also, if you are white and want to play on the football team, you go to Salem since there no space for you in Tylertown whether the baseball team is for whites and the football team is for blacks.
I guess you look up the articles by Patrick Welsh in the Washington Post about T.C. Williams High School. The white students at T.C. Williams pack themselves into the AP/IB classes and concentrate on the "white" sports like crew. White students refer to the non-AP classes as Ghetto classes because there are virtually no whites.
In reality, the entire U.S. functions like rural Mississippi. The problem is that the blue collar whites in rural Mississippi do not have the money and connections to hide what they are doing.
Superdestroyer,
ReplyDeleteYour comment was, "However, if you look at test scores, the two schools are very similar are almost the same except for the algebra scores."
So if the two schools "are very similar [or] almost the same" except in a single subsection of mathematics, why would you declare that Salem is superior to Tylertown?
Also, if you are white and want to play on the football team, you go to Salem since there no space for you in Tylertown whether the baseball team is for whites and the football team is for blacks.
As for your evaluation of rural Southern public high schools: hi. Have we met? I graduated from a rural Southern public high school. My school's football team had black, white and Latino players. One of my best friends from high school was a white guy on the football team. I tutored some of the players for their English course because we had a "no pass, no play" policy. There were also white guys on the basketball team.
Were the white guys proportionately represented on the football and basketball teams, or the the black guys proportionately represented on the swimming and golf teams? No. But people who were interested and good enough could play, and there were people of each main racial group on each of the popular sports teams. Want to know one way in which our school was good enough to frequently make it to the district championship game, and also recently win the state championship? We only have one public high school in the district. Everyone -- black, white, purple -- has to go there unless he's getting private or home-schooled. That means pretty much all the athletic ability for 20 miles around is concentrated in a single pool. The best athletes of whatever race are all on the same teams instead of being divided up by race.
But that was East Texas. Mississippians apparently can't even obsess about football enough to overcome an inclination toward racial segregation.
Your bemoaning of the fact that white guys who aren't very good football players can't get on a team when they'd have to compete against black guys is hilariously similar to the complaints of this guy.