Schools Resegregate, Study Finds

Schools Resegregate, Study Finds

By GREG WINTER

[]HARLOTTE, N.C., Jan. 20 — Sanetra Jant still wonders where all the white kids went. Only last spring, they made up a quarter of her class, not to mention her friends. And then, poof, they were gone.
"I don't know why they left," said Sanetra, a fourth grader at Reid Park Elementary School.
Last year, before a federal appeals court ended three decades of judicial-supervised desegregation by the district, Sanetra's school was 68 percent black. Now it is almost entirely black, and the many white pupils who once rode in on yellow buses number one in a hundred.
"Maybe they didn't like it here," Sanetra said, knitting her brow in thought.
If there is any one place to witness the changing racial composition of the nation's public schools, perhaps it is here, in the city for which the Supreme Court first endorsed the use of busing to desegregate.
Dozens of Charlotte schools have basically changed color in the months since the appeals court lifted the desegregation order, and though few other places have seen swings so rapid, the city offers a time-lapse view of the steady transformation of the nation's schools.
According to a new study by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, black and Latino students are now more isolated from their white counterparts than they were three decades ago, before many of the overhauls from the civil rights movement had even begun to take hold.
To this I say so what. It is time the social engineers learned that you can not force intergration. Instead of wasting untold millions of dollars on busing that money could be better spent to upgrade schools hire and retain teachers and an upgrade of the facilities. The ethnic and racial character of schools only reflect the demographics of the area.
Is that unacceptable if so why?
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/21/education/21RACE.html?todaysheadlines