It never ends, they simply must do mischief. The country's eminent educrats just won't educate the children and leave them alone. It's now becoming clear that if these meddlers can't keep the race issue alive in the schools, thereby maintaining tension and conflict, then the next best thing will be to hammer away on the "socioeconomic" status of the children. We learn from Joyce Haws of the National Association for Neighborhood Schools that, regardless of how the egalitarians fare in the court system, these social engineers are not giving up. Following are excerpts from her commentary, "They Are 'Good' at Their Mischief:"
Seeing the handwriting on the wall, that the unconstitutional practice of using race as a factor in school assignment is finally being recognized as unconstitutional by the courts and may be coming to an end, social engineers are working overtime to develop new strategy that would allow their control to continue and be accepted by the courts.
Former U.S. Senator (CT) Lowell Weicker Jr. and Richard D. Kahlenberg teamed up to write an article about "The New Educational Divide" which was published 10/9/02 in the Christian Science Monitor. Weicker is now chairman of The Century Foundation Task Force on "the common school." Kahlenberg is executive director of the task force.
We have all heard the recent lament that American public schools are "increasingly segregated by race" in spite of decades of racial manipulation of school assignment and forced busing. Weicker and Kahlenberg simply changed a word or two and opened their op-ed piece by saying, "This fall American children have returned to schools that are increasingly segregated by economic status." They then opined that this is at the heart of AmericaÕs education problem. . . .
The authors noted that success in school depends on higher expectations, better teachers, more motivated students, more financial resources and greater parental involvement. What they apparently hoped the reader would not consider is how busing the children far from home would insure such things as better teachers, better student motivation and greater parental involvement. Why can we not have high expectations in all schools? . . .
Last year the Century Foundation assembled a 25-member task force composed of public officials, teachers, civil rights advocates, business people, union leaders, and scholars to devise ways to reinvent "the common school" in the 21st Century. Apparently those picked for the task force were thought to be super educated, super intelligent and super wise in deciding what is best for the rest of us, who are considered incapable of such decisions. A detailed plan emerged, we are told, that would focus as much on socioeconomic status as race.
At this point the authors slipped up and unwittingly admitted that since racial control was on the way out, they had to devise some other way to control student assignment. "...some courts," they said, "are forbidding even the voluntary use of race in student assignment." . . .
Weicker and Kahlenberg are"pretty good" in their effort to twist and turn attention from racial balancing to socioeconomic balancing, but the mischief shows through. It is time to call a halt to using public schools for social engineering under any guise and to start educating children wherever they are, whatever color they are, whatever their national origin, and whatever their socioeconomic status. If education were the emphasis, maybe some of the economically disadvantaged children would be equipped to rise out of their situation.
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