Beware the White Influx!
Beware of the white influx in Chicago’s selective government schools!
Sources report that Chicago Public Schools (CPS) is using a new admissions plan, one that replaces skin color with socioeconomic status. As a result, elite schools in the district are seeing an increase of white students. Although some sources say the level of racial diversity will stay at the same level, others report that top schools will become “more white.”
The underlying assumption is there’s something wrong with “more white” top schools. In 2009, a federal judge ended the CPS desegregation consent decree, which had been in place for over two decades. The district limited student enrollment in top schools based on race. While white students accounted for nine percent of enrollment across the district, they were limited to up to 35 percent of students admitted to top schools. Consent decree liberation resulted in higher white student enrollment at the better schools. Why? White students on average have higher grades and scores.
Since the government can’t tell people where to live (yet), it manipulates the racial make-up of schools across the district by considering race in assignments. People who support such a practice find the idea of majority-black schools alarming. Why?
“The evidence indicates that there is a negative effect for all children from all ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds for attending schools that are isolated,” Roslyn Mickelson, professor of sociology and public policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte,” told the Chicago Tribune. “Diversity has powerful effects for everybody.”
What exactly is this “negative effect”? White children are somehow harmed attending school with other white children? In what way? What is “negative” about black children attending school with other black children? Regardless of the answers to these questions, we must ask whether the government is justified in discriminating against individuals because of the color of their skin, whatever the reason.
In Brown . Board of Education, the court declared “separate but equal” inherently unequal. I don’t believe it’s true, but let’s say it is. Did the ruling authorize the government to continue racial discrimination, but this time to racially balance schools?
