• If you are having problems logging in please use the Contact Us in the lower right hand corner of the forum page for assistance.

Nebraska a Step Back in Time

Should Nebraska let segrigation go on?

  • Yes

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • No, it means taking a step back and it is wrong.

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Perhaps depending on the situation.

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    0

CattleRMe

Well-known member
Editorial: Time warp / Nebraska turns back the clock on segregation
Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall may well be spinning in his grave.

The Nebraska Legislature's decision last week to divide the 45,000-student Omaha Public Schools into three school districts -- one predominantly white, one mostly black and one largely Hispanic -- beginning in 2008 is segregationist, potentially unconstitutional and a throwback to a much less enlightened time in our nation's history.

The school district's superintendent says the law cannot stand and will be challenged in court.

Nebraska's only black legislator, state Sen. Ernie Chambers, favors the plan, arguing that blacks want to control a school district in which black students are the majority. While his aim is well-intentioned and no doubt born out of frustration and the belief that the public schools have failed black students, this self-legislated isolation could have unintended consequences.

How can creating more entities to grab for finite pieces of pie, whether overall funding or stellar AP physics teachers, be better?

Last summer, the Omaha Public Schools campaigned to annex predominantly white schools that were within the city limits but part of other school districts in an effort to improve the Omaha Public Schools' tax base.

Parents in the predominantly white schools balked, not wanting to join the city school district, fearing busing would be reinstituted.

That's when the Legislature came up with the bill to include 11 school districts in the Omaha area in a common tax levy but keep existing school district borders. Then, Sen. Chambers amended it to divide the existing Omaha Public Schools into three racially and ethnically distinct districts.

Separate is inherently unequal. Majority and minority populations benefit from diversity. There is value in competing in the same arena against all comers, not just those from your neighborhood. There's something to be gained in theoretically having access to the best a school district has to offer.

In an increasingly multicultural society, it also may be a benefit to the majority that's fast becoming a minority to gain a certain comfort level and familiarity with those who will be in the majority.

Separate wasn't equal in 1954 when NAACP general counsel Thurgood Marshall successfully argued for school desegregation in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. And it's not equal now, whether it's legislated or de facto due to decades of segregated housing patterns.

Certainly, America has fallen short of the promise of the Brown decision -- courts can't legislate equality in economic backgrounds or community tax bases that fund education -- but now isn't the time to concede that failure and codify prima facie discrimination.
 

CattleRMe

Well-known member
Don Walton: Nebraska needs an ad in the Times


Sunday, Apr 16, 2006 - 11:54:17 pm CDT

How much is a full-page ad in The New York Times?

The state ought to consider purchasing a page to explain the key ingredients and broad purposes of the Omaha school plan approved by the Legislature and signed by the governor last week.

What’s being misunderstood and mischaracterized nationally is motivation.

Listen to the national conversation about the legislation — and it is considerable — and what you hear is Nebraska has taken an official position favoring, or creating, racial segregation in the schools.

Kansas opposes science in the classrooms and Nebraska opposes racial integration. That’s where the national chatter has headed.

That’s a devastating message that shouldn’t go unanswered or uncorrected.

Hey, you can argue about whether breakup of the Omaha Public Schools into three racially distinctive districts was good or bad, wise or unwise, constitutional or unconstitutional, progress or not. That isn’t what I’m trying to do.

All I’m saying is Nebraska is taking a beating because the motivation of that legislation is not being heard, much less understood.

Ron Raikes’ learning community plan gathering all property tax resources in Omaha and its suburban communities together to help fund all schools, rich and poor, has been largely ignored nationally.

Ernie Chambers’ point that the legislation does not change the current racial composition of any Omaha school (although it does change the racial composition of school districts) is not being heard.

If Omaha already has some predominantly black schools, he says, they ought to be led and managed by people from the community who may be more committed to their success and to the future of those children.

If the school system in Omaha already is de-facto segregated by color or race, so are public schools in cities all over the country.

In his 2005 book, “The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America,” Jonathan Kozol documents the resegregation of public schools in virtually every major city.

Omaha and Nebraska are hardly alone.

If Nebraska decided to explain itself to the rest of the nation, it ought to point that out in its full-page ad.

And it even could go a step further, challenging the rest of the country to look in the mirror and decide, together with us, whether the retreat to de facto school segregation really is the path we all want to pursue.

That’s the elephant in the room.
 

Latest posts

Top