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.