economic plus race integration?!

[Kathy Emery <mke4think@hotmail.com>]

Interesting article in this past sunday NY Times magazine  (below are significant excerpts)--notice the acknowledgement that test scores are problematic, yet the reality so the entire article is based on the "reality" -- which isn't.  so orwellian.

an aside: regarding short term thinking.  The last time United Airlines bought a new plane was right before 9/11.  European and Asian airlines have been buying new planes all along.  RESULT= U.S airlines like United are burdened with old, gas guzzlers and breaking under the price of oil.  European and Asian airlines have new, high tech planes that use much less fuel and hence are doing just fine, thank you very much.  American capitalism really pushes  short term thinking decision making -- and CEO's take the same approach to education as they do to every other aspect of their lives.

kathy

The New York Times, July 20, 2008  --Sunday Magazine Section
The Next Kind of Integration
By EMILY BAZELON

[At the beginning of the article]
Race has been the organizing principle of integration since Brown v. Board of Education. At the time of the court’s ruling in Meredith, hundreds of districts were pursuing some sort of racial integration, with or without a court order, while only a few dozen at most were trying any form of socioeconomic integration. Over the years, racial integration has proved to have tangible benefits. Amy Stuart Wells, an education professor at Columbia Teachers College, has found that going to school with substantial numbers of white students helped black students to form cross-racial friendships and, by giving them access to white social networks, eventually to find work in jobs higher up the economic ladder.However important these gains are, they are long-term and cannot be easily or quickly assessed. And increasingly, schools are held to a standard of immediately measurable outcomes. The No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law in 2002, demands student test scores that climb ever upward, with a mandate for all students to be proficient in reading and math by 2014. Test scores may not be the best way to assess the quality of a teacher or a school, but the pressure to improve scores, whatever its shortcomings, is itself on the rise. And if high test scores are the goal, it turns out, class-based integration may be the more effective tool.

[towards the end of article]
. . . . Todd’s first stop was at a forum sponsored jointly by the Urban League and the N.A.A.C.P., groups associated with Louisville’s black establishment. Most of their members supported the school district, but some clergy members who worked with the city’s black youth spoke against it. The Rev. John Carter, associate minister at Green Street Baptist Church, pointed to the district’s black-white achievement gap and called for a return to neighborhood schools and an earlier era of black self-reliance.

As more forums followed in high-school auditoriums across the county, white parents asked a different question: How would the new assignment plan affect their kids? Would they be forced to switch schools in second, third or fourth grade? “We like the diversity,” a white parent named Niki Noe told me the next morning at her son’s elementary school, St. Matthews. “But if we have to go to Chenoweth” — a school with lower test scores — “we’ll pull out and go to private school.”

[Conclusion]
. . . . As the schools shift to the new class-plus-race formula, the district will closely watch the test scores of black students and poor students, hoping for an upsurge, and those of middle-class students, hoping to see achievement hold steady. And if they do, maybe the court’s decision in Meredith will come to seem less like a cause for regret and more like an unexpected opportunity.