Is this a fair claim?
In his column, Mr. Fields, a former NAACP leader, cited an ACLU report earlier this month that claimed the South Orange-Maplewood School District was one of 136 districts statewide that had "discriminatory identification problems." And threatened legal action.
The column states, in part:
Today, as a parent and resident of Maplewood, I am confronting diversity mythology in my community and discovering the modern-day version of Jim Crow in the corridors of our school buildings. Our town boasts of its diversity and claims to have achieved a relative post-racial nirvana that does not hold up under close inspection.
What I have discovered in almost two decades as a resident of Maplewood, and observed in neighboring South Orange, is that race relations is "performance art," in which we engage in symbolic exercises of diversity in public settings that belie the true status of black children relative to their white peers.
This is clearly evident in the shared public school district of South Orange and Maplewood. Six decades after Brown, we maintain a school system where the racial disparities are breathtaking and black students are disadvantaged in numerous categories. Recently, the school district was a party to a state court consent decree for its treatment of black special-needs students and was cited as one of the state’s 10 worst districts for segregation of these students by race.
The district also has been cited by the American Civil Liberties Union for discriminatory practices in student enrollment that harm immigrants and, in the case of our schools, mostly Haitian students. These are just two examples of the betrayal of the principles of Brown evident in our public schools.
As early as elementary school, we begin to hear anecdotes and see patterns emerging of disparate treatment of black children — and black boys in particular. This is consistent with recently released U.S. Department of Education data that reveal the degree to which black preschool age children are disciplined relative to their white peers.
Read the entire piece HERE.
1 comment:
Very true as to black boys with special needs. However, much of this is because all parents of young children with special needs are treated like crap, at least by case manager Joyce and Dr. Barker.
Post a Comment