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Four Speeches
Re: Minnesota's "Voluntary" Desegregation Rule
Implications of the Neighborhood School Orientation
Speech to Minneapolis Board of Education - 8 September 1998
from The Fight Against Resegregating Minneapolis Public Schools
K-8 School Sites, K-8 Pathways and Apartheid
Speech to Minneapolis Board of Education - 24 November 1998
from WhiteSupremacy and the Politics of Apartheid in Minnesota
"Voluntary" Desegregation Means No Desegregation
Speech to Minneapolis Board of Education - 8 February 2000
The Proposed Segregation Rule Will Harm Most Students
Speech to Minneapolis Board of Education - 12 January 1999
from WhiteSupremacy and the Politics of Apartheid in Minnesota
Implications of theNeighborhood School Orientation
Speech to Minneapolis Board of Education 8 September 1998
On June 27, 1995 the Minneapolis Board of Education adopted a resolution ingeniously titled "Closing the gap: ensuring that all children can learn," which argued for the adoption of a neighborhood school plan, referred to as the "Community School Plan."
Under the Community School Plan, school attendance areas have been drawn which concentrate students from residential areas with high rates of poverty into some schools; And students of color, including "middle class" students of color are over-represented in areas with high rates of poverty.
Schools with the greatest proportion of children from low-income households have the least experienced teachers, and the central administration does not provide an adequate level of funding to the site management teams to cover necessary educational expenses, such as programs to train the teachers, and the acquisition of textbooks and supplies.
That's why, in some schools for the poorest neighborhoods in Minneapolis, such as Patrick Henry High on the North Side, students are not allowed to take textbooks out of the classroom. Whatever textbook reading that is assigned to the students has to be done in class.
The "closing the gap" resolution also proposes to increase the use of tracking: steering a large majority of students away from academic curriculum programs through devices such as ability-grouping, gifted and talented programs, and magnet schools.
Curriculum guides developed by the district and distributed to classroom teachers in 1997 promote "ability-grouping" within classrooms and by classroom. As early as Kindergarten, and no later than the beginning of first grade, children are labeled "fast, "medium-," and "slow-"learners; then grouped and provided instruction accordingly.
Tracking students in this manner is camouflaged with radically altered versions of legitimate educational theories, such as outcome-based education, and jargon that means one thing to educators and another thing to just about everyone else.
Tracking and inequitable resource distribution are part of the community school orientation.
The Community School plan represents an abandonment of even token efforts to equalize access to Education in Minnesota. It is an attack on the legacy of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. It represents a return to the doctrine of "separate but equal" in the field of education, which held sway until the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education.
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K-8 School Sites, K-8 Pathways and Apartheid
[Speech to Mpls. School Board, 24 November 1998]
I am here as part of the Parents' Union delegation to ask, What is the Minneapolis Board of Education doing about under-enrolled schools in Southwest Minneapolis, where you find a lot of empty classrooms and the average number of students per classroom is much less than the referendum mandated maximums?
Did the Board consider increasing enrollment at these under-crowded schools in upscale white neighborhoods by giving students from other parts of the city the option of going to these schools?
Minnesota's open enrollment law requires the Minneapolis Board to offer such a remedy for under-crowded schools. I'm sure that many parents on the Northside, whose children attend severely over-crowded schools would consider this option, provided that acceptable transportation arrangements are offered.
However, the school board's remedy is to spend millions of dollars to reconfigure elementary schools into K-8 schools where-ever possible, or set up exclusive pathways from one school site to another for grades K-8. This will increase enrollment by putting students from more grade levels at each site or paired school sites, and it has the virtue of ensuring that children in upscale white neighborhoods will never have to mix with children from neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty and people of color.
But to convince most high-income white people to put their children in the Minneapolis Public Schools [it is not enough to offer them all-white schools], the Minneapolis Board of Education will actually have to meet the expectations of those parents about what constitutes an adequate education, an education that prepares one to go directly from high school to college without having to take any remedial courses.
To be sure, the Minneapolis Board of Education will spare no effort to see that minimum grade-level expectations dramatically increase in schools for upscale white neighborhoods.
But this School Board will not try to provide the same quality of education for the under class in Minneapolis. In neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty, college preparatory curriculum programs will continue to be reserved for the talented tenth of students of color, and the talented third of white students. That's the plan because a highly educated under class would be a threat to those who profit from the under-education of our children, the white supremicists who run this town, and their puppets on this school board and at City Hall.
It is in the interest of just about everyone who has to work for a living to join the fight to ensure that all children in the Minneapolis Public Schools get a high-quality education, because the existence of a large pool of under-educated workers competing for low-wage jobs has an adverse affect on just about all wage earners.
And if you are for human rights, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out where to stand on this issue.
Education is a right, not a privilege!
Down with apartheid!
Repeal the community school plan, now!
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"Voluntary" Desegregation Means No Desegregation
Speech to the Minneapolis Board of Education - 8 February 2000
The School Desegregation Rule just repealed by the Minnesota legislature required K-12 schools to limit the enrollment of non-white students to no more than 15% above the district average.
The new desegregation rule allows school districts to establish and maintain what it defines as racially isolated schools, where the enrollment of non-white students is more than 20% above the district average. The Statement of Need and Reasonableness argues, on page 59, that,
"Even if some racially isolated schools remain under the proposed rule, this does not mean the rule is unreasonable or ineffective; schools comprised predominantly of students of color are not inherently inferior."
However, in its unanimous opinion in the 1954 case of Brown versus Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court found that in dual systems, black schools were inherently inferior to white schools due to the link between race and poverty. Poverty limits access to educational opportunities outside of the public schools; and in dual systems, black schools have always had the highest concentration of inexperienced and ineffective teachers.
When the courts began to order school districts to bus black students to white schools, black students were mainly integrated into the lower, non-academic tracks through a process of curriculum differentiation by ability grouping.
It should not be forgotten that racially segregated neighborhoods and schools were created in the Northern U.S. during the first decade of the 20th century by a white supremacist movement. Blacks were driven out of most neighborhoods by a variety of methods, including arson and murder, and city governments chartered and funded Neighborhood Associations which enforced restrictive convenants that prohibited the sale or leasing of dwelling units to blacks. These covenants were legally enforcable until 1948, and racial discrimination in the housing market was not outlawed until the passage of the largely unenforced Fair Housing Act of 1968.
History teaches us that privileged classes do not give up their privileges volutarily. If desegregation and access to education for all on equal terms could be acheived through purely voluntary means, it would have been accomplished long before now.
As Malcolm X explained in a speech at the Militant Forum in New York on January 7, 1965:
Power doesn't take a step back in the face of a smile, or a prayer, or a loving non-violent action. Power only takes a step back in the face of greater power. And power in defense of freedom is greater than power in defense of tyranny, because the power of a just cause is based on conviction and produces resolute and uncompromising action.
If you are ready to exercise some power for a just cause, contact the Minneapolis Parents Union at (612) 980-6748. [see "related links" for current phone number]
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The Proposed Segregation Rule Will Harm Most Students
[Speech to Mpls. School Board, 12 January 1999]
An "Our perspective" editorial in the December 21, 1998 issue of the Star-Tribune newspaper states that "...Minnesota's new school desegregation rule is a basically sound proposal that recognizes demographic changes and moves the State away from a racial quota system. Yet the new rule should make a stronger statement about the value of integration and its connection to student achievement."
The problem with the stance taken by the Star-Tribune is that, in as much as the proposed school desegregation rule will allow school districts to introduce more segregative policies on a variety of pretexts, it would be incongruous for the rule to affirm the connection between racial integration and student achievement.
In fact, the statement of need and reasonableness for the proposed school desegregation rule offers extensive argumentation not only to dispute the idea that racial integration can improve educational outcomes for students of color, but also to dispute the finding of fact by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1954 Brown decision that in dual systems, black schools are inherently inferior to white schools. For example:
"Even if some racially isolated schools remain under the proposed rule, this does not mean that the rule is unreasonable or ineffective; schools comprised predominantly of students of color are not inherently inferior" (page 59).
The proposed school desegregation rule does not recognize the harm done by creating what the current rule defines as "racially imbalanced" schools, and would not provide a remedy for the students who are trapped in these schools.
It does not allow the commissioner to require a racially segregated school district to limit the enrollment of non-white students at school sites to a certain percentage above the district average, which the statement of need and reasonableness refers to as a "racial quota" system.
And it recommends the use of magnet school programs, and gifted and talented programs in the non-magnet schools, without racial quotas, in order to prevent white flight from the inner cities and from less affluent suburban school districts with significant non-white populations. Such a policy not only undercuts the goal of providing students of color with greater access to academic programs, but also leads to an accelerated decline in the quality of education available to the large majority of students who are excluded from academic curriculum programs, including most white students.
There are some white people who understand that a segregated, stratified school system isn't just a bad thing for other people's children. And many more can be convinced of this truth. We must explain that the proposed desegregation rule legitimizes efforts to create a more segregated, stratified school system. We must speak out against neighborhood school plans and other segregative policies that the proposed rule would sanction.
Education is a right, not a privilege!
No to the proposed segregation rule!
Repeal the Community School Plan in Minneapolis!
Down with apartheid!
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