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Jews and communists lament facts over Segregation

Thread ID: 10816 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2003-10-29

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golfball [OP]

2003-10-29 15:28 | User Profile

[url]http://epaper.ardemgaz.com/Daily/Skins/Arkansas/?AW=1067439463282[/url] Tuesday 10/28/2003 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Front Page

Facing the consequences

Little Rock’s public school system loses out when families opt for private schools.

BY PHILLIP REESE ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

Last of three parts Every time the Little Rock School District loses a student to a private school, it also loses thousands of dollars in state funding. That’s just one of the ramifications Little Rock and its public schools face as private schools attract white students. As a result of a decades-old pattern, more than 48 percent of the city’s white students in kindergarten through 12 th grade attended private school in 2000, according to an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette analysis of census data. Among blacks, 4 percent did. Since 2000, the school district has lost 600 more white students, making it probable that the majority of white students in Little Rock are now in private schools. No other major city in Arkansas had a higher percentage of its white students in private schools in 2000. Only eight major cities in the United States did. The shift has pulled the Little Rock School District into a downward spiral that’s hard to escape: the diversion of millions of state dollars, diminished hopes for millage increases, and uneven teaching experience and parental involvement among schools. "It’s a constant, sloping trend," said Baker Kurrus, a five-year member of the Little Rock School Board. State school funding is tied to enrollment. For every child who leaves the Little Rock School District, the district loses about $4,700 in state funding, according to Don Stewart, chief financial officer for the district. With more than 6,400 of the city’s white students now enrolled in private schools, the district is losing out on up to $30 million that it could otherwise expect, according to calculations based on current funding, Stewart said. Including nonwhite students, that amount is as high as $35 million. "That’s dollars that go out of our budget," said recently reelected School Board member Sue Strickland. "We need them desperately." That won’t lower anyone’s taxes, though. The state simply redistributes those millions to school districts in communities other than Little Rock for uses ranging from instruction to school construction, Stewart said. For the past 30 years, enrollment and census data show, Little Rock public school enrollment has stagnated. A growing number of black students has offset the loss of white students. But while the district’s enrollment — and Little Rock’s portion of state education funds — has been relatively flat, its school buildings have gotten older, some have fallen into disrepair and new buildings have not followed the city’s population shift to the northwest. Most of the district’s 50 schools are more than 25 years old. Three of Arkansas’ six oldest school buildings still in use are in the Little Rock School District. Fulbright Elementary, constructed in 1979, is the last school built in northwest Little Rock. The School Board has discussed building a school in northwest Little Rock, an area that grew more than 40 percent in the past decade. But it takes money above and beyond operating expenses to construct schools and to keep school buildings updated. The last school built, Stephens Elementary in southwest Little Rock, was constructed in 2000 for $10.5 million, mostly from a bond issue. Private school parents still pay property taxes, which go to public schools. School districts often raise extra money through millage increases on those taxes. The last millage increase referendum for education in Little Rock took place in 2000, its purpose to pay for repairing and updating deteriorating buildings. That measure would have failed had voting been limited to northwest Little Rock, where most of the students in the area — 3,500 of 5,900 — go to private school. Fifty-six percent of voters living north of the Interstate 630 line and west of Interstate 430 voted against the increase, according to a breakdown of election returns by precinct. The measure carried largely because of support in central Little Rock. "If all of the kids are going to public school, then you are more likely to pass millage increases when you need them," said Ruth Shepherd, a former School Board member.

‘A PERCEPTION PROBLEM’

Much of the city’s economy is tied to its public schools. Companies consider an area’s public schools when deciding where to set up shop, as do parents when deciding where to live. Because so many white parents in Little Rock send their kids to private school, the public schools — and the city itself — do not look especially good to newcomers, some business leaders say. Growth in Little Rock has remained largely stagnant for 15 years, while the city’s suburbs are booming. Many suburban parents say they decided against living in Little Rock because of the city’s schools. The vast majority of residents in the suburbs are white. "People perceive better schools, smaller classrooms" outside the city, said Sarah Breshears, head of the state data center. "We heard that the private schools were obviously good, but not the public schools," said Allison Minton, who moved from Atlanta to Bryant, a Little Rock suburb, in September 2002. In addition to losing out on newcomers, battles over "very unpopular school consolidation" and a perceived crime problem in the city have recently driven many residents away from Little Rock, said Jim McKenzie, executive director of Metroplan. "We had a pretty compact metro region" until the past few decades, McKenzie said, adding that Little Rock now has urban sprawl. Little Rock developer Rett Tucker said he believes that Little Rock public schools do a good job but he knows that many businesses considering setting up shop in the city hear otherwise. When businesses and people locate somewhere besides Little Rock, their tax dollars move with them. "The bottom line is that we need to have a healthy school system," he said. "I believe we do. But Little Rock suffers from a perception problem."

UNEVEN RESULTS

When private schools attract more affluent, mostly white children away from public school systems, they leave behind schools in danger of losing good teachers and drain away parental involvement, researchers and parents say. The result is uneven quality throughout the district, with inner-city schools often the first to lose more experienced teachers, school officials say. These are the same schools that tend to score poorly on the state’s Benchmark Exams, test score data show. "Some of the low-achieving schools, we can’t keep the teachers there," said John Riggs, president of the Little Rock Public Education Foundation. "They get seniority and leave." For instance, teachers at Forest Park, Fulbright and Jefferson Elementary schools average 13 years of teaching experience. These three public schools, in the north-central and northwest parts of the city, have the highest percentage of whites in the district. That contrasts with the nineyear average teaching experience at Rightsell, Franklin and Mitchell Elementary schools, three inner-city schools with the district’s highest percentage of blacks, according to an analysis of Arkansas Department of Education data. Students at the three northern schools also scored much better on last year’s Benchmark Exams than students at the three inner-city schools. For example, 66 percent of fourth-graders at Forest Park, Fulbright and Jefferson collectively scored at or above a proficient level on the math test, compared with 28 percent of fourth-graders at Rightsell, Franklin and Mitchell. Teachers like to work at schools where parents are heavily involved, school officials say. "Anytime you’ve got a lot of good, strong parental involvement, it’s going to be a good school," said Becky Rather, parent recruiter for the Little Rock School District. But, Strickland said, "teachers feel like, in the lower income brackets, some of these parents are just not as involved with the students. [The parents] are just working so hard trying to make a living for the family, they have a hard time of it." Riggs agreed that parental involvement makes a difference. "If a kid is in private school, generally, it’s because the parents have been paying attention to the academic performance of their children. If you have those parents in public schools, it improves education— immediately." John T. Yun, who has authored studies on private school enrollment trends, sees the same problems in cities across the Unites States in which private schools draw large numbers of students from communities with more affluent and better educated residents. "Highly segregated schools concentrate things like poverty and disadvantage in particular schools with fewer resources," said Yun, a former researcher at Harvard University’s Civil Rights Project who now teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "The students there have greater needs, but the teachers are less educated and younger. More kids need counseling, but there is the same number of counselors." The differences among public schools in the Little Rock district are so stark that even public school advocates are conflicted. "There are schools here in this city that I would not put my kids in," said Riggs, a former state senator and former president of the Little Rock School Board. "If I was in their attendance zone, I would send my kids to private school."

LEARNING SEPARATELY

Some students, parents and school officials are disappointed in the cultural separation in largely one-race schools. They see it as lost educational opportunity. Charlie Sachs, headmaster at Pulaski Academy, said his school would be much improved by a better racial mixture. "We are preparing our student for life," he said, "and it’s a diverse world." Will Richardson, a white student who graduated from Pulaski Academy in May, agreed. Currently a student at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, he said he loved Pulaski Academy, but regretted that the school’s demographics limited the viewpoints expressed there. "Eighty percent of the school being WASP, you learn the same ideas and the same principles," he said. "You got caught in a comfort zone." The situation is essentially the same for many of Little Rock’s public schools, except that white students are the ones who are scarce. In 16 of the 50 schools in the district, white students make up less than 10 percent of the enrollment. Gloria Hansberry is a black former school bus driver who expects her grandson to begin school at Franklin Elementary soon. Last year, 314 of the 321 students at Franklin were black. The loss of white students from the public schools saddens her. "These parents have a right to pick out the school they want," she said. "But if they would sit down and think about it, their children aren’t going nowhere as long as people are divided." Like Sachs, she senses a lost opportunity. "It should be so all kids, no matter what color they are, would have to participate in each one of these schools, have to get to learn about the opposite race, have to learn the culture of that race, whatever school they are in. Then maybe the kids would say, ‘Hey, it’s not too bad.’ " Bari Sells’ daughters have experienced both worlds. They went to Pulaski Heights Elementary School, a public school where about half of the students are black. Now one attends Episcopal Collegiate School, and another transferred from Episcopal Collegiate to Little Rock Christian Academy. Sells, who is white, wishes private schools were more mixed, she said, but her daughters’ earlier experiences have proved invaluable. "We loved that about public schools," she said. "They knew no color. They still don’t. I wouldn’t trade that for anything." But she did. Like many of the private school parents interviewed for this series, the desire for cultural diversity lost out to other concerns. In Sells’ case, it was because she believes private schools are better at teaching values and respect. Meanwhile, a small handful of magnet schools in Little Rock have managed to draw both black and white students from various parts of the city, and parents and students at those schools sing their praises. Garrett Phelps is a white seventh-grader at Dunbar Magnet Middle School. Garrett said he doesn’t believe the environment at an essentially one-race school could compare to the mixture of cultures and personalities at Dunbar. "It’d get kind of boring after a little bit because they would want to do the same things you would want to do," he said. "There’d never be anything else."

HARD TO REVERSE

Before 1957, Little Rock’s black and white students never walked through the same public school door, never sat by each other in class, and never played on the same school ball team or in the same school band. The next decade saw Little Rock schools slowly desegregate. Millions of dollars were spent in legal battles over how well the district was doing during the rest of the century. But, almost without exception, the number of white children in Little Rock public schools has dropped each year since 1957. Some of those children left the city altogether. But many transferred to private schools. As a whole, Little Rock private schools have added 135 students each year since 1970, according to the Census Bureau. Little Rock Christian Academy alone has more than 1,000 students and is growing about 15 percent each year. At the same time, black children entering private schools are still the exception, not the rule, private school advocates concede. "The numbers are not good at all," said Little Rock Christian Academy President Boyd Chitwood, adding that he could probably count the number of black, high school students at his school on one hand. The bottom line, many education experts say, is that a decades-old trend is hard to reverse. For private schools to have more black children, their parents must put them in schools that for the most part are overwhelmingly white. For public schools to have more white children, their parents must put them in predominantly black schools. It’s a tough decision. "People don’t like going to a school where their race is not equal or dominant," said Morris Holmes, the interim superintendent of the Little Rock School District. "Blacks don’t like that. Whites don’t like that." Also, even if all white private school students transferred to public schools tomorrow, the district’s schools would not necessarily become more diverse, Holmes said. Since school assignment no longer is under federal court supervision, attendance zones are largely neighborhoodbased; but whites and blacks mostly live in separate neighborhoods. An assignment plan proposed by the school district earlier this month could lead to even more one-race schools, a school official said at a School Board meeting Oct. 9. The plan would consider income and test scores as well as race when determining placement of students in several Little Rock magnet schools. "Certainly, you can look at schools in our district and say they are not desegregated," said Ginny Kurrus, the Little Rock PTA president and School Board member Baker Kurrus’ wife. The same thing holds true in other cities, she said. "Nationwide, the courts have been getting out of this," Kurrus said. "I think we have already learned that we are not going to force a student to go to a school when they don’t want to." Little Rock’s school attendance trends show no signs of slowing. "Are we going to become a nation where we have white suburban public schools, black innercity schools and white inner-city private schools?" asked Robert Fairlie, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As a result of thousands of decisions by individual families, are schools resegregating? In Little Rock, the answer is yes. The lead editor for this series was Assistant City Editor J.J. Thompson. Phillip Reese, the reporter, can be reached at: [email]phillip_reese@adg.ardemgaz.com[/email]
or (501) 378-3596. About this article A few notes about the information in this story: Figures on the ages of school buildings are from the Arkansas Department of Education. This story states that the most recent millage increase referendum for schools would have failed if voting was restricted to northwest Little Rock. That statement is derived from precinct results as reported by the Pulaski County Election Commission including, roughly, all precincts west of I-430 and north of the I-630 line, a straight line from the end of I-630 to the western edge of the city. Early voting results are not included.

Acorn

2003-10-30 05:32 | User Profile

Gee that's too ****ing bad.

I went to schools where Whites were a minority. The key to survival and I don't mean intellectual or moral but PHYSICAL was to stay out of school. The dream was to be expelled or at least suspended, it meant you could stay out of the clutches of the non-White boogas who only wanted to kill you for extended periods of time.

There are some interesting research results lately on segregation, it's the natural order of things UNLESS unnaturally pushed by Der Juden, I'll try to look up the research and post it in new threads.

Until then, keep your White kids out of nigger schools and homeschool them if you at all can! Take this from a former White kid!