An American Lion

The Soiling of Old Glory, Stanley J. Forman

I don’t know what your reaction is, but my reaction to this is one of dread because it sounds an awful lot like busing:

In a battle mirrored in other districts across the U.S., parents here have been fighting for months over which public high school their kids will attend: one under construction in an affluent corner of the Plano Independent School District, or an older school several miles away in the city’s more diverse downtown.

Last month, the district’s school board angered many parents when it created a Pac-Man-shaped zone that placed their children in the downtown school for grades nine and 10 instead of in the newer, closer campus.

The downtown school has the highest proportion of poor students of all high schools in the district; many are Hispanic and African-American.

“We want to go to our neighborhood school,” said Kelly McBrayer, a white, 48-year-old stay-at-home mother of three who lives near the site of the new high school.

Mrs. McBrayer and other parents from her neighborhood held a silent protest at a recent school-board meeting. They wore black T-shirts with the shape of the new attendance zone in bright pink and the message “Pac-Man in your neighborhood soon?”

Is this really a sign that we are going to have racial and class tensions from the 1970s all over again? Have we come far enough as a nation to avoid a replay of such a thing? 

“It’s going to be harder and harder to find a community that’s all white,” said Matthew Hall, a doctoral student at Pennsylvania State University who studies diversity in the suburbs. “The tensions that are happening in places like Plano are going to play out across all communities eventually.”

Other suburbs with quality schools are undergoing similar demographic changes to Plano, prompting many to revisit boundaries in an attempt to balance enrollment and integrate new students. The situation becomes especially fraught when states rank schools’ performance; these ratings influence both local housing prices and college admissions.

Some residents of Fairfax County, Va., filed a lawsuit in the county’s circuit court in 2008 to reverse a school board’s decision that sent their children from several high-achieving but overcrowded schools to an underutilized, lower-achieving high school with a bigger proportion of minority students. The court ruled in favor of the board.

The school district in Eden Prairie, Minn., outside Minneapolis, has been studying whether to change school boundaries to integrate an influx of Somali and Latin American immigrants who have transformed the school population from 90% Anglo in 2000 to 75% this school year.

Well, what about the education?

I don’t see anything positive that can come from uprooting children and sending them to schools for the sole purpose of allowing a school district to “balance” test scores and do better when it comes to hitting the targets set out by the so-called “No Child Left Behind” legislation that is still the law of the land. I’m not enthusiastic about repealing the law—I’m all for getting rid of the Department of Education entirely. If you want to have a simple Federal agency that sets and enforces funding and educational standards for all 50 states, fine, be my guest. The problem is, people in wildly different communities have competing agendas. Athletics versus academics, classroom size versus the length of the school day—where are the standards?

I’m also tired of the “Not in my Backyard” mentality that exists out there. That’s fine for rich people like me—nothing goes into my backyard, except a few errant stick urchins, a handful of hungry deer, and my son, who maintains an ecologically unfriendly mink habitat. Your backyard is your business. Next time, don’t live where they’re putting that privately-owned prison with the flimsy walls. If the school board tells you that there’s no where to build a decent school, get off your duff and find out who’s lying to you.

No one talks about the actual learning. If children leave school unable to read and write, that school has failed. Teaching to the test does not impart knowledge, nor does it prove that a skill has been transferred to the student.