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CAT Tracks for March 25, 2011
WELL, DUH...YA THINK |
Bears repeating...
This was the whole point...from DAY ONE!
Time to unfurl the banner...
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
From the Education News...
Blacks, Whites React to School Choice in Detroit
As school demographics change, whites are moving their children to schools with fewer blacks.
Many whites are taking advantage of the Michigan School Choice programs to move their children from more diverse schools to ones with fewer black students, The Detroit News reports. According to the most recent US census data, released on March 22, more than 184,000 African-Americans have moved out of Detroit in the past decade, most moving to the predominantly white suburban communities and the percentage of black students in those schools has jumped:
This trend has created a situation that Jason Booza, a demographics researcher at Wayne State University called “daytime segregation and nighttime integration.” The numbers show that in the neighborhoods where the African-American population has grown, the schools quickly become more black than the surrounding communities:
Although the state does not collect the race of students who take move schools, according to the data, the schools that receive the most incoming School Choice students are overwhelmingly white. Schools like Lakeview, which accepts 1500 students from outside the district, has only 192 black students.
As the leaving students take their state funds with them to their new schools, Metzger points out that eventually there will be a great inequality between the quality of education received by the richer whiter schools and poorer blacker schools. “We need to talk about it,” Metzger said.
The East Detroit School District’s African-American population jumped from 3 percent to 25 percent; Harper Woods, from 9 percent to 48 percent; and South Redford, from 13 percent to 37 percent.
But as black kids move into the schools, white kids move out. Although the participation in School Choice has grown across Michigan, in Macomb county, where the increase in black population is the largest in the state, participation has jumped 110%, compared to lower-double-digits growth elsewhere. More than 13,000 students in Macomb county now attend classes out of their neighborhood school.
In Roseville, where the community is 11 percent black, the schools are now 20 percent black; in the section of Warren that comprises Van Dyke Public Schools, the community is 24 percent black and the schools 40 percent; the East Detroit district is 25 percent black, but the schools, 40 percent.
