The parents in Walthall County, Mississippi were informed by a judge last Tuesday that they could no longer choose among the handful of public schools in their district. The Justice Department’s minions, prodded by the ACLU, decided that these children must attend their neighborhood school, no crossing the street to pick a different educational environment.
Not that these rural folks ever had many choices in this tiny community, much less good ones. All but one of their schools are rated academically unacceptable and that single exception is barely hanging on by the skin of its academic teeth, having been ranked as a complete failure by the state. The Salem Attendance Center, the choice for a majority of white parents along with thirty percent of black parents, was just ripped from their lousy menu of options in the name of serving diversity.
The Justice Department accused the Walthall County School District in rural Mississippi of annually permitting more than 300 students, most of them white, to transfer to a school outside of their residential area, shifting its racial makeup.
Further, administrators at three other schools grouped most of the white students into their own classrooms “resulting in significant numbers of segregated all-black classrooms at each grade level,” the U.S. government said in a court filing.
The Justice Department is still keen on knuckling their bright dreams of diversity on the Southern parents. Commonsense and parental rights be damned, it’s patently clear that the state doesn’t give a ripe shit about the quality of little Suzy’s or Tamika’s education, just that it’s parsed out in a classroom representing the correct racial quotas of the district.
Liberals have a strong belief in fairy tales and they’ve built a policy line of dreamy castles on top a mountain of inane federal legislation to support their delusions. Problem is, wishing doesn’t make it so, neither does waving a government wand full of fairy dust backed by onerous legal sanctions that strip parental rights straight down to the bone and ignore local custom.
You can’t legislate your way out of people’s natural proclivity to seek common ground and you certainly can’t throw down a mandate that will erase a low I.Q. or raise learning ability in a population that’s isn’t inherently capable of meeting high academic standards.
Throwing black students in with white students by judicial fiat won’t give the desired results, no matter how hard you tweak the system. Smarts simply aren’t catching, they don’t magically rub off, it’s a concrete genetic thing. You’d think the liberal Darwinists would be jumping all over that simple fact.
The desegregation act aimed to create equal education for blacks, a worthy goal. All children deserve the same basic resources in the public school system; quality teachers, materials, curriculum and buildings should be the norm. The act also held unspoken expectations that will never be met, framed as it was in delusional lies and fanciful thinking. People aren’t equal in capability and generally have no use for forced sociability. This tolerant piece of racial equality/friendship legislation could only have been written by a complete imbeciles or men who willfully denied the intrinsic truth of human nature.
I took some time to look into the Walthall county school district. The percentages in the Reuters story look meaningful and scary, indicative of vile Southern racism, while strongly implying that the black children of Walthall County are being discriminated against and denied the best educational opportunities. The hard numbers tell a different story.
The focus of the Justice Department is the Salem Academy, a small school of 624 students serving kindergarten through twelfth grade in a low slung, aging building of crumbling brick. The children wear simple uniforms each day and play on grounds that have seen better days. Judging by the photos, it isn’t exactly a state of the art campus.
The number that brought the power of Justice into play is 70%. That’s the percentage of white students attending this school, which is located in a predominately black neighborhood. White parents asked for a transfer and the school district had the temerity to grant their requests, but looking at the steadily changing demographics of the school’s population, it’s apparent that many black parents must have also asked for, and received, transfers out of Salem.
I can’t blame the black parents for choosing Tylertown’s primary and secondary schools over the Salem Academy, a quick glance at the test scores make it an easy choice for the best chance at academic success in Walthall county.
Tylertown’s student body is 80% black, not representative of neighborhood demographics, a glitch doesn’t seem to concern the Feds, and that school is beating the pants off of Salem in academic testing. If you think it’s important for your child to master the basics of reading, writing and math, you pick Tylertown. If you would like your child to have a chance of absorbing higher math, language art skills and possibly attending college someday, you pick Tylertown. It’s a no brainer, the school is far and away the best of a bad lot.
It’s also interesting to note that the white students at Tylertown are meeting proficiency standards at rates far exceeding their white counterparts at Salem.
I’m quite sure that the growing predominance of whites at Salem is entirely based on parental desires to remove their white children out of an environment dominated by the black community. I would probably do the same given the limited options if I was unable to homeschool my boys. I don’t know a single parent of any color in my neighborhood that would willingly subject their child to the halls of a predominately black public school, though most educated people are loath to admit that simple truth out loud.
Salem parents and the superintendent may very well be racists in the eyes of the justice department, but why do they care? Black children in Walthall are obviously getting the best educational experience available in the county by attending Tylertown. Is the judge going to insist that the black children who transferred out of Salem be returned to a substandard school in order to meet neighborhood racial quotas? I’m betting that sticky problem hasn’t come into play. Can you imagine telling room full of poor black parents that they’re children are damned to an abysmal education due to federal diversity guidelines?
Regarding the charges of segregated classrooms, I’m assuming they’re referring to Tylertown, which is the major school serving the most children in the district. I think it’s highly likely that these classes are based on academic placement, not race.
Algebra I test scores broken down along racial lines show 69% of whites passing or exceeding proficiency, while only 31% blacks met the same standard. Similar differences are found in the other three levels of testing. Biology 83% vs. 43%. U.S. History 76% vs. 40%. English II 68% vs. 60%. A clear disparity that would support my assumption.
A quick glance at the page honoring the Tylertown Chief Club’s 2008-2009 middle and high school students who achieved advanced scores on the state test shows forty smiling recipients. Twenty five of the faces are white.
I don’t think racism is playing any part in the small number of classes representing a white majority of students. Children are likely being sorted by ability and performance according to test scores, not skin color.
Walthall County, Mississippi doesn’t have a segregation problem, they have a systemic failure of adequate education problem. The federal government looks the fool in this case and it angers me that they have the audacity to inform a small community on how to sort their children.
Color-by-numbers doesn’t work on any level, it never has and never will. It’s a damn shame liberals refuse to admit that they were wrong when they shoved their insane social science dogma down the country’s throat at the expense of our children’s education, parental preferences and social custom. That we still allow their institutional progeny to wreak damage on our communities and schools with a failed policy is something that ought to shame you and I.
References
Walthall County School District
Walthall County School District Report Card
Mississippi Office of Reasearch and Statistics type in Walthall for current information.
I blame my dislexical proclivities for misreading the word, “desegregation” as disintegration. I guess it means the same thing.
Touche’ sweets.
In some European countries, parents are free to choose which public school their child attends, and Sweden and Belgium have voucher systems as well as public school choice. Chile has an extensive voucher system which pays for public and private education, representing 90% of its students.
The teachers unions here will not permit vouchers or choice because if they understand one thing, it is that they cannot cut it in an environment where others have the right to chose them or avoid them; great numbers of these teachers and administrators would have no work, and there would be no universal method for the chattering class to inject cultural poison so successfully to young minds. We have seen again and again that the system does not mind terribly when kids rot or become sociopathic in very sick schools. They’ll study it. Send more money. These bastards belong in jail for child abuse.
When the true dollar cost of public education is calculated– not the rigged figures reluctantly provided by districts and states, which do not include capital costs–most classrooms fall into the $200,000 to $400,000 range. DC is higher, and enough said. That is fantastic opportunity in waiting.
The citizen has been raised with a nearly religious respect over the public school monopoly and that must be broken, or we will be.
You hit the nail on the head in your closing sentence, James.
People need to stop assuming that the government is their best, wise friend when it comes to educating their children.
The education bureaucracy, alongside the liberal quangos foisting a spoil of tainted special interest dogma on the system, has an agenda that’s not necessarily in the public’s best interests.
Mean IQ may be lower in some races, but the proportion of high IQ kids is the same at the end of the bell curve no matter the race.
Most National Merit Finalists are in the top 1/2 of 1%. If you look at the faces of the National Merit Finalists in most districts, they are Anglos, Indians, Japanese or Chinese. There are very few Amerindian, Black, or Hispanic kids.
If desegregation had worked, if the system worked, there would be a high degree of diversity at the bright end of the bell curve.
The ground truth is the most important truth. We’ve lost three generations of minority kids for some reason. It is a disgrace.
I think it may be time for an underground railroad of sorts. Our schools have been black holes of waste and incompetence for so long they think it will never end. Kansas City, my home town has closed a good portion of their elementary schools. Not so long ago, residents in the KC suburbs in KANSAS were ordered by the Supreme court to pay for Kansas City Missouri Schools. Talk about taxation without representation. And did any of the redistribution of the wealth help that fading but always corrupt city? No. It is just as bad as it was before. Only 10 years after the graft was ordered, there was even less to show for it. Clearly, this is an object lesson.
One would do well to listen to those rare, British educated African preachers and economists who have warned, repeatedly about the evils of western ‘charity’. It has only done more harm than good.
Seeing how poorly educated my youngest has been this year, I am probably going to have to home school her next year.
Jewel–
There is an underground railroad in Chicago. School districts in the suburbs have so many refugees that they hire private detectives to follow kids home, and when home is two buses and an El to Chicago, they expel them.
My daughter did her volunteer credit work for DePaul one semester as a teachers aid in a Chicago second grade class. She called me in tears. There is nothing more dishonorable than abusing the young.
My 9 year old attends a Parochial school staffed by 6 Philippine nuns . Total school enrollment, 125 kids K-6. It cost’s me about $4k per year. It’s an old building and the playground consists of the parking lot of the Catholic church across the street.
Neither my wife nor myself are Catholic.
Kids from this school who go on to the local government schools after 6th grade routinely skip a grade.
The equivalent govt. schools spend $13k-14k per kid.
It has the added advantage of the nuns having an average height of 4’11″ at 6′ 4″ I feel like a combine harvester in a field of corn. My 9 year old is within 1″ of his teacher.
These people do not take shit from the peasants (that would be me, you and our children)
Here’s the dress code:
Girls (all grades): Plaid jumper, yellow uniform blouse with Peter Pan collar (long or short sleeve), navy blue sweater, navy blue socks (long or short), and a good quality black shoe (1 inch to 1-1/2 inch heel only). (Pantyhose are not permitted.)
Boys (Kindergarten only): Navy blue dress pants (no denim, corduroy, or slacks with contrasting stitching), the special yellow shirt bearing the School’s logo, and a good quality black shoe.
Boys (Grades 1-6): Navy blue dress pants (no denim, corduroy, or slacks with contrasting stitching), yellow standard dress shirt (long or short sleeve), navy blue uniform tie, navy blue sweater, dark solid belt, and a good quality black shoe.
Doesn’t seem to me that this educating kids stuff is rocket science.
I am looking for something more evil and sinister and Galtian, James. I am talking about setting up school rooms. Not using any public school system at all. Using church basements. Start disappearing the kids. The parents are the ones who should be on strike against the school systems. The kids are the ones who should be on strike against the schools.
Have we gotten so soft, so comfortable and so uncreative that we are willing to go to a tea party with a sign and rant, or are we willing to do something that would really put the knife to the throat of the beast and slice. The only way you do that is to remove your kids.
Consequences? Bring em on.
I think the first thing I would do if I were in charge would be to dismantle the NEA , it would be history.
Second, I’d declare the Teacher’s Unions illegal and scatter them to oblivion.
Third, I’d place a great deal of emphasis (unremitting pressure and relentless scolding, might be a more accurate description) from my bully pulpit on parental responsibility. The fed is not responsible for your children’s education – you are.
Your local school board and superintendent should hear your voice loud and clear. Your child’s teachers and administrators should see your face and know who you are.
Your child should be clean, well fed, rested and motivated by you when they show up to learn. Your child should know that there will be consequences at home as well as school for bad behavior and poor study habits. Teach your children to be polite and respectful.
Take responsibility for your school system and your offspring, parents.
Jewel, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. Could you imagine the utter shock waves that would reverberate through the halls of power if 40% of the nation’s school children suddenly dropped out of public education?
I think I’d pay good money to see that provocative public slam.
Problem is we have gotten soft. My children attend, or will be attending, the top three public schools in Texas. These schools have their annoyances, but they do educate our children quite well and in a very safe environment.
Leaving would be a hard thing – for me and the kids.
I guess I haven’t reached the point of putting my principles to a fine point, yet.
James, funny you mention Chicago’s underground school railroad. We have a similar thing in my school district, especially in the elementary and middle schools my children attend.
We have one apartment complex in the boundary and they’ve found many students with different surnames using the same addresses located in the complex. Indian and Asian families would pool their resources to rent an apartment to secure residency, drop their children off in the morning to board the bus then pick them up to drive home across town in the afternoon.
At one point we had two school directory volunteers verifying these duplicate addresses as legitimate residences and they would find empty apartments – no furniture, no nothing.
It’s probably a common occurrence in the better school districts.
It is here, too, in the Amish Boondox. One of the consequences of building housing developments is that all the unsold houses become either section 8 or rentals, and guess who moves in.
I would agree more with your point about being involved with your school district, and add that you should volunteer.
Problem is, that when you get into places where the values of the parents are at odds with the values of the teachers and the administration, you get stonewalled on everything.
I once asked to volunteer in my 1st grader’s class, expecting a huge, “Hell to the yeah!’ from the overworked teacher whose class was way too much for one woman to handle, but I got a slammed door in my face. I found out later why: She couldn’t control her class, and so there was little teaching. She was also caught giving her kids the answers on the PSSA Standardized Bullshit tests in math. She couldn’t be fired…..tenured.
It was sad reading I went to kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade, 8th grade and four different high schools in Mississippi. Two of the five school districts I attended in Mississippi are failing and one is barely passing. The friends I went to school with in the failing districts either moved out or sent their children to private schools. When my folks and I moved back to Mississippi after living in Virginia, I was shocked at how bad the schools were (and we moved to one of the leading districts). One high school I attended only required 16 credits to graduate because they didn’t offer any higher math classes than Algebra II. Chemistry and Spanish were discontinued when the teacher left. Another high school I transferred to put me in Voc Ed classes “because I wasn’t college material” even though I made 28 on the ACT. It is sad to say, at least from my experience in Mississippi, education is mostly a baby sitting service. Why do parents put up with this? I don’t know unless they resent someone “acting smart”. After living in the Delta, in the Piney Woods and in Jackson, I saw that smart people got the hell out. The remnant are content to live the way they always have and they resist change to the death.
Daphne,
I have been fascinated with this story. From the first day I read it I was convinced that the entire story was not being told.
I write a weekly column (see me on Townhall.com) and plan on writing something up this week. I would love to discuss some of this with you as I have been having a devil of a time finding any real information.
would you be so kind as to email me; I promise not to take up too much time.
Thank you
Joseph