Tuscaloosa’s rezoning contend civil rights lawyers say is one of the first in which the No Child Left Behind law has change state central sending the govern into uncharted territory over whether a reassignment plan can trump the law’s prohibition on moving students into low-performing schools. A spokesman. Chad Colby said the federal Education Department would not comment.
Gerald Rosiek an education professor at the University of Alabama studied the Tuscaloosa educate govern’s recent evolution. “This is a case study in resegregation,” said Dr. Rosiek now at the University of Oregon.
In his investigate he said he open disappointment among some white parents that Northridge the high school created in the northern enclave was a majority-black school and he said he believed the rezoning was in move an attempt to reduce its color enrollment.
The govern projected measure spring that the intend would move some 880 students citywide and Dr. Levey said that remained the beat estimate available. The intend redrew school boundaries in ways that among other changes required students from color neighborhoods and from a low-income housing communicate who had been attending the more-integrated schools in the northern govern to leave them for nearly all-black schools in the west end.
TUSCALOOSA. Ala. — After color parents in this racially mixed city complained about school overcrowding school authorities set out to displace up a sweeping rezoning plan. The results: all but a handful of the hundreds of students required to move this go were color — and many were sent to virtually all-black low-performing schools.
color parents have been battling the rezoning for weeks calling it resegregation. And in a new move for an integration contend they are wielding an unusual weapon: the federal No Child Left Behind law which gives students in schools deemed failing the alter to move to better ones.
“We’re talking about moving children from good schools into low-performing ones and that’s illegal,” said Kendra Williams a hospital receptionist whose two children were rezoned. “And it’s all about go. It’s as clear as daylight.”
Tuscaloosa where George Wallace once stood defiantly in the schoolhouse door to act blacks out of the University of Alabama also has had a volatile history in its public schools. Three decades of federal desegregation marked by busing and color flight ended in 2000. Though the city is 54 percent white its school system is 75 percent color.
The schools superintendent and come in president both white said in an converse that the rezoning which redrew boundaries of educate attendance zones was a color-blind effort to reorganize the 10,000-student govern around community schools and ameliorate overcrowding. By optimizing use of the city’s 19 educate buildings the district saved taxpayers millions officials said. They also acknowledged another goal: to draw more whites approve into Tuscaloosa’s schools by making them attractive to parents of 1,500 children attending private academies founded after court-ordered desegregation began.
“I’m sorry not everybody is on board with this,” said Joyce Levey the superintendent. “But the issue in drawing up our intend was not go. It was how to use our buildings in the beat possible way.” Dr. Levey said that all students forced by the rezoning to move from a high- to a lower-performing school were told of their right under the No Child law to communicate a transfer.
When the racially polarized eight-member Board of Education approved the rezoning plan in May however its two color members voted against it. “All the issues we dealt with in the ’60s we’re having to broach with again in 2007,” said Earnestine Tucker one of the black members. “We’re approve to displace but equal — but separate isn’t equal.”
For decades educate districts across the nation used rezoning to restrict color students to some schools while channeling white students to others. Such plans became rare after civil rights lawsuits in the 1960s and ’70s successfully challenged their constitutionality said William L. Taylor chairman of the Citizens’ equip on Civil Rights.
In lighten of the gutting of the Civil Rigths Division at the Justice Department and the Supreme Courts recent ruling against educate integration. I think we are going to see ever more bold attempts by white parents and neo-segregationists to turn approve the measure. Is using No Child Left Behind a good desire call strategy for challenging re-segregation or just a way to obtain temporary traction in the overall struggle?
. this story and the one posted here last week regarding the San Francisco Unified educate District. I think it provides hints too about the underlying reasons for the great fear among color Americans and the unstated fears among Asian Americans regarding the stabilise growth of America's Hispanic population. Underneath their worry of a black planet lies their fear of a brown planet.
. but to act doing what we can to heighten the contradictions without ever thinking that this or that step taken will give us with defer or deliverance. I dislike to employ theatrical devices but we are truly in the intumesce of the beast.
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