Posted by
Michael on Thursday, July 10, 2008 2:48:31 AM
I'm not really up to putting up a new article for this blog, so I thought I'd put up a Flashback article from February 2007. It deals with the use of racial quotas by public schools, a practice that has now been declared illegal. It's one of my favorite articles of mine, so I hope you like it too.
As I write, the Seattle School District is defending its policy of race-based school assignments to the U.S. Supreme Court. This is a hot-button issue that has gotten Seattle mentioned throughout the mainstream media.
The school district's official defense for its race-based assignments is that it "enhances students' education by introducing them to people with multiple backgrounds and points of view."
That may be what the bureaucrats at the school district tell themselves, but for many of the people who actually felt the brunt of their policies, opinions are quite different.
Added challenges
In a recent column by nationally syndicated columnist George Will entitled "Justice or Racism?" he cited two parents, Jill Kurfirst and Winnie Bachwitz, who both felt that they were discriminated against.
Both parents had children who were assigned to distant schools that required them to get up at 5 a.m. and return at 8 p.m. at the earliest. They only avoided this by taking their children out of the school district altogether.
Jake Foxcurran, a student at University of Washington and vice president of the UW College Republicans, voiced concerns over the policy.
"It doesn't do anyone a favor when students are thrown into an academic environment that is overly challenging," he said. "It makes the teacher's job impossible, it holds other students back and [it] leads to dropouts among the unprepared students. The best thing is simply to allow student placement to be based on merit alone."
All of my siblings were negatively affected by this policy, as I imagine thousands of other Seattle students were. I, myself, was forced to attend Meany Middle School after attending View Ridge Elementary School for five years. The racial taunting and bullying I experienced left me with a chip on my shoulder that did not coincide well with the behavioral pro-blems I had due to Asperger's syndrome.
The goal of the school's policy was to fill a "40-60 balance" quota for all of its schools. If the student's skin color did not fulfill the needs of the district's desired quota, it didn't matter what the student thought. Diversity and multiculturalism were more important than the well-being of the student.
Punishing the children
One of the 20th century's most famed American presidents, John F. Kennedy, spoke out against the use of racial quotas. He did so in 1963, in the midst of the civil-rights movement, when the White House and civil-rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. still had the ear of one another.
Kennedy said, "I don't think we can undo the past. In fact, the past is going to be with us for a good many years in uneducated men and women who lost their chance for a decent education. We have to do the best we can now. That is what we are trying to do. I don't think quotas are a good idea. I think it is a mistake to begin to assign quotas on the basis of religion or race - color - nationality.... We are too mixed, this society of ours, to begin to divide ourselves on the basis of race or color."
King's dream was not to have generations of white Americans feel guilt for sins of the past, or for generations of black Americans to feel they can only achieve with the help of the government. He saw a future where blacks and whites stood shoulder by shoulder equally, not eyeing each other suspiciously.
By punishing children for the sins of history, we're corrupting our future and leading our society further into darkness.
Michael Powell can be reached at mptimes@ nwlink.com. He also has a web log at deschamps.townhall.com. His post "Mohammed in the Supreme Court" was the featured post on Townhall.com in early December and is the eighth most-read blog entry.