Parent resistance thwarts local school desegregation efforts

Regina Garcia Cano and Sarah Rankin, Associated Press
Updated 2:02 pm CST, Wednesday, January 29, 2020



Photo: Steve Helber, AP

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In this Dec. 16, 2019, photo, attendees hold signs during the Richmond School Board's last public hearing on redistricting at Ginter Park Elementary School in Richmond, Va. From New York City to Richmond, sweeping proposals to ease inequities have been scaled back or canceled after encountering a backlash. In Virginia’s capital city, the school board approved a plan that reassigned some students but rejected more sweeping proposals that would have diversified Richmond’s whitest elementary schools.

ELLICOTT CITY, Md. (AP) — As they try to address stubborn school segregation, many of the nation's school districts confront a familiar obstacle: resistance from affluent, well-organized and mostly white parents to changes affecting their children’s classrooms.

From New York City to Richmond, Virginia, sweeping proposals to ease inequities have been scaled back or canceled after encountering a backlash. The debates have been charged with emotion and racist rhetoric reminiscent of the aftermath of Brown vs. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that threw out state laws establishing segregated schools.

While the federal government has largely stepped back from the aggressive role it played decades ago in school desegregation, some local districts have acted in recognition of increasingly apparent racial divides and the long-established educational benefits of integration.

In Howard County, Maryland, a suburban community between Washington and Baltimore, one parent who supports reforms lamented the presence of "concentrated poverty in certain schools and concentrated wealth in other schools.”

More:
https://www.chron.com/news/education/article/Parent-resistance-thwarts-local-school-15013702.php