From the New York Times:
Dallas Schools, Long Segregated, Charge Forward on Diversity
By DANA GOLDSTEIN JUNE 19, 2017
DALLAS — Michael Hinojosa was about to enter the ninth grade in Dallas when a federal judge ordered the city’s public schools to integrate. It was 1971, and Mr. Hinojosa, the Mexican-American son of a preacher, was suddenly reassigned to a new school, whose football coach told him that it was too late to join the squad — its roster had been set months earlier. “I had a traumatic experience” with desegregation, Mr. Hinojosa said.
So, too, did Dallas. Like many cities, it replaced one form of segregation with another, as white and middle-class families moved to the suburbs or put their children in private schools. Now Mr. Hinojosa is the superintendent, and the Dallas school system, one of the country’s most segregated urban districts, has become a national leader in trying to figure out how to encourage students of all backgrounds to willingly go to school together.
When it comes to educations, “segregated” now means: not enough white kids. On the other hand, when it comes to adults voting, not enough whites is seen by the New York Times as a feature, not a bug. Granted, that’s kind of a logical contradiction, but when you’re holding The Megaphone, you don’t have to worry about being called out on minor issues like not making any sense.
Dallas is one of just a handful of cities trying ambitious integration programs, even though nationwide, public schools are more segregated today than they were in 1970.
You know, America is more nonwhite than in 1970, too. Funny how that works.
A third of black and Hispanic students attend schools that are more than 90 percent nonwhite, according to research from the Century Foundation, and those racially segregated schools are overwhelmingly low-performing. Research shows that poor children who attend school alongside more privileged peers score higher on standardized tests and earn more money as adults.
But you are running out of white kids to salve the low test scores of nonwhite kids with.
… Rather than admit students by grades, test scores or auditions, which tends to turn schools into enclaves of affluence, these schools admit them by lottery, with no admissions standards. They are organized around popular themes like single-sex education, science, the arts, bilingual classes and professional internships.
The idea is for clever white parents to agree upon certain Dallas public schools they will all send their children to before the Hispanic masses figure out which are the good (white) schools and ruin everything.
… Dallas has plenty of white and college-educated parents to draw from. The region is the nation’s second-fastest-growing, with an economic boom driven by the financial services and health sectors. On weekday evenings, throngs of well-heeled, mostly white urbanites take to the Katy Trail, an elevated, tree-lined path north of downtown. They walk their dogs, stroll with their babies and jog while wearing university T-shirts and expensive sneakers. But these people have not enrolled their children in public schools, with the exception of a few coveted neighborhood schools and selective magnet programs.
The district’s student population is 93 percent Hispanic and black. In the 1960s, before court-ordered desegregation, more than half the students were white.
Okay, but white people don’t breed well in captivity. Dallas County is only 18% white children. What Dallas City is I don’t know, but your fundamental problem is You Are Running Out of White Children.
America’s big educational problem is that it’s running out of white children. Our ideologies still assume that America is a white-dominated country with only a small percentage of minorities, but the reality is that whites are rapidly heading toward being a minority too. So theories of solving the problems of blacks and Hispanics by diluting their troubles in the great mass of white children are out of date.
