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Letters to the EditorsIn Pinellas, our schools still need race ratios© St. Petersburg Times published March 17, 2003 I have found the Feb. 26 and 27 stories in the St. Petersburg Times concerning race ratios in the schools, along with the conduct of the Pinellas County School district and the School Board, to be very interesting. The question that arises from such stories is: Why are the race ratios necessary? The answer lies within your own reported stories. I had thought long and hard about this very serious question over the years. However, as a member of the District Monitoring and Advisory Committee, it became very clear why Jim Sanderlin, the St. Petersburg attorney who filed the original class-action lawsuit, had initiated the ratios and why it was necessary to continue them as long as possible. In your Feb. 26 story (Ratios leave empty classrooms), it is noted that the school district had changed the capacity with regard to various schools. The current superintendent, however, had been told directly by the School Board that he was not to play the capacity game. This was because the changing of capacities has a direct effect on how the choice plan and the court order, which gave rise to the plan, are to operate. If you manipulate the capacities, you can affect not only diversity but also school improvement. Provisions within the choice plan make use of the information gained when a school is underchosen and specify a mechanism and timetable to initiate school improvement. Human and economic resources are directed at helping an underchosen school become more attractive to all parents. If the capacity is artificially manipulated, then provisions of the choice plan and/or court order may not come into play. The bottom line is that the actions of the school district do not engender trust. Despite a court order -- a plan enunciated by the School Board which was agreed to -- and the very actions of the board itself, the current superintendent believes that he can unilaterally take whatever action he believes necessary. This is simply not correct and, again, was not the way the superintendent was supposed to act, as advised by the board. Jim Sanderlin, who was elevated to an Appellate Court judge position prior to his death and who has been honored by having one of the new schools bear his name, understood the conduct of the school district very well. If material and monies and teachers are to be of the same quality for black children, there must be some type of requirement that the school district will concern itself with the problems of black children. The race ratios are not designed as a social experiment; they are not designed as a penalty to anyone, but rather as a means of keeping the schools from degenerating into the situation that existed prior to 1964, where the schools are racially segregated and the white schools will get primary emphasis with regard to teachers, monies and materials. Thus, the ratios are needed, particularly until such time as it has been shown that the School Board is willing to require the superintendent to administer the school system such that it protects the interests of all children. The board can begin exercising such leadership and reassuring the black community that its directive with regard to capacity will be followed by immediately asking for the resignation of the superintendent.
Supporting true equality Re: Resist that inclination to resegregate our schools., by Howard Troxler, March 10. Troxler claims that lack of integration is always wrong. We forget that before forcible integration there were a lot of black schools that produced students who were ahead of both the black and the white kids in the forcibly integrated schools of today. There was a problem in that often black schools had less money than white schools. They were usually compared with white schools in affluent metropolitan areas, as the poor white schools were in remote rural areas. It would have taken the professional complainers too much work to get to those areas so they could compare poor black schools with poor white schools. While any fool can predict schools with more resources will generally produce better students than those with less resources, given the same laws, they compared more affluent white schools with poorer black schools and decided that separate was inherently unequal. We do not keep track of what percentage of the student body is Italian and what percentage is Greek. Greeks and Italians are considered to be equal so there is no need to keep track of the integration of Greeks and Italians (or Germans or Danes, etc.) by percentage as they are all considered equal. Those parents who are for neighborhood schools regardless of racial ratio are not supporting "resegregation" -- they are claiming it doesn't matter and are supporting true equality! Government-imposed segregation was wrong, so we want to fix it with government-imposed integration, which is equally wrong. Claiming "separate but equal" is wrong I find really offensive, as it implies that black people and white people are not now equal and will never be equal. Black people and white people will only be equal when we stop keeping track of racial percentages! Only when it doesn't matter whether a school is all black, all white or some percentage in between will we have true equality.
This isn't the '50s Re: Resist that inclination to resegregate our schools, by Howard Troxler. It is nice that this country allows its people the right to speak their minds, just as Howard Troxler does in this column. The people of Pinellas County have spoken, too, but Troxler thinks that we are all wrong. We did not want the new school assignment plan from the beginning. The thought of losing control of your children's educational epicenter was at best tormenting to all families involved, both black and white. We have feared extended bus trips, the loss of friends, the instability and all of the additional cost to the families that was possible under this plan. We feel lucky and relieved that we received our top choices. How much more hell do we need to put our kids through? All people want for their kids are safe, equally funded, nurturing schools in our neighborhoods. What is wrong with that? We are paying for schools, so why would we not get to use the schools the way we wish? You cannot in any way compare the '50s to the present as schools of yesterday were not equally funded and some were definitely sub par. Schools today are well funded and some in more disadvantaged areas get more money. Troxler is saying that an all-black school can never be on equal footing with an all-white school, and I do not agree with that. How would he feel as a black child having that kind of cloud over his head? No one but Troxler and the NAACP cares if a school is all black or all white.
A matter of educational responsibility Re: Consultant says race holds black students back, March 7. Whatever happened to personal responsibility? I am a public school teacher in Pinellas County. Children, regardless of color, pass or fail based upon merit. If students do their homework, come to class each day prepared to learn and behave in a manner compliant with school rules, they will succeed. If students rarely complete assignments, come to class unprepared and show consistent disregard for school rules, they will probably fail. Instead of pursuing this lawsuit, these parents should be spending their valuable time at home, helping their child study for an upcoming test or helping to complete a school project. Educational research shows that the No. 1 factor in educational success is parental involvement.
It is their own fault Re: Consultant says race holds black students back. This is one more group of people trying to extract money from the trough. They say that black students are not promoted at the same rate as white students. Wonder why that is? Could it be that the black students are not performing as well as they should in the classroom? Maybe they are out on the streets late at night, as Bill Maxwell says, instead of doing their homework? They say that the black student is 3.8 times more likely to be disciplined than the white student. Could that be because they are more likely to be a problem? They are busy proving that they can't be "dissed" by whitey, that they are stronger, etc., instead of getting along with their peers and their instructors. If they have poor scores and don't get promoted and do get disciplined, it is their own fault, not the school's. Wonder why everything that they think of as bad, is always someone else's fault? Maybe they should read Bill Maxwell.
Lawsuit is wasteful Re: Consultant says race holds black students back. In this "politically correct" and "everyone's a victim" climate, it is easy to see why no one states the obvious. As a substitute teacher (not a professional teacher), I see firsthand why black students' FCAT scores and promotion rates are lower than those of whites. The reason is not discrimination but a lack of discipline, both scholastically and personally, as is shown in the "3.8 times more likely to be disciplined" finding. Discipline begins at home. This lawsuit is a waste of taxpayers' money that the school system desperately needs.
Tax dollars at work I hope I was not the only one to make the connection. In the March 14 B section there was an article (What's missing here?) regarding the FCAT and the missing number 3 on a ruler. The defective rulers were created by NCS Pearson, a company in the middle of a three-year $105-million contract to administer and score the Jeb Bush-backed FCAT. This may seem like a simple mistake, but as the director of the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association asked, "If they can't get a ruler right, what else are they getting wrong?" Read on. In an unrelated op-ed column (The homeland-security money pit), I read that the George Bush/GOP-backed Transportation Security Administration is turning into a fiscal black hole. TSA awarded a $104-million recruitment contract to a company that ripped off taxpayers by racking up its charges to $700-million. Can you guess who that company was? Yep, NCS Pearson. There are no funds for education, health care and after-school care, but plenty of tax dollars for wealthy state and federal contractors. And the beat goes on.
The most famous liar The March 10 article Liar, liar tongues on fire was surely interesting. This provocative piece, outlining a study done by doctors at Yale University, found that some chronic liars are capable, even disciplined people. The writer cited a Pulitzer-Prize winning historian, a Superior Court judge and an Arizona newspaper publisher as classic examples of liars. The story failed to note that most famous liar of modern America, William Jefferson Clinton. Perhaps he did not want to overstate the obvious.
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