The Michigan school district investigating whether an elementary school field trip that excluded white students was illegal has disbanded the black-students-only academic support group that participated in the outing two weeks ago.This guy should be treated with the same disdain a white guy would get if he suggested white kids be given a special trip that excluded blacks. If we're ever going to be a post-racial country, that's what has to happen.
“We have essentially put it on hold while we wait for the final determination on the investigation into possible violation of the State's Proposal 2,” Ann Arbor School District spokeswoman Liz Margolis told FoxNews.com.
Thirty members of the Dicken Elementary School’s AA Lunch Bunch, a support group designed to bridge the gap in test scores between white and black students, were taken on a field trip two weeks ago to meet Alec Gallimore, an African-American rocket scientist who is an aerospace engineering professor and propulsion lab director at the University of Michigan.
The school principal, Mike Madison, who is black, helped organize the trip, saying he hoped to encourage the students to pursue a career in the sciences. Hoping to quell rising tensions over the black-students-only outing, Madison sent a lengthy letter home to parents in which he explained the reasoning behind the trip.
He admitted, however, that it could have been “approached and arranged in a better way.”
“The intent of our field trip was not to segregate or exclude students, as has been reported, but rather to address the societal issues, roadblocks and challenges that our African-American children will face as they pursue a successful academic education here in our community,” Madison wrote.
But instead of quashing tensions, the letter fueled a week of controversy and an onslaught of parental complaints that culminated late last week in the school district’s launch of an investigation into whether the field trip violated Proposal 2, a new state law that bans racial favoritism in public schools.
The investigation is ongoing, and the Lunch Break will be out to lunch until it's wrapped up.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
When Segregation Goes Bad
Isn't segregation always considered bad? Not if the black school administrators are segregating black kids from white kids. In that case it's an "educational opportunity", but sometimes that doesn't even work:
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