50 years later

[Gonz]

Brown vs Board of Education was decided May 17, 1954. With history showing forced integration doesn't work, why don't people learn to learn & quit placing blame?

A story in the USA Today starts off badly, accidently sideswipes the real issue & re-corrects its course to avoid the real probelm.

The blame game

It may come as no surprise that Toney, with 94% of families living in poverty, has some of the county's lowest test scores. And that Vanderlyn, with no poor students, has the highest. Toney's student body is made up of all African-Americans; Vanderlyn's has virtually none.

The real problem shows up

The current form of segregation has a direct connection to kids' lives, resulting in a wide skills gap. Recent federal figures show that the average black or Hispanic 12th-grader's skills are on par with those of white eighth-graders.

Blaming but almost veering into it

The retreat from integration troubles some scholars, who say efforts such as No Child Left Behind will fall flat unless society addresses pressing issues in poor children's lives such as hunger, crime and substandard housing. Anything less, they say, will leave children in worse shape than before Brown because the close-knit minority communities of the 1950s -- including a large, stable pool of black teachers -- don't exist anymore.

a confused paragraph

Experts say the effects of poverty fall squarely on minority students. John Logan, a demographic researcher at State University of New York-Albany, has found that the average black or Hispanic student attends an elementary school in which about two-thirds of classmates are poor; for whites, fewer than a third of classmates are poor.

near miss

Even middle-class minority students aren't exempt: The average black family with an income of more than $60,000 lives in a neighborhood with a higher poverty rate than the average white family earning less than $30,000, he says.

CRASH!!!

Even when they're in integrated schools, poor and minority students often find themselves in less-challenging classes. Wealthy students are more than twice as likely as poor students to be on a ''college preparatory'' track in high school, while black students have much higher enrollment rates in special education classes. According to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, they are more likely to be labeled ''mentally retarded'' the higher the socioeconomic status of their school.

For all of its financial advantages, perhaps Vanderlyn's most important asset is its parents, 100% of whom belong to the PTA. On a recent afternoon, moms in jogging suits filed through the main office in a steady parade, many arriving or leaving with stacks of papers.

Orr, on the other hand, has a devil of a time getting parents interested in school. At a parents' night last January, only three showed up. It's clear that this is her biggest problem. More than half of Toney students are from single-parent families, and Orr says 40% of her kids are being raised by someone other than a parent.

Why is this reporter and so many parents & scholars worrying about certification percentages & neighborhoods instaed of parental responsibility? The web edition of the story is missing quite a bit of teh story. Things like percentages of single parents & the fact that whites are also living in these conditions. It's not a race issue but somebody wants to keep that facade up.