News that makes you angry

[Lamplighter]

TV news this morning showe an Ohio mother sent to jail because she enrolled her child in the wrong school.
Of course, the Mom being Black and the school being better
than her assigned "neighborhood school" had nothing to do with it

A one-off event ? We are beyond racial bigotry ?

This is your Tea Party in action...
Washington Post
Republican school board in N.C. backed by tea party abolishes integration policy
By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 12, 2011; 12:38 PM

RALEIGH, N.C. - The sprawling Wake County School District has long been a rarity.
Some of its best, most diverse schools are in the poorest sections of this capital city.
And its suburban schools, rather than being exclusive enclaves,
include children whose parents cannot afford a house in the neighborhood.

But over the past year, a new majority-Republican school board
backed by national tea party conservatives has set the district on a strikingly different course.
Pledging to "say no to the social engineers!" it has abolished the policy
behind one of the nation's most celebrated integration efforts.

The situation unfolding here in some ways represents a first foray of tea party conservatives
into the business of shaping a public school system, and it has made Wake County
the center of a fierce debate over the principle first enshrined in the
Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education:
that diversity and quality education go hand in hand.

So far, the board shows few signs of shifting course.
Last month, it announced that Anthony J. Tata, former chief operating officer of the D.C. schools,
will replace a superintendent who resigned to protest the new board's intentions.
Tata, a retired general, names conservative commentator Glenn Beck and the
Tea Party Patriots among his "likes" on his Facebook page.

A small bit of history about this school district ...

Officials in Raleigh tried to head off that scenario.
As white flight hit in the 1970s, civic leaders merged the city and county into a single district.
And in 2000, they shifted from racial to economic integration,
adopting a goal that no school should have more than 40 percent of its students
qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, the proxy for poverty.

Why the NAACP continues as a viable organization:

The NAACP has filed a civil rights complaint arguing that 700 initial student transfers
the new board approved have already increased racial segregation,
violating laws that prohibit the use of federal funding for discriminatory purposes.
In recent weeks, federal education officials visited the county, the first step toward a possible investigation.