Tea Party Successfully Pushes Wake County School Board To Turn Back The Clock, Re-segregate Schools
The Teabaggers are a bunch of white cranks who really are nostalgic for the “good” old days, huh. For people who are so careful about denying any racism in their ranks, I’d say that fighting for segregation doesn’t do much to convince people otherwise: Tea party groups have succeeded in reversing nationally praised school integration policies in Raleigh, North Carolina, decrying the longstanding system as one of social engineering. The Washington Post reports that tea party pressure has motivated Wake County School District’s largely Republican school board to abolish policies the newspaper describes as “one of the nation’s most celebrated integration efforts.” “Say no to the social engineers!” was one of their slogans. The Post hails the existing system as a “rarity,” noting that some of the county’s “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.” The school board is instead considering a system in which poor children are relegated to low-income neighborhood schools, moving away from its current policies where most schools have students from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds. Critics have sharply denounced the new plans as a form of segregation, noting that poorer children are often minorities and arguing that the new tea party-backed ideas will lead to a new cycle of poverty for the less fortunate. Chief among them is the NAACP, which has slammed the effort as discriminatory and a new type of racial segregation, and has filed a civil rights complaint in an effort to protect hundreds of students from having to transfer out of their schools. “So far, all the chatter we heard from tea partyers has not manifested in actually putting in place retrograde policies,” NAACP president Ben Jealous told the Post. “But this is one place where they have literally attempted to turn back the clock.”
Tea Party Successfully Pushes Wake County School Board To Turn Back The Clock, Re-segregate Schools
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on January 13, 2011. Filed under