Saturday April 15, 2006

The Nebraska legislature passed a law that would, in July 2008, divide the Omaha City School District into three separate entities, each one serving a different geographic area of town (northeast, southeast, west), with designs of developing public schools that more closely serve their communities.

The mind-blowing hitch, however, is that each region more or less constitutes a specific ethnic mixture. The northeast is mostly Latino, the southeast is mostly African-American, and the west is mostly white. Interestingly, the “driving force” behind the law was Ernie Chambers, the only black member of the Nebraska legislature. The logic here is that minority students will perform better when both administrators and the majority of students are from their ethnic group.

Here is the story. So should we start resegregating our schools? (There have already been numerous cases of schools segregating classes by gender, especially in middle schools, but race is a wee bit touchier.) Are the civil rights leaders from the sixties rolling in their graves, or might this actually make a positive difference?