Hat tip to the invaluable blog Modern Tribalist for drawing my attention to this gem:
Harding Elementary School PTA President Meredith Brace has led a battle for several years to stop her white neighbors from transferring out of the heavily Latino Westside campus.
Now she's joining them, saying she's not willing to make her son the guinea pig any longer…
As PTA president, Mrs. Brace said she has tried to start after-school enrichment programs in art and theater at Harding…"We made it so affordable, $20 for a six- to eight-week session. We told everybody, 'Come on, do something extra for your kids.' We had so few people sign up, we had to eliminate a lot of the classes," she said…She said her son has struggled to make friends.
"He hasn't been invited to a birthday party. There is absolutely no after-school interaction," she said. "For his birthday, he invited four of his classmates. Only one came."
Another Harding mother and friend of the Braces, Brenda McDonald, said she had independently decided to transfer her kindergartner out of the campus…"It's the socioeconomic chasm. It's not a gap, it's a huge difference in the population," said Mrs. McDonald… Diversity in the Classroom: advocate for staying joins fleeing parents – by Camilla Cohee [Send her mail] Santa Barbara News-Press, February 24,2005
Modern Tribalist links to the LibertyPost.org thread on the subject, which is well worth reading—particularly if you don't have young children and don't realize the problem:
"A friend of mine worked for years in a grammar school in Wilmington, California…has rapidly become almost entirely Hispanic…The parents of the English speaking children moved their kids to other schools because they were at a disadvantage in the classrooms due to "bilingual" education, which really meant Spanish speaking…The non-Spanish speaking office workers, including my friend, were also at a disadvantage, unable to communicate with well-meaning but illiterate parents who didn't even understand that a school wasn't a baby sitting facility."
It is easy to laugh at Mrs. Brace. But she deserves credit for having the courage to protect her children—despite the considerable public persona she developed and what apparently is a seriously liberal family tradition. Getting mugged by reality is not pleasant.
I don't know exactly what an #858, 074 ranking translates into as far as actual copies sold, but not very damn many.
Once again, I pose the question I asked one year ago: Does anyone, anywhere, at any time pay attention to Raoul Lowery Contreras?
The answer in 2004 was no. And in the 2005, the answer is the same.
Got a letter from an Ohio reader that said this:
Dear Mr. Fulford,
I read your past article on racial profiling in America. I have seen the documentaries on 20/20 that conclusively show police ticketing African- Americans more than whites in Cincinnati.
A scientific study would be of interest to show whether minorities are inappropriately pulled over the police. I would suggest cameras and speed measurements on roadways throughout the city.
This would give an accurate way of measuring whether police were "targetting" minorities. We would initially have to ascertain whether the cameras and radar guns were not prejudiced against any one ethnic group.
I'm not sure which article he meant, but this one I did, Heather MacDonald Debunks Racial Profiling, reports that a study like that has already been done by the Public Services Research Institute in Maryland., and here's the short version:
When researchers combined driver identifications with the speeding information, Ms. Mac Donald says, they found "black drivers speed twice as much as white drivers, and speed at reckless levels even more."
Briefly, the anti-profiling argument is this: if blacks get more speeding tickets than whites, it's because police are harassing black motorists, whom they suspect, on statistical grounds, of committing crimes.
However, this doesn't follow, on two grounds, the scientific ground, above: blacks have been shown to speed more than whites, and the logical ground that since the black community does have a high crime rate, shouldn't they be expected to be, on the average, less likely to obey the traffic laws?
