I was somewhat bemused by the reasoning in the Times-News headline article on May 19 noting “Teacher diversity imbalance”. The numbers presented in that article lead me directly to the conclusion that the only way to achieve the goal of having minority children taught by minority teachers is to return to school segregation.
Even if the ethnic makeup of the teaching staff exactly matches that of the students, in integrated classrooms Hispanic children (23.3 percent of ABSS students) will have only about one chance in four of getting a Hispanic teacher, and black students (21.2 percent) are only about one in five. The only way numerically to ensure that a child gets a teacher “they identify with” is to segregate the students by ethnicity and then assign each class an ethnically compatible teacher.
Will this really help these students? It appears to totally contradict the finding in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated education has, and I quote, “a detrimental effect upon the colored children ... for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group” and “has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children”.
So, have educators come 180 degrees on this issue and now segregation is good for minority kids?