Opponents of urban charter schools – inevitably white, upper-middle-class, MPR-listening, Subaru-driving people with degrees from Macalester – have developed a habit of sniffing that urban charters are “a return to segregation”, because many charters, especially in the city, are aimed at ethnic groups.<\/p>\n
What these lilywhite guardians of “diversity”-for-its-own-sake miss is that these charters – the Twin Cities have schools aimed at black, H’mong, latino and Native American kids, and used to have one serving Muslim students – may be “segregated”, but it’s entirely voluntary; the decision of the parents and families involved.<\/p>\n
And why would they do that?<\/p>\n
Because they’re racists?<\/p>\n
Perhaps. \u00a0More likely, I suspect, it’s cultural (the Native American and H’mong schools), and linguistic (the Latino schools).<\/p>\n
And I suspect that for more than a few parents, it’s more like this: \u00a0while they like the idea of “diversity” – exposing their children to different people, cultures, races and the like – they also know they’ve got one shot with their kids. \u00a0America’s racial problems aren’t going to be fixed in 12 years. \u00a0If they’re fixed in thirteen years, that’s great – but too late for your first-grader.<\/p>\n
And in the meantime, lurking in the background at the worst “diverse” schools, are scenes like this<\/a>\u00a0(and save your breath, Volvo-driving ninnies; this sort of tension\u00a0is\u00a0<\/em>endemic at urban schools; my kids went there for years, and while it rarely got\u00a0that\u00a0<\/em>bad, it hovered over the school experience in ways ugly and comical<\/a> for their entire time in school). \u00a0And while I suspect that, like me, a lot of parents would\u00a0love\u00a0<\/em>for their kids to participate in America’s ethnic “conversation”, they also figure that there’s plenty of time for that when they’re adults, and they’d like to spend that first 12 years focusing on them getting an education without all the pointless, mindless tension.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Opponents of urban charter schools – inevitably white, upper-middle-class, MPR-listening, Subaru-driving people with degrees from Macalester – have developed a habit of sniffing that urban charters are “a return to segregation”, because many charters, especially in the city, are aimed at ethnic groups. What these lilywhite guardians of “diversity”-for-its-own-sake miss is that these charters – […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[324,10,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-education","category-education","category-school-choice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51944"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51944\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51953,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51944\/revisions\/51953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}