Engaged last year in buying another vainglorious term, Michael Bloomberg told black voters at a Bronx church (Daily News, September 10) that he had reversed predecessors who gave "white" schools more money than "minority" schools. (The city's school system is 30.9 percent black, 39.7 percent Latino, 14.4 percent Asian, and 14.5 percent white.)
But when he talks about white and minority schools, there's a word that the Education Mayor carefully avoids: "segregation."
Throughout the country, in big city schools and smaller ones, as Professor Gary Orfield—long a dauntless integrationist—has reported at the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, there are more segregated public schools today than there were in 1954—the time of the landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education.
What we have now is not de jure (by law) segregation, but de facto (actual) segregation, propelled by residential segregation and post-Brown white flight to private and suburban schools.
Village Voice