Alabama Plan Brings Out Cry of Resegregation

What a total disgrace!  You'd think blatant, transparent plans to kick black kids out of higher-performing, somewhat-integrated schools into failing, virtually completely segregated schools wouldn't happen in America today -- but you'd be wrong...

Months later, the school board commissioned a demographic study to draft the rezoning plan. J. Russell Gibson III, the board’s lawyer, said the plan drawn up used school buildings more efficiently, freeing classroom space equivalent to an entire elementary school and saving potential construction costs of $10 million to $14 million. “That’s a significant  savings,” Mr. Gibson said, “and we relieved overcrowding and placed most students in a school near their home. That’s been lost in all the  rhetoric.”
 
Others see the matter differently. Gerald Rosiek, an education professor at the University of Alabama, studied the Tuscaloosa school district’s recent evolution. “This is a case study in resegregation,” said Dr.  Rosiek, now at the University of Oregon.
 
In his research, he said, he found disappointment among some white parents that Northridge, the high school created in the northern enclave, was a majority-black school, and he said he believed the rezoning was in part an attempt to reduce its black enrollment.
 
The district projected last spring that the plan would move some 880 students citywide, and Dr. Levey said that remained the best estimate available. The plan redrew school boundaries in ways that, among other changes, required students from black neighborhoods and from a low-income housing project who had been attending the more-integrated schools in the northern zone to leave them for nearly all-black schools in the west  end.

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Alabama Plan Brings Out Cry of Resegregation
 
Dave Martin for The New York Times
By SAM DILLON
September 17, 2007
www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/education/17schools.html <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/education/17schools.html>

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — After white parents in this racially mixed city complained about school overcrowding, school authorities set out to draw up a sweeping rezoning plan. The results: all but a handful of the hundreds of students required to move this fall were black — and many were sent to virtually all-black, low-performing schools.