W&I©

Negro children need neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What they need is an education

W.E.B. DuBois
1935

Debra J. Dickerson has a different look at Brown v. Board of Education and it’s 50th Birthday; she’s reviewing recent books by a pair of aging civil rights crusaders, Derrick Bell and Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. The books are "eulogies for the dying dreams of integration ... for two generations of black children used as pawns and tossed aside, uneducated."

Something like three-quarters of the students on this campus are veterans of the inner-city schools in North Philly and southeast D.C.; I get to hear war stories of high schools that are still teaching basic addition; one girl recently told me that the teachers at her old school didn't have to deal with large class sizes, because while there were usually thirty students on the roll, only half would show up.

So the good students get by. But as Charlie Cleveland, a social studies teacher at Hillsboro High in Hillsboro Oregon, puts it, "The good students are going to survive, and the students at the other end are going to get special help—we have programs mandated by law for them. It's the big group in the middle that are just jammed together. Some of them will make it ... but I see a lot that don't."

That's not even a poor school, it's Hillsboro High, an upper-middle-class suburb in Oregon. (I'm not sure what city it's a suburb of; I don't think suburbs have to be suburbs of somewhere anymore—like some B-movie mind-control parasite, they've evolved to the point where they can function on their own.)

Just a couple of snippets from the June 2004 issue of Mother Jones. The issue theme is "Who's Better Off? A special report on the State of the Union" and the content is universally depressing. Arthur Allen describes the fate of Medical College of Pennsylvania Hospital. MCP is a century-old hospital in North Philadelphia, founded by one of the America's first female medical schools, the school that graduated our nation's first black female doctor. The managed-care company that owns MCP has been nabbed committing outlier fraud and, bankrupt, may now be forced to close MCP.

Even the upbeat articles are secretly ironic. In a profile, New Jersey State Senator Shirley K. Turner and her noble efforts read like Don Quixote; then we get an interview with the liberal Rush Limbaugh. And, finally, George Packer ably explains the fatal problems of blogs like this one.

Read it, preferably when your already in a bad mood.

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