podman and Dickey, there's no one reason why so many Black students and so many Latino students do so poorly in school. Would that there were just one reason.

**

Dani, I very much respect, appreciate, and applaud your commitment to diversity. However, I don't believe that school desegregation efforts were initiated in the 1950s because diversity is intrinsically good. As I quoted in one of my earlier posts to this thread: "But no one should be confused about why African- Americans sought to enroll in desegregated schools.

"There is no evidence that the long struggle of civil rights groups to end segregation was only motivated by a desire to have minority children sit next to white children," the Harvard report stated. "There was a strong belief that predominantly white schools offered better opportunities on many levels..."

-snip-

In other words, Black parents who pushed for school desegregation felt that their children would be more likely to get a quality education if they went to schools that were also attended by White students. If these parents could have been assured that their majority "Black" schools would have the same fiscal supports {including books & supplies, laboratories, building structure & building maintenance, and teacher/staff salary support} as "White" schools, they may not have pushed so strenuously for school desegregation.

This point does not negate the fact that it's good for people of different races and ethnicities to know each other and have opportunities to socially interact with each other. But unfortunately, even in so-called integrated schools, classrooms may not be all that integrated {because of a number of reasons, but especially because of classroom stratification as a result of academic testing}. And positive interaction between children and teens of different races/ethnicities does not necessarily take place in integrated schools.

Case in point: Although the student population was just about 50-50 {50% Black and 50% White} at my high school {which was the only public high school in my hometown}, and although 900 students were in my graduating class [and there was a total of 3,000 students in that school], because I did well on the placement academic test, I was one of 2 Black students in my classes throughout ALL my years at that school. There were NO classes that students in my group took with students in any other group except the one group in which the students had scored higher than we did. That group also had just 2 Black students. I'm assuming that the test graders were honest folks, and didn't stack the deck to make sure that these classes had only a couple of Black students. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if that had occurred.

Another case in point-20 years or so afterwards...My daughter attended a small, racially integrated performing and visual arts [public] high school. All her classes were racially integrated. Some of the students-such as my daughter- had attended the performing/visual arts middle school. So a considerable number of the students had known each other for some time. However, my daughter informed me that most students in the middle school and high school voluntarily segregated themselves at separate lunch room tables. While she routinely sat at "integrated table" with a "mixed" group of friends, most of the White students sat at "their own" table, and most of the Black students sat at "their own" table.

While I'm glad that my daughter bucked the self-segregation custom at her school, I can also understand why students of different races self-segregate. {Here's another personal story-The first day that I went down to lunch at my liberal arts college, I was invited to sit at the "Black table". I declined and went to sit down to eat with my Jewish roomate {why that Swedish Lutheran college with only 3 Black women as campus residents assigned me to room me with another "minority" is another story-well actually it's another part of the whole story}...

Three years later, at the start of a new school year, I was seated at the Black table. Why? I was SICK of the "what do Black people want?" and "Do Black people get sun tans" and a host of other assorted questions, some well meaning, and some not. I was also tired about not studying anything about me or MY PEOPLE except in reference to dysfunction families and dysfunctional community systems in sociology classes. I wanted to hang with Black people so I could shoot the breeze using words and sayings and cultural references that I did not have to explain. I wanted to kick back and relax and just be me. And so I sat at the lunch table with other Black students instead of sitting at the "integrated table". And that was just what the doctor [in me] ordered at that time and in that space.