Well... Being one of the few here who has seen what innercity education for minorities in New York City is all about, let me shine a bit of light on the subject. I do concerts for the NYC public school system, (to be cautious, though I know our English and Irish members are well informed enough to know, but just in case, public school is the opposit institution over here...) well, there is not only racial segrigation alive and well in New York, but in the ecconomically better off New York nighborhoods, this color blind system, finds a way of getting more funding into public schools where one finds the few white kids. Let me describe a typical day on one or the other side of the pale.
It is late in the school year and the temps in New York are in the high nineties. I go to a public school in Oceanhill Brownsville. You can't open many of the windows which have a mesh of steal over them like a prison. Inside the building the temperature is over one hundred, and the building is packed. Teachers and students are in a daze of heat exhaustion, all execpt the principal, who has an aircondiitoned office, the only airconditioner I see. There are not enough books for each student in most subjects kids are sharing books. We meet in a huge dimly lit auditorium, no sound system, so most of the kids can hardly hear the Uillian pipes unless they are in the first few rows - though I have a loud set, they are almost lying down in the chairs as they are melting from the heat. The food is vile, the teachers for the most part are just trying to keep order in most classes, and I know if I was a kid in this hell, I would play hooky to survive.
Now we go to Asher Levey school a public school in the East Village, intergrated, airconditioned, has computerlabs, a sound system in the auditorium and good engergetic teachers, a few blocks over in alphabet city the schools are more like Oceanhill Brownsville or Bed Sty. Now counting schools like Asher, the NYPS system is mostly minority, eighty or nighty percent, Black and Hispanic kids going to schools that are 99% segrigated and neglected. For any kid in those schools to get a good score on a nation wide test, it is much more of an accomplishment, than a kid who has gotten the educational advantages of say a grace church school, where in the private schools there are small classes, 9 in a class instead of 30 - 40, school pshycologists to figure out why little billy is not doing well, ... getting 20 points on an admission test is not a racial quota it is a realistic appreciation of the barrier race causes in Amerikkka. Fact is, the baby bush wants to bring back Jim Crow, plan and simple.
Some of us want to live in America.
Larry