Real Equality

For John, BLUF:  I Found this lawsuiot to be interesting in that it seems to turn the tools used to reverse segregation in schools seen as implementing new forms of segregation.  Are we not able, are we never able, to see ourselves as one People?  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Lawsuit Targets Massachusetts Public School System for Racial Segregation, Censoring Students

From The Daily Signal, by Writer Mary Margaret Olohan, 22 October 2021.

Here is the lede plus five:

A Massachusetts public school system is actively promoting racially segregated student groups and a “bias reporting program” that encourages students to report instances of their peers’ biases to school officials for disciplinary action, a lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges.

Parents Defending Education filed the lawsuit against the Boston-area Wellesley Public Schools Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts—a lawsuit that specifically targets both the racially segregated student groups and the school’s speech policies.

“Nearly seven decades of Supreme Court precedent have made two things clear,” said the lawsuit. “Public schools cannot segregate students by race, and students do not abandon their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse gate.  [Wellesley Public Schools] is flouting both of these principles.”

The school system has held “multiple racially segregated events for students,” the Parents Defending Education lawsuit said, describing how the school district’s equity director lamented that the school did not keep a list of students sorted by race and ordered white students not to come to certain events.

Not only did the school host these racially segregated events, the lawsuit said, it also refused to host a Jewish students’ affinity group or to fly Israeli or Thin Blue Line flags “as a gesture of viewpoint diversity” when parents complained about Black Lives Matter flags at various schools.

The lawsuit also alleges that Wellesley Public Schools displayed “similar disregard for students’ First Amendment rights” through a policy that punishes “biased” student speech, including “any student speech that is ‘offensive,’ has an ‘impact’ on others, ‘treats another person differently,’ or ‘demonstrates conscious or unconscious bias.”

This story was also covered by Breitbart, with an emplhasis on the phrase "affinity groups".

At issue under the allegations of racial segregation are WPS’s “‘affinity group’ meetings that are open to some students, but closed to others, based solely on the races and ethnicities of the students involved.”  The lawsuit notes that “A racial affinity group is commonly defined as ‘a group of people sharing a common race who gather with the intention of finding connection, support, and inspiration.'”  However, these groups also “by definition, exclude individuals of certain racial groups,” according to the filing.

This sort of advocacy for racial segregation has become more commonplace with the recent push for Critical Race Theory in K-12 schools.

This idea of "affinity groups" seems, on the surfacee, to run counter to decades of legislation and Supreme Court rullngs on segregation.  I still remember remember the idea, from Brown v Board of Education, that "separate but equal is inherently unequal."

On the other hand, we have evidence that students perform better when they see teachers and paraprofessionals who are of the wame race or ethnic group.  Is there scientific evidence that affinity groups actually enhance educational performance.  There should be little doubt that at least some communities in our Commonwealth need a hand up in the area of education.

I am looking forward to how this all plays out.  I hope science is part of the process.  Good science.

Hat tip to my Wife.

Regards  —  Cliff