A reader writes about growing up in the South. She brings back memories to me of growing up in Houston when it was segregated:

I don’t think PUBLIC schools should be catering to one ethnic or religious group either and I don’t think that schools that do so should receive public money.  I grew up under segregation.  My high school integrated when I was in the 11th grade.  The chemistry teacher asked if I minded being lab partners with  “the colored girl”.  I was never a racist, even having grown up in Birmingham, so of course I didn’t mind and Portia Montgomery and I screwed up our lab experiments all year.

I can see why certain religious or ethnic groups with non-mainstream practices might want to have their own schools.  I don’t have a problem with that as long as we don’t pay for it.  There was a Hebrew School in Atlanta where many Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox     Jewish children attended. Many lived in the neighborhood around their school and synagogue They wore their special clothing and curled sideburns and hats.  They did not have school on Fridays because of the Sabbath.  I understood that as well as the Kroger grocery with its separation of foods, separate kosher meat department, rabbi butcher, and huge, about 1/3 of the store, Jewish section. The store was also decorated for Hannukah instead of Christmas and their school choir sang Hannukah carols at the store.  My tax money did not go to any of it.  It was fine.

What I cannot see is public schools bowing down to the needs of the religious right or even recognizing particular races or religious groups exclusively or nearly so.  Sometimes it was difficult in my early years in Atlanta Public Schools which, at the time were 90% black for students and 75% for faculty.  There was discrimination against everyone else.  A principal at one middle school made several stereotyped remarks against me as a white person and eventually got rid of me for teaching while white.  She also ran off ALL her white students who were not special ed. She had her eye on one of mine but did not realize he was biracial.  The schools were extremely Afro-centric, at least the ones where I was.  But because I was only at two where there was a problem with racism towards me and because I was liberal, flexible, older, special ed., and married to a black guy, it did not really bother me.  And I learned a whole lot of black history.

This post contains one of the comments on the Minnesota charter story that I missed while my Internet service was down.

It contributes more to the discussion earlier about whether segregation is okay if it is voluntary.

Let me add that I have never supported the creation of public schools (are charters still public schools?) that welcome one race, one cultural group, one point of view, one group to the exclusion of others. I got death threats twenty years ago when I criticized Afrocentrism, and since then I have criticized Hebrew-language charter schools and an Arabic-language public school. My view is that if there is a demand for a foreign language, it should be taught in public school, but should not be the focus of the curriculum; that way tends towards ethnocentricity. I think the way a multicultural, multiethnic society works best is if we all work together and to the extent possible, learn together. That breaks down fear and misunderstanding.

I know that racial and ethnic segregation exists and that many schools are overwhelmingly one-race or nonwhite. That’s a fact. I just don’t like the idea of accepting it and saying it is inevitable. I grew up in the segregated South. I didn’t like segregation. I thought it was humiliating. I’m always happy now to visit the south and see people and children of different races working together. I wish it had always been like that. I don’t want us to accept segregation as a new normal. It should not be. It’s wrong.