I'd like to pose this simple statement: We should not be telling parents where they can and cannot send their children to school. I can already hear the righteous agreement from Madison liberals. After all, aren't we toying with individual lives when we make that decision for people?
Yet a family in Madison is going through a hell of an ordeal transferring their 5-year-old daughter from Madison to a Monona Grove school. The girl is white, and Madison officials have explained that her departure would increase a 'racial imbalance' in the public schools. A recent Supreme Court ruling made it possible for them to challenge their treatment.
This brings home to Madison a debate which has raged for years. I like to fall on the side of individual rights, and I believe I don't compromise my basic liberalism when I do that. I hate that we're telling families that our overarching strategic vision for public schools is more important than their personal strategies for a happy life. But this is a more complicated issue than that; as the San Diego Union-Tribune makes clear, maintaining a "racial balance" has a hugely positive effect on most African-American youths. It's also true that public schools have been about social goals ever since their inception.
So I do hope that the family in question is able to go to Monona Grove as soon as possible. And I hope that after that, we can fix this difficult system with equal attention to individual concerns and the goal of basic integration.
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You didn't even mention the fact that the child's mother teaches at the school that she wants to send her child to. You'd think there'd at least be an exception for that.
There was another case a few years ago in which a family moved to Madison but wanted to keep their kids in Monona Grove schools. The Madison School District wouldn't let them out. If I remember correctly they quickly moved back to Monona, taking their property tax dollars back with them.
As much as I strongly support public education and I think that all of the Madison school board members really care about the schools...there's a serious amount of groupthink going on with the Madison school board, resulting in bad ideas and alienation such as this.
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