It seems to me that the scope of racial discrimination has switched from its focus on non-Caucasians to Caucasians in the Madison area school district. Andy Hall writes about this situation in the article Open Enrollment Closed to White Madison Students. The article goes on to report that a 12-year-old boy named Zachary Walton was denied enrollment into a public online school because he is white. If Zachary was any other race he would have been allowed enrollment without a problem, but since the Madison school district receives $500,000.00 a year to participate in the states voluntary school-integration program known as Chapter 220. Madison is the only school district in the state of Wisconsin that participates in this program, which prohibits any student from changing the racial balance of the school by joining the school district through open enrollment. Even though this program affects every race, last year 140 transfer requests from white students were denied, which represents 71 percent of the race-based rejections at that time. The question that arises in my mind is: should school enrollment in the Madison school district be based on race or the student’s need and ability?
3 comments:
My previous knowledge of the Madison area school district was that students could not be denied access to enrollment based on race. This new information is alarming and in my opinion unfair. I believe that enrollment should not be denied to a student based on race but by need and ability. It would be a different story, but still unfair in my opinion, if a private school was denying students based on race. This new information is alarming to me and I believe shying away from all that the Madison public school's stand for.
-beau
Reverse discrimination is something that isn't going on just in the Madison area but all over the U.S. and is involved in college enrollment too. I think this is very unfair to deny students enrollment based on race. I know this is a touchy subject because some of the groups benefitting were discriminated against in the past, but now I think this reverse discrimination is doing the same thing. People should not be seen by their race whether to be admitted into a school or not but rather by need and ability. Race should not have an effect in the enrollment process.
Reverse discrimination, as it has been referred to in this article and these posts, is a MAJOR factor in admission to many institutions. Private high schools have been doing this for years, colleges also follow similar practices, and now it's become an issue in publicly funded institutions. The fact that racism has long prevented people of other ethnicities does not excuse this, nor does this make up for earlier discriminations. I once heard a store from a former medical student of his roommate using race to get into medical school. The story is that this white student claimed that he was African American on his med. school application. He was admitted into medical school based on his race, even though his grades and MCAT scores were sub-admission standards. This is just one example of the problem with this system of admission.
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