Myron Orfield us a longtime Law Professor at the University of Minnesota and represented the University area as a State Representative back when I was in school, (because TWO government jobs are always better than one.)   Orfield was in Eden Prairie a couple of weeks ago consulting our over-consulted School Board in his area of expertise:  race and poverty.

Per the Eden Prairie News:  (and I apologize but the link is not on their website- so this is linked to the print edition where you'll have to find the article itself) 

Orfield said that it's legal for school districts to use race as part of its guidelines for drawing district boundaries.

For those interested in the what the U.S. Supreme Court had to say about the issue in June 2007, see the ruling here. 

Orfield has been consulting the schools here, as have the $500-$800/hour consultants at Pacific Educational Group, since 2007.  Orfield has been following events in Eden Prairie for almost a decade, in 2001 he said this about Eden Prairie:

“I get sad out here,” Sen. Orfield says. “The landscape is being destroyed and money is being sucked out of the city.”

You can see a bit of the sadness in Orfield's answers to the Eden Prairie School Board a couple weeks back.

Suburbs like Eden Prairie make Orfield sad indeed and he's dedicated most of his career to promoting "regional solutions"  i.e. creating schooling/housing districts via gerrymandering and unconstitutional taxing authorities like the Met Council.  Essentially he wants Minneapolis to stay urban in character, but wants the inner-ring suburbs to become more urban and the exurban development to be stopped altogether.  What he never acknowledges is that people choose to live somewhere for specific reasons.  My few friends who live in the city wouldn't be caught dead living in the 'burbs.  I love the city, but specifically chose to live somewhere where  I'm not represented in the state legislature and U.S. Congress by some nutty liberal nor living next door to the anti-war dove signs that dot the residential streets of Minneapolis. The restaurants leave a bit to be desired, but I digress.

Orfield's dream is to have the Met Council come in and dictate to the suburbs (even more than they are so already,) what housing is allowed, what schools should be built, what public transit is going to be funded and who's going to pay for all of it.  (Guess who's going to pay for all of it....)  It's a regional liberal utopia!  (Reason #34 Tom Emmer needs to be Governor- getting rid of the Met Council.) 

Orfield was recently featured in the University of Minnesota Alumni Magazine in a cover story about segregation in Minnesota schools...from the article:

Orfield advocates making the Met Council a proactive force for reining in unruly sprawl and promoting affordable housing across the region. He also strongly backs a directly elected council, which he believes would free it from the vacillating controls of changing governors (his own bill on this in 1994 failed in the legislature by one vote).Other regional solutions high on his list are expanded city-suburban school integration.

And:

In some districts, school boards go out of their way to intensify segregation, Orfield says. With a few keystrokes, he displays on his computer screen a colorful map showing where a suburban district south of the Twin Cities had drawn school boundaries around a low income housing project. “They had me come out to tell them if they would get sued,” he says dryly. “I said yes.” 

Orfield talks about the push from Minneapolis Public Schools to leave the time-and-taxdollar-wasting West Metro Educational Program....(how dare a district try to assert some autonomy!)

“If Minneapolis leaves, it falls apart. We have a responsibility to hang in there, to be part of pushing from the inside to make it what we want it to be.”

And there's the liberal mind-set for you.....where the world exists in a classroom and things are "as you want them to be" never how they really are...

The article also features Hopkins School Superintendent John Schultz who is pictured at Hopkins Chinese Immersion School, XinXang Academy, and states support for Orfield's idea that we need "regional sytems" to integrate the schools. 

There's only one problem:  Xin Xang is a segregated school.  At least according to the standards set by PEG and Orfield.

I sent a data request to Hopkins Schools (which was answered very quickly, once again proving that Eden Prairie Schools has the slowest staff in the state,) and asked them for their diversity statistics for XinXang.  They first sent me to their website to look at statistics for Eisenhower Elementary School where XinXang is housed.  Here are those statistics:

765 Students

52% Female

48% Male

49% White

28% Black

9% Hispanic

8% Asian

Now here are the statistics for their Chinese Immersion School- housed in the same building:

143 Students

61% female

39% male,

62% white students,

32% Biracial asian

6% Black, Hispanic and American Indian.

So- essentially, much like Eden Prairie's Spanish Immersion School- this is a cultural school for White and Asian kids.  (Or in Eden Prairie's case for White and Hispanic kids.)  It's really no surpise-- the entire language Immersion school concept is about forty years old and came out of French-speaking Canada where French-Canadians wanted to preserve their lanugage and culture.  Our Spanish Immersion school promotes Hispanic Culture.  Hopkins Chinese Immersion school promotes Asian culture (there is no such thing by the way as the countries which make up these two racial groups are as different as they can be....)  And really folks, this is all fine and dandy, but let's not praise them for being beacons of "diversity." 

With over $300,000 (and counting) spent with Pacific Educational Group by Hopkins and Eden Prairie Schools, one can either conclude that the consulting company promotes this "feel-good" segregation within the public school system (under the guise of "multi-culturalism"), or the districts simply don't heed any of the spendy advice of the company.  Either way, it ain't good..

But because Spanish Immersion or Chinese Immersion or any other Cultural-school of liberal liking adheres to the academic love of mult-culturalism, any segregation in those schools is okay by them!  Talk about convenient (and faulty) logic.

Orfield also takes time talking to the EP School Board about funding disparities between districts and essentially defends them and basically makes the case that unless black kids go to school with white kids, they won't be successful.  Now I ask, as I always ask on this blog:  Who are the racists?  If racism is defined by believing that your race is superior to another race and you believe that "black and brown" kids must go to school with white kids in order to succeed, who has the superiority complex? 

Conservatives believe in the superiority of one thing:  the individual.  Individual students learn individually regardless of their class, race or socioeconomic status and to believe anything other than that is simply wrong. 

Obviously the intentions and motives are good on all sides.  There is nobody out there who doesn't believe in equal educational opportunity for children...but the twisted road that liberals take to try to get there simply hasn't worked, doesn't work and will never work in the mess that is the government-run school system.  Bring on the scholarships, bring on the funding that mirrors our College and University system, and let's finally fix this thing.

P.S.

In other EP School News, I'm happy to see the School Board holding meetings-before-their-meetings for the public or "stakeholders" in their weird-paid-consultants-told-us-to-say-this lingo....The bad news is there appears to be no intellectual curiosity from the School Board about the issue I raised weeks ago...closed-door meetings to select the members of the critical task forces which will re-shape the district.  Instead the district has its political strategy A-game on with its widely promoted one-hour-long  "Task Force Input Session"....Isn't it nice that they're opening the doors and allowing input AFTER the task-forces where hand-picked by the Administration?