Page 20 - Florida Sentinel 7-12-19

National
South African Headed For Space Dies In Motorcycle Accident
Segregation Has Soared In America’s Schools As Federal Leaders Largely Looked Away
Nearly 50 years have passed since Kamala Har- ris joined the legions of chil- dren bused to schools in distant neighborhoods as the United States attempted to integrate its racially segre- gated public schools.
Yet the consequences of racial and economic segre- gation remain a fact of daily life for millions of black and Latino children.
Harris’ attack on her Democratic rival Joe Biden over his opposition to feder- ally mandated busing in the 1970s was a rare case of school segregation emerging as a flashpoint in a recent presidential race.
The emotionally raw clash on a Miami debate stage between a black U. S. senator and a white former vice president raised the question of what, if anything, the Democratic candidates would do to promote racial integration of America’s schools.
In the aftermath of the social upheaval wrought by the forced busing of the 1970s, the federal govern- ment all but walked away from school desegregation, with only lax enforcement of court-ordered integration and token programs to en- courage voluntary desegrega- tion.
“For more than a gener- ation, little has been done to address the issue,” said Gary Orfield, the co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. “It is crucial that we act.”
In recent elections, candi- dates have been largely silent about segregation, a posture
Students line up for their buses at a district stop near Jeffer- son High School in Los Angeles on the first day of classes in 2015. In California, 58% of Latinos attend “intensely segregated schools,” a recent report says.
A South African man who was expected to become the first black African in space was killed when his motorcycle was struck by a car on Saturday.
The 30-year-old Mandla Maseko, popularly known as “Spaceboy” and “Afro- naut,” was one of 23 people who won a seat on the trip to space.
“It is with deep sadness that the Maseko family confirms that Mandla Maseko tragi- cally passed away in a bike ac- cident last night, July 6 2019,” his business manager and close friend Sthembile Shabangu said in a media release.
“Maseko will be sorely missed." Shabangu said. "May Mandla Maseko’s kind and beautiful soul rest in eter- nal peace.”
The space flight was sched- uled to be an hour-long sub-or- bital trip on the Lynx Mark II spaceship. However it had not yet happened at the time of Maseko's passing -- and it's possible that it never will, as Space.com reported that the company organizing the flight, XCOR Aerospace, went bank- rupt two years ago.
Maseko’s death was met
Mandla Maseko speaks to a journalist in Mabopane, north of Pretori, South Africa, Jan. 9, 2014.
with an outpouring of grief on social media.
Shabangu said that even though Maseko did not end up going into space, he would have wanted his hope to spread.
"There were still rocket tests happening before they could go up," Shabangu said. "He really thought that if he went up to space he could in- spire young African children that they could do anything. He used to always say that the sky was no longer the limit."
that experts say is not sur- prising given the unease of many Americans with discus- sions about race and in- equity, particularly when it involves their children.
“The scars of the busing era are still pretty deep,” said Bruce Fuller, an education and public policy professor at UC Berkeley.
The effect of segregation is profound. Children in inte- grated schools are more likely to graduate high school and attend college, and they get jobs with higher incomes, studies show. There is also a societal benefit when young people interact with peers of different racial and socioeco- nomic backgrounds, scholars say.
“It’s important to h a v e public schools play a role in helping young people and the broader community develop the capacity and commit- ment to live together in pro- ductive ways,” said John Rogers, director of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Ed-
ucation and Access.
Betsy DeVos, Presi-
dent Trump’s Education secretary, has chipped away at desegregation efforts, which were already a rela- tively low priority in the Obama administration.
“I would give myself a pretty low grade on that,” President Obama’s former Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the 74, a non- profit education news outlet, after he left office in late 2015.
The largest current fed- eral effort is a roughly $100- million competitive grant program for magnet schools that began under President Nixon. By drawing students from diverse neighborhoods, magnet schools play an im- portant role in desegregation.
But civil rights advo- cates have long called for more action, starting with the repeal of a 1974 section of an education law that bars spending of federal dollars on transportation for the pur- pose of racial integration.
The federal government could also fund competitive grants for school districts that pursue voluntary deseg- regation and step up its en- forcement of court orders to integrate, said Erica Frankenberg, director of Penn State’s Center for Edu- cation and Civil Rights.
“It’s a really important role the federal government can play to provide political support for local school dis- tricts who may want to do it but for various political rea- sons may find it’s a hard lift,” she said.
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