Schools in many parts of Australia are study in self-segregation, by Rosemary Neill.
As the nation becomes more multicultural, are our schools becoming more racially segregated?
Yes, says the article by way of anecdotes. Then:
This segregation is also found in gentrified, bohemian enclaves in Sydney and Melbourne. In these inner-city areas, the economic and racial divide is not necessarily the familiar one separating private and public schools; often the gulf is between white-dominated public schools with a privileged parent cohort and highly diverse public schools with economically disadvantaged parents.
During the past year, an incendiary debate has erupted in Victoria about “white flight” from disadvantaged public schools in Melbourne’s trendy inner north. Here, social housing towers built in the 1960s, home to a large population of mostly African refugees, loom sentinel-like over tastefully renovated Victorian terraces worth between $1 million and $2m.
Fitzroy and Carlton are renowned for their 19th-century architecture, cosmopolitan food cultures, alternative arts scene and ardent support for the Greens — the area’s federal MP is the Greens’ Adam Bandt. Two schools that feature prominently in the white-flight debate were polling booths at the July election, and returned the nation’s highest two-party-preferred vote for the minority party, which has pro-refugee and asylum-seeker policies.
At Fitzroy Primary School, the Greens attracted 82.4 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote, while a short distance away at the whiter, more advantaged North Fitzroy Primary School, the Greens won 81 per cent of the two party preferred vote.
The local council, City of Yarra, says the district has been a proud “Refugee Welcome Zone since 2002”. Yet in Fitzroy, Carlton and surrounding suburbs, progressive, middle-class families have been accused of shunning public schools with high refugee populations.
“They are fleeing!” African community leader and former refugee Abeselom Nega says of white, inner-city families who apparently are rejecting diverse schools. This year, in a Melbourne newspaper, Nega accused families who avoided inner-Melbourne schools with large African-Australian student cohorts of racism.
“The white parents don’t send their kids to these schools because all they see is black kids,” he claimed.
From personal experience, ABC-listening, refugee-supporting Greens I know pull their kids out of public schools and put them in nice white private schools. So the problem immigrant children go to the public schools with the poorer whites, and less learning is done is these schools. Posturing about race and class, but not for our kids thanks.
The public “debate” lacks a certain honesty because it is controlled by the PC crew. They know they are being hypocritical.
Self-described “book whisperer” and “PC lefty” Alice Williams bought into Melbourne’s heated schools and ethnicity debate and was surprised to find herself the target of “Twitter hate” from other PC lefties. …
Williams feels strongly about this issue partly because her left-wing parents sent her to a low-performing Melbourne school with a majority migrant student base and a culture of low expectations. She dropped out of university “because I didn’t know how to study, I’d never had to study” before eventually returning to tertiary education and completing a communications degree. “In my experience, any school that has high levels of non-English-speaking students will have low literacy outcomes, and it’s not because of any race,” she says. Some schools handle this challenge well, but “we can’t pretend it isn’t an issue”.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
