Staff writer Thomas C. Tobin has a curious article on the racial school assignment cases in today’s St. Petersburg Times. (HatTip to Howard Bashman)
The headline is “Get Ready For School Resegregation,” and under that is what looks like a pull quote:
Listening to the Supreme Court argue an important schools case, I realized no matter the outcome, some schools here will certainly resegregate.
There are two problems here: first, the pull “quote” appears nowhere in the article; and second, the body of the article says something a bit different.
True, Tobin does write:
Pinellas [County] is only now emerging from 35 years of using strict race ratios to set school enrollments. A look at choice applications indicates that most Pinellas families will want to attend a neighborhood school when the ratios expire at the end of this academic year.
Unless that impulse is dampened or somehow controlled, some schools will likely return to being predominantly black or all-black for the first time since 1970.
One could, and many do, describe this process as “resegregation,” but Tobin himself doesn’t, raising a question of who wrote the headline to his story. Tobin continued:
Some who spoke beneath the Supreme Court steps after Monday’s oral arguments predicted a ruling against the school districts would just about unravel the progress of the last 50 years.
In Tampa Bay at least, it’s an assessment that ignores the facts. Today’s choice plans give black children freedom to attend a variety of schools, a bus ride to make it happen and thus the ability to avoid racially isolated schools if they wish.
It is a far cry from the forced segregation of old.
“The people who say that it will return to the bad old days are fearmongers at best,” [Pinellas School Superintendent Clayton] Wilcox says.
Yes, at best. But isn’t that exactly what the headline and leading pull quote suggest?
