A Pennsylvania high school is on the hot seat as it must defend its controversial decision to segregate black students from their peers to boost the school’s overall scores. The scheme, at McCaskey East High School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, singles out black students from the rest of the school pupils, and then further breaks it down into black females and black males. The program allows low achieving whites and hispanics to remain integrated with their high achieving peers.
Oddly, the separation is only for a short period, six minutes each day and 20 minutes twice a month. Nevertheless, the school’s principal must defend his policy. Bill Jimenez said the school noticed that black students were not performing as well as other students, and that research had shown that same-race classes with strong same-race role models led to better academic results. Mr Jimenez admitted that no other students were divided by race at the school.
Jiminez told Lancasteronline.com: ‘One of the things we said when we did this was, “Let’s look at the data, let’s not run from it. Let’s confront it and see what we can do about it”.’