Amazing Article in The Baltimore Sun

There was an amazing article in The Baltimore Sun yesterday. I am not sure the editors even understood what they were writing.  They certainly could not have intended for it to read the way I read it.

"Addressing The Divide"

The first two paragraphs are shocking for what they reveal:

Natalie Norton sits alone in a Towson University student cafeteria. The pre-med freshman from Silver Spring hasn't made any close friends yet, and many of her high school buddies now attend nearby Morgan State University, a historically black college.

"I would have preferred to go to Morgan," says Norton, who is African-American. "But I didn't even apply because my grades were really good." Attending a mostly black school would have been "more fun," she adds with a wistful smile. "But academics-wise, they're not as strict. It looks a lot better if you graduate from a majority-white school."

Maryland's Historically Black Colleges aren't good enough.  So, modern segregation works no better than historical segregation.  In an age where campuses and corporations bend over to laud the benefits of diversity (based totally on gender and skin color by the way, not points of view), we find out that they are right:  segregating students doesn't work well either.

But wait -- the article goes on:

At the direction of federal officials, the state has targeted about $400 million to the long-underfunded black campuses since 2001, in an effort to atone for a racist past and eliminate any remaining vestiges of segregation. The spending was part of the latest desegregation plan required by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights.

The ultimate goal: to make the colleges "comparable and competitive" with majority-white schools in "all facets of their operations and programs," according to the plan.

Now, what have we gotten for that $400 million?  A 38% graduation rate within 6 years.  That is average across the four schools.  Coppin was 21%.  Each granted bachelors degree at the four institutions costs taxpayers $50,000 per year -- compared to $21,000 a Towson University.  Note, that is the cost in state funding, not the cost of Tuition.

The question I have is-- in a time of such fiscal straights, with ever-increasing tuition, and ever-increasing student indebtedness (the causaulity relationship actually being the reverse of what you think), and with the system facing massive needs in capital investments-- my question is, why in the hell are we continuing to operate institutions that are not serving AT ALL the populations they are designed to serve?  The situation is SO BAD that black Marylanders like Natalie Norton even see it, and make the RIGHT choice-- to get an education.  Not a white education, not a black education, not a liberal education, but to get AN EDUCATION.

By continuing four decades of failed efforts to reform these schools, aren't we continuing to play a shell game that only hurts the students? 

When are we going to get off this merry-go-round?